Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Truth (frags)', 'Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion' and 'An American Indian model of the Universe'

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5 ideas

13. Knowledge Criteria / E. Relativism / 5. Language Relativism

3916	Hopi consistently prefers verbs and events to nouns and things [Whorf]
	Full Idea: Hopi, with its preference for verbs, as contrasted to our own liking for nouns, perpetually turns our propositions about things into propositions about events.
	From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.63)
	A reaction: This should provoke careful thought about ontology - without concluding that it is entirely relative to language.

14. Science / B. Scientific Theories / 4. Paradigm

3917	Scientific thought is essentially a specialised part of Indo-European languages [Whorf]
	Full Idea: What we call "scientific thought" is a specialisation of the western Indo-European type of language.
	From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.246)
	A reaction: This is the beginnings of an absurd extreme relativist view of science, based on a confusion about meaning and thought.

27. Natural Reality / D. Time / 2. Passage of Time / e. Tensed (A) series

3915	The Hopi have no concept of time as something flowing from past to future [Whorf]
	Full Idea: A Hopi has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past.
	From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.57)
	A reaction: If true, this would not so much support relativism of language as the view that that conception of time is actually false.

29. Religion / B. Monotheistic Religion / 4. Christianity / a. Christianity

21798	To universalise 'give everything to the poor' leads to absurdity [Hegel]
	Full Idea: If everyone gave everything to the poor, then soon there would be no more poor to give anything to, or no more persons who would have anything to give.
	From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion [1827], III: 152), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 10 'Faith'
	A reaction: Matthew 5:8, 19:21. Beautifully clear. [I always believed that I had thought of this idea - but not so]. If the logic is that it is better to be poor than to be rich, then the implication is that all excess wealth should be thrown into the sea.

29. Religion / D. Religious Issues / 2. Immortality / a. Immortality

21797	Immortality does not come at a later time, but when pure knowing Spirit fully grasps the universal [Hegel]
	Full Idea: The immortality of the soul must not be imagined as though it first emerges into actuality at some later time; rather it is a present quality. ...As pure knowing or as thinking, Spirit has the universal for its object - this is eternity.
	From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion [1827], III: 208), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 10 'Death'
	A reaction: An unusual view of immortality, which challenges orthodoxy. The idea seems to be that 'pure knowing' is a grasping of the pure reason which embodies nature, which in turn is the nature of God. You enter eternity, rather than reside in it?