42 ideas
23183 | Different abilities are needed for living in an incomplete and undogmatic system [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: There is an entirely different strength and mobility to maintaining oneself in an incomplete system, with free, open vistas, than in a dogmatic world. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[025]) | |
A reaction: This is like Keats's 'negative capability' - the ability to live in a state of uncertainty. I'm a fan of attempts to create a philosophical system, but dogmatism would seem to be the death of such a project. How would you live with your system? Nice. |
23188 | Bad writers use shapeless floating splotches of concepts [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Bad writers have only shapeless floating splotches of concepts in their heads. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[083]) | |
A reaction: Under 'conceptual analyis' not because he analyses concepts, but because he recognises their foundation importance in philosophy. I get more irritated by unchallenged concepts than by drifting concepts. Writer must know and challenge their key concepts. |
23212 | A text has many interpretations, but no 'correct' one [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The same text allows innumerable interpretations: there is no 'correct' interpretation. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 1[120]) | |
A reaction: It is hard to defend a 'correct' interpretation, but I think it is obvious to students of literature that some interpretations are very silly, such as reading things allegorically when there was no such intention. |
18261 | A simplification which is complete constitutes a definition [Kant] |
Full Idea: By dissection I can make the concept distinct only by making the marks it contains clear. That is what analysis does. If this analysis is complete ...and in addition there are not so many marks, then it is precise and so constitutes a definition. | |
From: Immanuel Kant (Wiener Logik [1795], p.455), quoted by J. Alberto Coffa - The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap 1 'Conc' | |
A reaction: I think Aristotle would approve of this. We need to grasp that a philosophical definition is quite different from a lexicographical definition. 'Completeness' may involve quite a lot. |
23199 | What is the search for truth if it isn't moral? [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: What is searching for truth, truthfulness, honesty if not something moral? | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 35[05]) | |
A reaction: Feels right to me. It might be an effect of the virtue of respect. If you respect a person you tell them the truth (assuming they want the truth). Lying to someone is a sort of contempt. |
23202 | Like all philosophers, I love truth [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: I, too, love truth, like all philosophers. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 37[02]) | |
A reaction: Please pay attention to this remark! His perspectivalism is not a denial of truth. It is an epistemological phenomenon, not a metaphysical one. The perspectives are the nearest we can get to truth. Humanity therefore needs teamwork. |
22275 | Logic gives us the necessary rules which show us how we ought to think [Kant] |
Full Idea: In logic the question is not one of contingent but of necessary rules, not how to think, but how we ought to think. | |
From: Immanuel Kant (Wiener Logik [1795], p.16), quoted by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 02 'Trans' | |
A reaction: Presumably it aspires to the objectivity of a single correct account of how we all ought to think. I'm sympathetic to that, rather than modern cultural relativism about reason. Logic is rooted in nature, not in arbitrary convention. |
23196 | Logic is a fiction, which invents the view that one thought causes another [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The model of a complete fiction is logic. Here a thinking is made up where a thought is posited as the cause of another thought. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[249]) | |
A reaction: He could almost be referring to Frege's Third Realm. Most hard core analytic philosophers seem to think that propositions have tight logical relationships which are nothing to do with the people who think them. |
23186 | Numbers enable us to manage the world - to the limits of counting [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Numbers are our major means of making the world manageable. We comprehend as far as we can count, i.e. as far as a constancy can be perceived. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[058]) | |
A reaction: I don't agree with 'major', but it is a nice thought. The intermediate concept is a 'unit', which means identifying something as a 'thing', which is how we seem to grasp the world. So to what extent do we comprehend the infinite. Enter Cantor… |
23211 | Events are just interpretations of groups of appearances [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: There is no event in itself. What happens is a group of appearances selected and summarised by an interpreting being. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 1[115]) | |
A reaction: Since innumerable events are nested within one another, such as the events at a carnival, this is obviously true. A primitive 'Kim event' (an object changes a property) might have objective existence. Carnivals happen, though. |
23201 | The 'I' does not think; it is a construction of thinking, like other useful abstractions [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: I do not grant to the metaphysicians that the 'I' is what thinks: on the contrary I take the I itself as a construction thinking, of the same rank as 'material',' thing', 'substance', 'purpose', 'number': therefore only as a regulative fiction. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 35[35]) | |
A reaction: Ah. I have always defended the Self, the thing that is in charge when the mind is directed to something. I suddenly see that this is compatible with the Self not being the thinker! It is just the willer, and the controller of the searchlight. Self = will? |
23207 | Appearance is the sole reality of things, to which all predicates refer [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Appearance as I understand it is the actual and single reality of things - that which first merits all existing predicates. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 40[53]) | |
A reaction: This is the view espoused by John Stuart Mill (a fact which would shock Nietzsche!). Elsewhere he laughs at the concept of the thing-in-itself as a fiction. |
23197 | Memory is essential, and is only possible by means of abbreviation signs [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Experience is only possible with the help of memory; memory is only possible by virtue of an abbreviation of an intellectual event as a sign. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[249]) | |
A reaction: My memory of a town is not formed as a sign, but as a bunch of miscellaneous fragments about it. I think mental files gives a better account of this than do 'signs'. |
18260 | If we knew what we know, we would be astonished [Kant] |
Full Idea: If we only know what we know ...we would be astonished by the treasures contained in our knowledge. | |
From: Immanuel Kant (Wiener Logik [1795], p.843), quoted by J. Alberto Coffa - The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap 1 'Conc' | |
A reaction: Nice remark. He doesn't require immediat recall of knowledge. You can't be required to know that you know something. That doesn't imply externalism, though. I believe in securely founded internal knowledge which is hard to recall. |
23206 | Schematic minds think thoughts are truer if they slot into a scheme [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: There are schematic minds, those who hold a thought-complex to be truer if it can be sketched into previously drafted schemata or categorical tables. There are countless self-deceptions in this area: nearly all the great 'systems' belong here. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 40[09]) | |
A reaction: Why 'nearly all'? Aristotle might be a candidate for such a person. Leibniz, perhaps. Nietzsche identified with Becoming and Heraclitus, as opposed to Being and Parmenides. |
23209 | Each of our personal drives has its own perspective [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: From the standpoint of each of our fundamental drives there is a different perspectival assessment of all events and experiences. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 1[058]) | |
A reaction: Revealing. Perspectives are not just each individual person's viewpoint, but something more fine-grained than that. Our understanding and response are ambiguous, because we ourselves are intrinsically ambiguous. Super-relativism! |
17488 | Empiricist theories are sets of laws, which give explanations and reductions [Glennan] |
Full Idea: In the empiricist tradition theories were understood to be deductive closures of sets of laws, explanations were understood as arguments from covering laws, and reduction was understood as a deductive relationship between laws of different theories. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
A reaction: A lovely crisp summary of the whole tradition of philosophy of science from Comte through to Hempel. Mechanism and essentialism are the new players in the game. |
17493 | Modern mechanism need parts with spatial, temporal and function facts, and diagrams [Glennan] |
Full Idea: Modern champions of mechanisms say models should identify both the parts and their spatial, temporal and functional organisation, ...and the practical importance of diagrams in addition to or in place of linguistic representations of mechanisms. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Discover') | |
A reaction: Apparently chemists obtain much more refined models by using mathematics than they did by diagrams or 3D models (let alone verbal descriptions). For that reason, I'm thinking that 'model' might be a better term than 'mechanism'. |
17487 | Mechanistic philosophy of science is an alternative to the empiricist law-based tradition [Glennan] |
Full Idea: To a significant degree, a mechanistic philosophy of science can be seen as an alternative to an earlier logical empiricist tradition in philosophy of science that gave pride of place to laws of nature. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
A reaction: Lovely! Someone who actually spells out what's going on here. Most philosophers are far too coy about explaining what their real game is. Mechanism is fine in chemistry and biology. How about in 'mathematical' physics, or sociology? |
17489 | Mechanisms are either systems of parts or sequences of activities [Glennan] |
Full Idea: There are two sorts of mechanisms: systems consist of collections of parts that interact to produce some behaviour, and processes are sequences of activities which produce some outcome. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
A reaction: [compressed] The second one is important because it is more generic, and under that account all kinds the features of the world that need to be explained can be subsumed. E.g. hyperinflation in an economy is a 'mechanism'. |
17490 | 17th century mechanists explained everything by the kinetic physical fundamentals [Glennan] |
Full Idea: 17th century mechanists said that interactions governed by chemical, electrical or gravitational forces would have to be explicable in terms of the operation of some atomistic (or corpuscular) kinetic mechanism. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
A reaction: Glennan says science has rejected this, so modern mechanists do not reduce mechanisms to anything in particular. |
17491 | Unlike the lawlike approach, mechanistic explanation can allow for exceptions [Glennan] |
Full Idea: One of the advantages of the move from nomological to mechanistic modes of explanation is that the latter allows for explanations involving exception-ridden generalizations. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'regular') | |
A reaction: The lawlike approach has endless problems with 'ceteris paribus' ('all things being equal') laws, where specifying all the other 'things' seems a bit tricky. |
23184 | The mind is a simplifying apparatus [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The intellect and the senses are above all a simplifying apparatus. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[046]) | |
A reaction: Very plausible, and not an idea I have met elsewhere. There's a PhD here for someone. It fits with my view as universals in language (which is most of language), which capture diverse things by ironing out their differences. |
23190 | Consciousness is our awareness of our own mental life [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: We have a double brain: our capacity to will, to feel and to think of our willing, feeling, thinking ourselves is what we summarise with the word 'consciousness'. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[087]) | |
A reaction: Pretty much the modern HOT (higher order thought) theory of consciousness. Higher order thought distinguishes us from the other animals, but I think they too are probably conscious, so I don't agree. Why is level 2 conscious of level 1? |
23191 | Minds have an excluding drive to scare things off, and a selecting one to filter facts [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: In our conscious intellect there must be an excluding drive that scares things away, a selecting one, which only permits certain facts to present themselves. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[131]) | |
A reaction: I like this because he is endorsing the idea that philosophy needs faculties, which may not match the views of psychologists and neuroscientists. Quite nice to think of faculties as drives. |
23213 | The greatest drive of life is to discharge strength, rather than preservation [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Something that lives wants above all to discharge its strength: 'preservation' is only one of the consequences of this. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 2[063]) | |
A reaction: This seems to fit a dynamic man like Nietzsche, rather than someone who opts for a quiet and comfortable life. |
23210 | That all events are necessary does not mean they are compelled [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The absolute necessity of all events contains nothing of a compulsion. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 1[114]) | |
A reaction: I like to look for necessity-makers behind necessities. So if the event is not necessary because of its cause, where does it come from? Is it that the whole sequence is a unified necessity? |
23189 | Concepts are rough groups of simultaneous sensations [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Concepts are more or less definite groups of sensations that arrive together. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[086]) | |
A reaction: I like this because I favour accounts of concepts which root them in experience, and largely growing unthinking out of communcal experience. Nietzsche is very empirical here. Hume would probably agree. |
23192 | Concepts don’t match one thing, but many things a little bit [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: A concept is an invention that doesn't correspond entirely to anything; but to many things a little bit. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[131]) | |
A reaction: This seems to cover some concepts quite well, but others not at all. What else does 'square' correspond to? |
23187 | Whatever their origin, concepts survive by being useful [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The most useful concepts have survived: however falsely they may have originated. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[063]) | |
A reaction: The germ of both pragmatism, and of meaning-as-use, here. The alternative views must be that the concepts are accurate or true, or that they are simply a matter of whim, maintained by authority. |
23205 | Thought starts as ambiguity, in need of interpretation and narrowing [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: A thought in the shape in which it comes is an ambiguous sign that needs interpretation, more precisely, needs an arbitrary narrowing-down and limitation, until it finally becomes unambiguous. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 38[01]) | |
A reaction: This is exactly my view of propositions, as mental events. Introspect your thinking process. Track the progress from the first glimmer of a thought to its formulation in a finished sentence. Language, unlike propositions, can be ambiguous. |
23198 | Aesthetics can be more basic than morality, in our pleasure in certain patterns of experience [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Some of the aesthetic valuations are more fundamental than the moral ones e.g. the pleasure in what is ordered, surveyable, limited, in repetition. The logical, arithmetical and geometrical good feelings form the ground floor of aesthetic valuations. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 35[02]) | |
A reaction: Nietzsche's originality is so striking because his novel suggestions are always plausible. Lots of modern philosophers (especially, I fear, in the continental tradition) throw out startling ideas which then fail on closer inspection. |
23208 | Caesar and Napoleon point to the future, when they pursue their task regardless of human sacrifice [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: In nature's such as Caesar and Napoleon we intuit something of a 'disinterested' laboring on one's marble, regardless of any sacrifice of human beings. The future of the highest human beings lies on here: to bear responsibility and not collapse under it. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 1[056]) | |
A reaction: Hideous. Nietzsche at his absolute worst. You would think there was some wonderful higher good to which they were leading the human race, when they just strike me as people who liked fighting, and adored winning. |
23193 | Napoleon was very focused, and rightly ignored compassion [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: With Napoleon only the essential instincts of humanity came into consideration during his calculations, and he had a right not to take notice of the exceptional ones e.g. of compassion. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[131]) | |
A reaction: Napoleon was notoriously indifferent to casualties, and I find it depressing that Nietzsche supports him. Napoleon brought misery to Europe for nearly twenties, mainly because he loved winning battles. Nothing über about that. |
23214 | For the strongest people, nihilism gives you wings! [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: In the hands of the strongest every kind of pessimism and nihilism becomes only one more hammer and tool with which one mounts a new pair of wings on oneself. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 2[101]) | |
A reaction: Not sure how this works. Why is great strength needed? Strength implies forceful overcoming. The wings come from rejecting nihilism, but why does that need strength? Aren't there people with wings who never even thought of nihilism? |
23203 | The great question is approaching, of how to govern the earth as a whole [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: It is approaching, irrefutably, hesitatingly, terrible as fate, the great task and fate: how should the earth as a whole be governed? | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 37[08]) | |
A reaction: Two issues have accelerated the question, though we have yet to properly face it. One is the incredible increase in military destructiveness, and other is the damage to the planet caused by the relentless pursuit of wealth. |
23200 | The controlling morality of aristocracy is the desire to resemble their ancestors [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The foundation of all aristocracies …is to resemble the ancestors as much as possible, which serves as the controlling morality: mourning at the thought of change and variation. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 35[22]) | |
A reaction: This makes sense of the permanent residence of the family, full of portraits and family trees. Aristocrats preserve records of their predecessors, in a way that most of us don't, going back before grandparents. |
23194 | People feel united as a nation by one language, but then want a common ancestry and history [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: People who speak one language and read the same newspapers today call themselves 'nations', and also want much too eagerly to be of common ancestry and history. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[203]) | |
A reaction: This sort of nationalism is still with us, as white supremacy, and as history as mythology. But we can't just shake off a sense of which gene pools we come from, and which lines of history are our personal inheritance. |
23204 | To be someone you need property, and wanting more is healthy [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: Property owners are to a man of one belief: 'you have to own something to be something'. But this is the oldest and healthiest of all instincts: I would add 'you have to want more than you have in order to become more'. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 37[11]) | |
A reaction: An odd idea from someone who spent his later years living in one room in a guest house. The context of this is a rejection of socialism. The love of and need for property and possessions must be taken into account in any politics. |
17494 | Since causal events are related by mechanisms, causation can be analysed in that way [Glennan] |
Full Idea: Causation can be analyzed in terms of mechanisms because (except for fundamental causal interactions) causally related events will be connected by intervening mechanisms. | |
From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'causation') | |
A reaction: This won't give us the metaphysics of causation (which concerns the fundamentals), but this strikes me as a very coherent and interesting proposal. He mentions electron interaction as non-mechanistic causation. |
23195 | Laws of nature are actually formulas of power relations [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: The alleged 'laws of nature' are formulas for power relationships… | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[247]) | |
A reaction: Love it. This is precisely the powers ontology of modern philosophy of science. His Will to Power is not often recognised as closely related to this view. |
23185 | In chemistry every substance pushes, and thus creates new substances [Nietzsche] |
Full Idea: In chemistry is revealed that every substance pushes its force as far as it can, then a third something emerges. | |
From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1885-86 [1886], 34[51]) | |
A reaction: This is the ontology of powers as the basis of science, of which I am a fan. It is Nietzsche's Will to Power in action, which is often mistakenly taken to only refer to human affairs. |