43 ideas
14888 | Wisdom prevents us from being ruled by the moment [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The most important thing about wisdom is that it prevents human beings from being ruled by the moment. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 30 [25]) |
14863 | Unlike science, true wisdom involves good taste [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Inherent in wisdom [sophia] is discrimination, the possession of good taste: whereas science, lacking such a refined sense of taste, gobbles up anything that is worth knowing. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [086]) | |
A reaction: This is blatantly unfair to science, which may lack 'taste', but at least prefers deep theories with wide-ranging explanatory power to narrow local theories. Maybe the line across the philosophical community is the one picking out those with taste? |
14890 | Suffering is the meaning of existence [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Suffering is the meaning of existence. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 32 [67]) | |
A reaction: This doesn't mean that he is advocating suffering. The context of his remark is that the pursuit of truth involves suffering. |
14861 | Philosophy ennobles the world, by producing an artistic conception of our knowledge [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Philosophy is indispensable for education because it draws knowledge into an artistic conception of the world, and thereby ennobles it. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [052]) | |
A reaction: I take this to be an unusual way of saying that philosophy aims at the unification of knowledge, which is roughly my own view. It has hard for us to keep believing that life could be 'ennobled'. |
14885 | The first aim of a philosopher is a life, not some works [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The philosopher's product is his life (first, before his works). It is his work of art. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [205]) |
14887 | You should only develop a philosophy if you are willing to live by it [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: One should have a philosophy only to the extent that one is capable of living according to this philosophy: so that everything does not become mere words. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 30 [17]) |
14889 | Philosophy is pointless if it does not advocate, and live, a new way of life [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: As long as philosophers do not muster the courage to advocate a lifestyle structured in an entirely different way and demonstrate it by their own example, they will come to nothing. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 31 [10]) | |
A reaction: This is a pretty tough requirement for the leading logicians and metaphysicians of our day, but they must face their marginality. The public will only be interested in philosophers who advocate new ways of living. |
14862 | Philosophy is more valuable than much of science, because of its beauty [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The reason why unprovable philosophizing still has some value - more value, in fact, than many a scientific proposition - lies in the aesthetic value of such philosophizing, that is, in its beauty and sublimity. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [076]) | |
A reaction: I am increasingly inclined to agree. I love wide-ranging and ambitious works of metaphysics, each of which is a unique creation of the human intellect (and with which no other individual will ever entirely agree). A great short paper is also beautiful. |
14878 | It would better if there was no thought [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: It would be better if thought did not exist at all. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [004]) |
14881 | Why do people want philosophers? [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Why do human beings even want philosophers? | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [019]) | |
A reaction: It is not clear, of course, that they do want philosophers. The standard attitude to them seems to be a mixture of contempt and fear. |
14876 | Philosophy is always secondary, because it cannot support a popular culture [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: It is not possible to base a popular culture on philosophy. Thus, with regard to culture, philosophy never can have primary, but always only secondary, significance. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 23 [14]) | |
A reaction: It is the brilliance of Christianity as a set of ideas that it is simple enough to found a popular culture. A complex theology would make that impossible. Luther brought it back to its roots, when the priesthood lost touch with the people. |
14860 | Kant has undermined our belief in metaphysics [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: In a certain sense, Kant's influence was detrimental; for the belief in metaphysics has been lost. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [028]) | |
A reaction: As I understand it, there are two interpretations of Kant, one of which is fairly thoroughly anti-metaphysical, and another which is less so. Also one path leads to idealism and the other doesn't, but I need to research that. |
14859 | If philosophy controls science, then it has to determine its scope, and its value [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The philosophy that is in control of science must also consider the extent to which science should be allowed to develop; it must determine its value! | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [024]) |
13886 | Later Frege held that definitions must fix a function's value for every possible argument [Frege, by Wright,C] |
Full Idea: Frege later became fastidious about definitions, and demanded that they must provide for every possible case, and that no function is properly determined unless its value is fixed for every conceivable object as argument. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 2 (Basic Laws) [1903]) by Crispin Wright - Frege's Concept of Numbers as Objects 3.xiv | |
A reaction: Presumably definitions come in degrees of completeness, but it seems harsh to describe a desire for the perfect definition as 'fastidious', especially if we are talking about mathematics, rather than defining 'happiness'. |
9845 | We can't define a word by defining an expression containing it, as the remaining parts are a problem [Frege] |
Full Idea: Given the reference (bedeutung) of an expression and a part of it, obviously the reference of the remaining part is not always determined. So we may not define a symbol or word by defining an expression in which it occurs, whose remaining parts are known | |
From: Gottlob Frege (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 2 (Basic Laws) [1903], §66) | |
A reaction: Dummett cites this as Frege's rejection of contextual definitions, which he had employed in the Grundlagen. I take it not so much that they are wrong, as that Frege decided to set the bar a bit higher. |
10019 | Only what is logically complex can be defined; what is simple must be pointed to [Frege] |
Full Idea: Only what is logically complex can be defined; what is simple can only be pointed to. | |
From: Gottlob Frege (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 2 (Basic Laws) [1903], §180), quoted by Harold Hodes - Logicism and Ontological Commits. of Arithmetic p.137 | |
A reaction: Frege presumably has in mind his treasured abstract objects, such as cardinal numbers. It is hard to see how you could 'point to' anything in the phenomenal world that had atomic simplicity. Hodes calls this a 'desperate Kantian move'. |
14880 | Logic is just slavery to language [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Logic is merely slavery in the fetters of language. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [008]) | |
A reaction: I don't think I agree with this, but I still like it. |
9886 | Cardinals say how many, and reals give measurements compared to a unit quantity [Frege] |
Full Idea: The cardinals and the reals are completely disjoint domains. The cardinal numbers answer the question 'How many objects of a given kind are there?', but the real numbers are for measurement, saying how large a quantity is compared to a unit quantity. | |
From: Gottlob Frege (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 2 (Basic Laws) [1903], §157), quoted by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.19 | |
A reaction: We might say that cardinals are digital and reals are analogue. Frege is unusual in totally separating them. They map onto one another, after all. Cardinals look like special cases of reals. Reals are dreams about the gaps between cardinals. |
9889 | Real numbers are ratios of quantities [Frege, by Dummett] |
Full Idea: Frege fixed on construing real numbers as ratios of quantities (in agreement with Newton). | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 2 (Basic Laws) [1903]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.20 | |
A reaction: If 3/4 is the same real number as 6/8, which is the correct ratio? Why doesn't the square root of 9/16 also express it? Why should irrationals be so utterly different from rationals? In what sense are they both 'numbers'? |
10553 | A number is a class of classes of the same cardinality [Frege, by Dummett] |
Full Idea: For Frege, in 'Grundgesetze', a number is a class of classes of the same cardinality. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 2 (Basic Laws) [1903]) by Michael Dummett - Frege Philosophy of Language (2nd ed) Ch.14 |
10020 | Frege's biggest error is in not accounting for the senses of number terms [Hodes on Frege] |
Full Idea: The inconsistency of Grundgesetze was only a minor flaw. Its fundamental flaw was its inability to account for the way in which the senses of number terms are determined. It leaves the reference-magnetic nature of the standard numberer a mystery. | |
From: comment on Gottlob Frege (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 2 (Basic Laws) [1903]) by Harold Hodes - Logicism and Ontological Commits. of Arithmetic p.139 | |
A reaction: A point also made by Hofweber. As a logician, Frege was only concerned with the inferential role of number terms, and he felt he had captured their logical form, but it is when you come to look at numbers in natural language that he seem in trouble. |
9887 | Formalism misunderstands applications, metatheory, and infinity [Frege, by Dummett] |
Full Idea: Frege's three main objections to radical formalism are that it cannot account for the application of mathematics, that it confuses a formal theory with its metatheory, and it cannot explain an infinite sequence. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 2 (Basic Laws) [1903], §86-137) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics | |
A reaction: The application is because we don't design maths randomly, but to be useful. The third objection might be dealt with by potential infinities (from formal rules). The second objection sounds promising. |
8751 | Only applicability raises arithmetic from a game to a science [Frege] |
Full Idea: It is applicability alone which elevates arithmetic from a game to the rank of a science. | |
From: Gottlob Frege (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 2 (Basic Laws) [1903], §91), quoted by Stewart Shapiro - Thinking About Mathematics 6.1.2 | |
A reaction: This is the basic objection to Formalism. It invites the question of why it is applicable, which platonists like Frege don't seem to answer (though Plato himself has reality modelled on the Forms). This is why I like structuralism. |
14869 | If some sort of experience is at the root of matter, then human knowledge is close to its essence [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: If pleasure, displeasure, sensation, memory, reflex movements are all part of the essence of matter, then human knowledge penetrates far more deeply into the essence of things. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [161]) | |
A reaction: I don't think Nietzsche is thinking of monads at this point, but his idea certainly applies to them. Leibniz rested his whole theory on the close analogy between how minds work and how matter must also work. |
9891 | The first demand of logic is of a sharp boundary [Frege] |
Full Idea: The first demand of logic is of a sharp boundary. | |
From: Gottlob Frege (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 2 (Basic Laws) [1903], §160), quoted by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.22 | |
A reaction: Nothing I have read about vagueness has made me doubt Frege's view of this, although precisification might allow you to do logic with vague concepts without having to finally settle where the actual boundaries are. |
14875 | Belief matters more than knowledge, and only begins when knowledge ceases [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The human being starts to believe when he ceases to know. …Knowledge is not as important for the welfare of human beings as is belief. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 21 [13]) | |
A reaction: The first idea is now associated with Williamson (and Hossack). The second is something like the pragmatic view of belief espoused by Ramsey. |
14866 | It always remains possible that the world just is the way it appears [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Against Kant we can still object, even if we accept all his propositions, that it is still possible that the world is as it appears to us. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [125]) | |
A reaction: This little thought at least seems to be enough to block the slide from phenomenalism into total idealism. The idea that direct realism can never be ruled out, even if it is false, is very striking. |
14872 | Our knowledge is illogical, because it rests on false identities between things [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Every piece of knowledge that is beneficial to us involves an identification of nonidentical things, of things that are similar, which means that it is essentially illogical. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [236]) | |
A reaction: I take the thought to be that no two tigers are alike, but we call them all 'tigers' and merge them into a type, and then all our knowledge is based on this distortion. A wonderful idea. I love particulars You should love particulars. |
14879 | The most extreme scepticism is when you even give up logic [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Even skepticism contains a belief: the belief in logic. The most extreme position is hence the abandoning of logic. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [008]) | |
A reaction: Some might say that flirting with non-classical logic (as in Graham Priest) is precisely travelling down this road. You could also be sceptical about meaning in language, so you couldn't articulate your abandonment of logic. |
14873 | If we find a hypothesis that explains many things, we conclude that it explains everything [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The feeling of certainty is the most difficult to develop. Initially one seeks explanation: if a hypothesis explains many things, we draw the conclusion that it explains everything. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [238]) | |
A reaction: As so often, a wonderful warning from Nietzsche to other philosophers. They love to latch onto a Big Idea, and offer it as the answer to everything (especially, dare I say it, continental philosophers). |
14868 | Our primary faculty is perception of structure, as when looking in a mirror [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The primary faculty seems to me to be the perception of structure, that is, based upon the mirror. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [153]) | |
A reaction: The point about the mirror makes this such an intriguingly original idea. Personally I like very much the idea that structure is our prime perception. See Sider 2011 on structure. |
14870 | We experience causation between willing and acting, and thereby explain conjunctions of changes [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The only form of causality of which we are aware is that between willing and acting - we transfer this to all things, and thereby explain the relationship between two changes that always occur together. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [209]) | |
A reaction: This is a rather Humean view, of projecting our experience onto the world, but it may be that we really are experiencing real causation, just as it occurs between insentiate things. |
14867 | It is just madness to think that the mind is supernatural (or even divine!) [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: To view 'spirit', the product of the brain, as supernatural. Even to deify it. What madness! | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [127]) | |
A reaction: When I started philolosophy I was obliged to take mind-body dualism very seriously, but I have finally managed to drag myself to the shores of this lake of madness, where Nietzsche awaited with a helping hand. |
3643 | The concept of mind excludes body, and vice versa [Descartes] |
Full Idea: The concept of body includes nothing at all which belongs to the mind, and the concept of mind includes nothing at all which belongs to the body. | |
From: René Descartes (Reply to Fourth Objections [1641], 225) | |
A reaction: A headache? Hunger? The mistake, I think, is to regard the mind as entirely conscious, thus creating a sharp boundary between two aspects of our lives. As shown by blindsight, I take many of my central mental operations to be pre- or non-conscious. |
9890 | The modern account of real numbers detaches a ratio from its geometrical origins [Frege] |
Full Idea: From geometry we retain the interpretation of a real number as a ratio of quantities or measurement-number; but in more recent times we detach it from geometrical quantities, and from all particular types of quantity. | |
From: Gottlob Frege (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 2 (Basic Laws) [1903], §159), quoted by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics | |
A reaction: Dummett glosses the 'recent' version as by Cantor and Dedekind in 1872. This use of 'detach' seems to me startlingly like the sort of psychological abstractionism which Frege was so desperate to avoid. |
11846 | If we abstract the difference between two houses, they don't become the same house [Frege] |
Full Idea: If abstracting from the difference between my house and my neighbour's, I were to regard both houses as mine, the defect of the abstraction would soon be made clear. It may, though, be possible to obtain a concept by means of abstraction... | |
From: Gottlob Frege (Grundgesetze der Arithmetik 2 (Basic Laws) [1903], §99) | |
A reaction: Note the important concession at the end, which shows Frege could never deny the abstraction process, despite all the modern protests by Geach and Dummett that he totally rejected it. |
14884 | The shortest path to happiness is forgetfulness, the path of animals (but of little value) [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: If happiness were the goal, then animals would be the highest creatures. Their cynicism is grounded in forgetfulness: that is the shortest path to happiness, even if it is a happiness with little value. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [143]) | |
A reaction: I would be reluctant to describe an apparently contented cow as 'happy'. Is a comatose person happy? Maybe happiness is fulfilling one's nature, like a monkey swinging through trees? |
14886 | Education is contrary to human nature [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Education runs contrary to the nature of a human being. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 30 [06]) | |
A reaction: Tell me about it! |
14883 | We should evaluate the past morally [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: For the past I desire above all a moral evaluation. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [096]) | |
A reaction: There is a bit of a contradiction with Idea 14819, of only a few years later. He was always interested in a historical approach to morality, but I'm not sure if his ethics gives a decent basis for moral assessments of remote historical eras. |
14882 | Protest against vivisection - living things should not become objects of scientific investigation [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Protest against vivisection of living things, that is, those things that are not yet dead should be allowed to live and not immediately be treated as an object for scientific investigation. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [027]) | |
A reaction: Wow. How many other people had come up with this idea in 1873? |
14865 | We do not know the nature of one single causality [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: We do not know the nature of one single causality. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [121]) |
14871 | Laws of nature are merely complex networks of relations [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: All laws of nature are only relations between x, y and z. We define laws of nature as relations to an x, y, and z, each of which in turn, is known to us only in relation to other x's, y's and z's. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [235]) | |
A reaction: This could be interpreted in Armstrong's terms, as only identifying the x's, y's and z's by their universals, and then seeing laws as how those universal relate. I suspect, though, that Nietzsche has a Humean regularity pattern in mind. |
14864 | The Greeks lack a normative theology: each person has their own poetic view of things [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The Greeks lack a normative theology: everyone has the right to deal with it in a poetic manner and he can believe whatever he wants. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [110]) | |
A reaction: There is quite a lot of record of harshness towards atheists, and the trial of Socrates seems to have been partly over theology. However, no proper theological texts have come down, or records of the teachings of the priests. |