5 ideas
| 21238 | Later phenomenologists tried hard to incorporate social relationships [Bakewell] |
| Full Idea: Ever since Husserl, phenomenologists and existentialists had been trying to stretch the definition of existence to incorporate our social lives and relationships. | |
| From: Sarah Bakewell (At the Existentialist Café [2016], 08) | |
| A reaction: I see a parallel move in Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument. Husserl's later work seems to have been along those lines. Putnam's Twin Earth too. |
| 21237 | Phenomenology begins from the immediate, rather than from axioms and theories [Bakewell] |
| Full Idea: Traditional philosophy often started with abstract axioms or theories, but the German phenomenologists went straight for life as they experienced it, moment to moment. | |
| From: Sarah Bakewell (At the Existentialist Café [2016], 01) | |
| A reaction: Bakewell gives this as the gist of what Aron said to Sartre in 1933, providing the bridge from phenomenology to existentialism. The obvious thought is that everybody outside philosophy starts from immediate experience, so why is this philosophy? |
| 23137 | Liberty without socialism is injustice; socialism without liberty is brutality [Bakunin] |
| Full Idea: Liberty without socialism is injustice; socialism without liberty is slavery and brutality. | |
| From: Mikhail Bakunin (works [1867], 3), quoted by Adam Gopnik - A Thousand Small Sanities 3 | |
| A reaction: [1867, but no reference] Bakunin was an anarchistic socialist. This must be the best one-line defence of socialism ever written. Gopnik quotes it as part of the anarchist critique of liberalism. So are liberty and socialism long-term compatible? |
| 13304 | Learned men gain more in one day than others do in a lifetime [Posidonius] |
| Full Idea: In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes. | |
| From: Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]), quoted by Seneca the Younger - Letters from a Stoic 078 | |
| A reaction: These remarks endorsing the infinite superiority of the educated to the uneducated seem to have been popular in late antiquity. It tends to be the religions which discourage great learning, especially in their emphasis on a single book. |
| 20820 | Time is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed [Posidonius, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: Posidonius defined time thus: it is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed and slowness. | |
| From: report of Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.08.42 | |
| A reaction: Hm. Can we define motion or speed without alluding to time? Looks like we have to define them as a conjoined pair, which means we cannot fully understand either of them. |