28 ideas
| 21844 | The history of philosophy is an agent of power: how can you think if you haven't read the great names? [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: The history of philosophy has always been the agent of power in philosophy, and even in thought. It has played the oppressor's role: how can you think without having read Plato, Descartes, Kant and Heidegger. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: I find it hard to relate to this French 1960s obsession with everybody being oppressed in every conceivable way, so that 'liberation' is the only value that matters. If you ask why liberty is needed, you seem to have missed the point. |
| 21849 | Thought should be thrown like a stone from a war-machine [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Thought should be thrown like a stone by a war-machine. …Isn't this what Nietzsche does with an aphorism? | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II) | |
| A reaction: It sounds as if philosophy should consist of nothing but aphorisms. |
| 21845 | Philosophy aims to become the official language, supporting orthodoxy and the state [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is shot through with the project of becoming the official language of a Pure State. The exercise of thought thus conforms to the goals of the real State, to the dominant meanings and to the requirements of the established order. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Nietzsche's 'Schopenhauer as Educator' as the source of this] Is Karl Marx included in this generalisation, or Diogenes of Sinope? Is conservative philosophy thereby invalidated? |
| 21839 | When I meet objections I just move on; they never contribute anything [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Not reflection, and objections are even worse. Every time someone puts an objection to me, I want to say: 'OK, OK, let's get on to something else'. Objections have never contributed anything. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: I know it is heresy in analytic philosophy, but I love this! In analytic seminars you can barely complete your first sentence before someone interrupts. It's like road range - the philosophical mind state is always poised to attack, attack. |
| 21841 | We must create new words, and treat them as normal, and as if designating real things. [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Let us create extraordinary words, on condition that they be put to the most ordinary use and that the entity they designate be made to exist in the same way as the most common object. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like the attitude of someone creating a computer game. A language game! The idea is to create concepts with which to 'palpitate' our conceptual scheme, in order to reveal it, and thus put it within our power. |
| 6859 | Analytic philosophy has much higher standards of thinking than continental philosophy [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Certain advances in philosophical standards have been made within analytic philosophy, and there would be a serious loss of integrity involved in abandoning them in the way required to participate in current continental philosophy. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001], p.151) | |
| A reaction: The reply might be to concede the point, but say that the precision and rigour achieved are precisely what debar analytical philosophy from thinking about the really interesting problems. One might as well switch to maths and have done with it. |
| 21842 | Don't assess ideas for truth or justice; look for another idea, and establish a relationship with it [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: Neither relativism nor dialectic. Sounds like just having fun with ideas, but a commentator tells me it is a strategy for liberating our thought, following an agenda created by Nietzsche. |
| 21850 | Dualisms can be undone from within, by tracing connections, and drawing them to a new path [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: It is always possible to undo dualisms from the inside, by tracing the line of flight which passes between the two terms or the two sets …and which draws both into a non-parallel evolution. At least this does not belong to the dialectic. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II) | |
| A reaction: Deleuze disliked Hegel's version of the dialectic. Not clear what he means here, but he is evidently groping for an alternative account of the reasoning process, which is interesting. Deleuze hates rigid dualisms. |
| 6862 | Fuzzy logic uses a continuum of truth, but it implies contradictions [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Fuzzy logic is based on a continuum of degrees of truth, but it is committed to the idea that it is half-true that one identical twin is tall and the other twin is not, even though they are the same height. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001], p.154) | |
| A reaction: Maybe to be shocked by a contradiction is missing the point of fuzzy logic? Half full is the same as half empty. The logic does not say the twins are different, because it is half-true that they are both tall, and half-true that they both aren't. |
| 6858 | Formal logic struck me as exactly the language I wanted to think in [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: As soon as I started learning formal logic, that struck me as exactly the language that I wanted to think in. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001]) | |
| A reaction: It takes all sorts… It is interesting that formal logic might be seen as having the capacity to live up to such an aspiration. I don't think the dream of an ideal formal language is dead, though it will never encompass all of reality. Poetic truth. |
| 21838 | Before we seek solutions, it is important to invent problems [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: The art of constructing a problem is very important: you invent a problem, a problem-position, before finding a solution. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: I get the impression that Deleuze prefers problems to solutions, so the activity of exploring the problem is all that really matters. Sceptics accuse philosophers of inventing pseudo-problems. We must first know why 'problematising' is good. |
| 21847 | Before Being there is politics [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Before Being there is politics. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: [He says he is quoting Felix Guattari] I can only think that this is a very Marxist view - that politics permeates and dictates everything. This seems to tell me that I am forever controlled by something so deep and vast that I can never understand it. |
| 6863 | Close to conceptual boundaries judgement is too unreliable to give knowledge [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: If one is very close to a conceptual boundary, then one's judgement will be too unreliable to constitute knowledge, and therefore one will be ignorant. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001], p.156) | |
| A reaction: This is the epistemological rather than ontological interpretation of vagueness. It sounds very persuasive, but I am reluctant to accept that reality is full of very precise boundaries which we cannot quite discriminate. |
| 6861 | What sort of logic is needed for vague concepts, and what sort of concept of truth? [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The problem of vagueness is the problem of what logic is correct for vague concepts, and correspondingly what notions of truth and falsity are applicable to vague statements (does one need a continuum of degrees of truth, for example?). | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001], p.153) | |
| A reaction: This certainly makes vagueness sound like one of the most interesting problems in all of philosophy, though also one of the most difficult. Williamson's solution is that we may be vague, but the world isn't. |
| 6860 | How can one discriminate yellow from red, but not the colours in between? [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: If one takes a spectrum of colours from yellow to red, it might be that given a series of colour samples along that spectrum, each sample is indiscriminable by the naked eye from the next one, though samples at either end are blatantly different. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Interview with Baggini and Stangroom [2001], p.151) | |
| A reaction: This seems like a nice variant of the Sorites paradox (Idea 6008). One could demonstrate it with just three samples, where A and C seemed different from each other, but other comparisons didn't. |
| 21840 | A meeting of man and animal can be deterritorialization (like a wasp with an orchid) [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: The wasp becomes part of the orchid's reproductive apparatus at the same time as the orchid becomes the sexual organ of the wasp. …There are becomings where a man and an animal only meet on the trajectory of a common but asymmetrical deterritorialization. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: [second bit compressed] The point here is to illustrate 'deterritorialization', a term which Deleuze got from Guattari. It seems to be where the margins of your being become unclear. Recall the externalist, anti-individualist view of mind. |
| 21843 | People consist of many undetermined lines, some rigid, some supple, some 'lines of flight' [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: Things, people, are made up of varied lines, and they do not necessarily know which line they are on or where they should make the line which they are tracing pass; there is a whole geography in people, with rigid lines, supple lines, lines of flight etc. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], I) | |
| A reaction: An example of Deleuze creating a novel concept, in order to generate a liberating way of seeing our lives. His big focus is on 'lines of flight' (which, I think, are less restrained by local culture than the others). |
| 2705 | How can intuitionists distinguish universal convictions from local cultural ones? [Hare] |
| Full Idea: There are convictions which are common to most societies; but there are others which are not, and no way is given by intuitionists of telling which are the authoritative data. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.454) | |
| A reaction: It seems unfair on intuitionists to say they haven't given a way to evaluate such things, given that they have offered intuition. The issue is what exactly they mean by 'intuition'. |
| 2712 | You can't use intuitions to decide which intuitions you should cultivate [Hare] |
| Full Idea: If it comes to deciding what intuitions and dispositions to cultivate, we cannot rely on the intuitions themselves, as intuitionists do. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.461) | |
| A reaction: Makes intuitionists sound a bit dim. Surely Hume identifies dispositions (such as benevolence) which should be cultivated, because they self-evidently improve social life? |
| 2706 | Emotivists mistakenly think all disagreements are about facts, and so there are no moral reasons [Hare] |
| Full Idea: Emotivists concluded too hastily that because naturalism and intuitionism are false, you cannot reason about moral questions, because they assumed that the only questions you can reason about are factual ones. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.455) | |
| A reaction: Personally I have a naturalistic view of ethics (based on successful functioning, as indicated by Aristotle), so not my prob. Why can't we reason about expressive emotions? We reason about art. |
| 2709 | Prescriptivism sees 'ought' statements as imperatives which are universalisable [Hare] |
| Full Idea: Universal prescriptivists hold that 'ought'-judgements are prescriptive like plain imperatives, but differ from them in being universalisable. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.457) | |
| A reaction: Sounds a bit tautological. Which comes first, the normativity or the universalisability? |
| 2704 | If morality is just a natural or intuitive description, that leads to relativism [Hare] |
| Full Idea: Non-descriptivists (e.g. prescriptivists) reject descriptivism in its naturalist or intuitionist form, because they are both destined to collapse into relativism. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.453) | |
| A reaction: I'm not clear from this why prescriptism would not also turn out to be relativist, if it includes evaluations along with facts. |
| 2703 | Descriptivism say ethical meaning is just truth-conditions; prescriptivism adds an evaluation [Hare] |
| Full Idea: Ethical descriptivism is the view that ethical sentence-meaning is wholly determined by truth-conditions. …Prescriptivists think there is a further element of meaning, which expresses prescriptions or evaluations or attitudes which we assent to. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.452) | |
| A reaction: Not sure I understand either of these. If all meaning consists of truth-conditions, that will apply to ethics. If meaning includes evaluations, that will apply to non-ethics. |
| 2707 | If there can be contradictory prescriptions, then reasoning must be involved [Hare] |
| Full Idea: Prescriptivists claim that there are rules of reasoning which govern non-descriptive as well as descriptive speech acts. The standard example is possible logical inconsistency between contradictory prescriptions. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.455) | |
| A reaction: The example doesn't seem very good. Inconsistency can appear in any area of thought, but that isn't enough to infer full 'rules of reasoning'. I could desire two incompatible crazy things. |
| 2708 | An 'ought' statement implies universal application [Hare] |
| Full Idea: In any 'ought' statement there is implicit a principle which says that the statement applies to all precisely similar situations. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.456) | |
| A reaction: No two situations can ever be 'precisely' similar. Indeed, 'precisely similar' may be an oxymoron (at least for situations). Kantians presumably like this idea. |
| 2711 | Prescriptivism implies a commitment, but descriptivism doesn't [Hare] |
| Full Idea: Prescriptivists hold that moral judgements commit the speaker to motivations and actions, but non-moral facts by themselves do not do this. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.459) | |
| A reaction: Surely hunger motivates to action? I suppose the key word is 'commit'. But lazy people are allowed to make moral judgements. |
| 2710 | Moral judgements must invoke some sort of principle [Hare] |
| Full Idea: To make moral judgements is implicitly to invoke some principle, however specific. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.458) |
| 21848 | Some lines (of flight) are becomings which escape the system [Deleuze] |
| Full Idea: There are lines which do not amount to the path of a point, which break free from structure - lines of flight, becomings, without future or past, without memory, which resist the binary machine. …The rhizome is all this. | |
| From: Gilles Deleuze (A Conversation: what is it? What is it for? [1977], II) | |
| A reaction: The binary machine enforces simplistic either/or choices. I assume the 'lines' are to replace the Self, with something much more indeterminate, active and changing. |