4 ideas
| 9764 | Inspiration and social improvement need wisdom, but not professional philosophy [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Professional philosophers have no peculiar fitness for inspirational and edifying writing, or helping to get society on an even keel (though we should do what we can). Wisdom may fulfil these crying needs: 'sophia' yes, but 'philosophia' not necessarily. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Has Philosophy Lost Contact with People? [1979], p.193) | |
| A reaction: This rather startlingly says that philosophy is unlikely to lead to wisdom, which is rather odd when it is defined as love of that very thing. Does love of horticulture lead to good gardening. I can't agree. Philosophy is the best hope of 'sophia'. |
| 9763 | For a good theory of the world, we must focus on our flabby foundational vocabulary [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Our traditional introspective notions - of meaning, idea, concept, essence, all undisciplined and undefined - afford a hopelessly flabby and unmanageable foundation for a theory of the world. Control is gained by focusing on words. | |
| From: Willard Quine (Has Philosophy Lost Contact with People? [1979], p.192) | |
| A reaction: A very nice statement of the aim of modern language-centred philosophy, though the task offered appears to be that of an under-labourer, when the real target, even according to Quine, is supposed to be a 'theory of the world'. |
| 12716 | The concept of forces or powers best reveals the true concept of substance [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The concept of forces or powers ..for whose explanation I have set up a distinct science of dynamics, brings the strongest light to bear upon our understanding of the true concept of substance. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (De primae philosophiae emendatione [1694], G IV 469), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 4 | |
| A reaction: My own experience was that as soon as I encountered the notion of a 'power' in the metaphysics of science (see Molnar on this) the whole thing began to form a coherent picture. Powers rule. |
| 20761 | If existence is absurd it can never have a meaning [Beauvoir] |
| Full Idea: To declare that existence is absurd is to deny that it can ever be given a meaning; to say that it is ambiguous is to assert that its meaning is never fixed. | |
| From: Simone de Beauvoir (Ethics of Ambiguity [1948], p.129), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 6 'Bad' | |
| A reaction: Absurdity precludes meaning, but being meaningless doesn't entail absurdity. Asteroids are meaningless. Presumably if existence is meaningless now (as in a depression), but it might possibly become meaningful, then it can't qualify as 'absurd'. |