50 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| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 30 [25]) |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| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [086]) | |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| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 32 [67]) | |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| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 19 [052]) | |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| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 29 [205]) |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| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 [1873], 30 [17]) |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]) |
| 12223 | It is a fallacy to explain the obscure with the even more obscure [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: The fallacy of 'ad obscurum per obscurius' is to explain the obscure by appeal to what is more obscure. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §3) | |
| A reaction: Not strictly a fallacy, so much as an example of inadequate explanation, along with circularity and infinite regresses. |
| 15647 | Truth definitions don't produce a good theory, because they go beyond your current language [Halbach] |
| Full Idea: It is far from clear that a definition of truth can lead to a philosophically satisfactory theory of truth. Tarski's theorem on the undefinability of the truth predicate needs resources beyond those of the language for which it is being defined. | |
| From: Volker Halbach (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2005 ver) [2005], 1) | |
| A reaction: The idea is that you need a 'metalanguage' for the definition. If I say 'p' is a true sentence in language 'L', I am not making that observation from within language L. The dream is a theory confined to the object language. |
| 15649 | In semantic theories of truth, the predicate is in an object-language, and the definition in a metalanguage [Halbach] |
| Full Idea: In semantic theories of truth (Tarski or Kripke), a truth predicate is defined for an object-language. This definition is carried out in a metalanguage, which is typically taken to include set theory or another strong theory or expressive language. | |
| From: Volker Halbach (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2005 ver) [2005], 1) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the metalanguage includes set theory because that connects it with mathematics, and enables it to be formally rigorous. Tarski showed, in his undefinability theorem, that the meta-language must have increased resources. |
| 15655 | Should axiomatic truth be 'conservative' - not proving anything apart from implications of the axioms? [Halbach] |
| Full Idea: If truth is not explanatory, truth axioms should not allow proof of new theorems not involving the truth predicate. It is hence said that axiomatic truth should be 'conservative' - not implying further sentences beyond what the axioms can prove. | |
| From: Volker Halbach (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2005 ver) [2005], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] |
| 15654 | If truth is defined it can be eliminated, whereas axiomatic truth has various commitments [Halbach] |
| Full Idea: If truth can be explicitly defined, it can be eliminated, whereas an axiomatized notion of truth may bring all kinds of commitments. | |
| From: Volker Halbach (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2005 ver) [2005], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: The general principle that anything which can be defined can be eliminated (in an abstract theory, presumably, not in nature!) raises interesting questions about how many true theories there are which are all equivalent to one another. |
| 15650 | Axiomatic theories of truth need a weak logical framework, and not a strong metatheory [Halbach] |
| Full Idea: Axiomatic theories of truth can be presented within very weak logical frameworks which require very few resources, and avoid the need for a strong metalanguage and metatheory. | |
| From: Volker Halbach (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2005 ver) [2005], 1) |
| 15648 | Instead of a truth definition, add a primitive truth predicate, and axioms for how it works [Halbach] |
| Full Idea: The axiomatic approach does not presuppose that truth can be defined. Instead, a formal language is expanded by a new primitive predicate of truth, and axioms for that predicate are then laid down. | |
| From: Volker Halbach (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2005 ver) [2005], 1) | |
| A reaction: Idea 15647 explains why Halbach thinks the definition route is no good. |
| 15656 | Deflationists say truth merely serves to express infinite conjunctions [Halbach] |
| Full Idea: According to many deflationists, truth serves merely the purpose of expressing infinite conjunctions. | |
| From: Volker Halbach (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2005 ver) [2005], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: That is, it asserts sentences that are too numerous to express individually. It also seems, on a deflationist view, to serve for anaphoric reference to sentences, such as 'what she just said is true'. |
| 15657 | To prove the consistency of set theory, we must go beyond set theory [Halbach] |
| Full Idea: The consistency of set theory cannot be established without assumptions transcending set theory. | |
| From: Volker Halbach (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2005 ver) [2005], 2.1) |
| 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. |
| 15652 | We can use truth instead of ontologically loaded second-order comprehension assumptions about properties [Halbach] |
| Full Idea: The reduction of 2nd-order theories (of properties or sets) to axiomatic theories of truth may be conceived as a form of reductive nominalism, replacing existence assumptions (for comprehension axioms) by ontologically innocent truth assumptions. | |
| From: Volker Halbach (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2005 ver) [2005], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: I like this very much, as weeding properties out of logic (without weeding them out of the world). So-called properties in logic are too abundant, so there is a misfit with their role in science. |
| 15651 | Instead of saying x has a property, we can say a formula is true of x - as long as we have 'true' [Halbach] |
| Full Idea: Quantification over (certain) properties can be mimicked in a language with a truth predicate by quantifying over formulas. Instead of saying that Tom has the property of being a poor philosopher, we can say 'x is a poor philosopher' is true of Tom. | |
| From: Volker Halbach (Axiomatic Theories of Truth (2005 ver) [2005], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: I love this, and think it is very important. He talks of 'mimicking' properties, but I see it as philosophers mistakenly attributing properties, when actually what they were doing is asserting truths involving certain predicates. |
| 12230 | Singular terms refer if they make certain atomic statements true [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: Anyone should agree that a justification for regarding a singular term as having objectual reference is provided just as soon as one has justification for regarding as true certain atomic statements in which it functions as a singular term. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §9) | |
| A reaction: The meat of this idea is hidden in the word 'certain'. See Idea 10314 for Hale's explanation. Without that, the proposal strikes me as absurd. |
| 12225 | Neo-Fregeanism might be better with truth-makers, rather than quantifier commitment [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: A third way has been offered to 'make sense' of neo-Fregeanism: we should reject Quine's well-known criterion of ontological commitment in favour of one based on 'truth-maker theory'. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §4 n19) | |
| A reaction: [The cite Ross Cameron for this] They reject this proposal, on the grounds that truth-maker theory is not sufficient to fix the grounding truth-conditions of statements. |
| 12224 | Are neo-Fregeans 'maximalists' - that everything which can exist does exist? [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: It is claimed that neo-Fregeans are committed to 'maximalism' - that whatever can exist does. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §4) | |
| A reaction: [The cite Eklund] They observe that maximalism denies contingent non-existence (of the £20 note I haven't got). There seems to be the related problem of 'hyperinflation', that if abstract objects are generated logically, the process is unstoppable. |
| 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. |
| 12226 | The identity of Pegasus with Pegasus may be true, despite the non-existence [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: Identity is sometimes read so that 'Pegasus is Pegasus' expresses a truth, the non-existence of any winged horse notwithstanding. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §5) | |
| A reaction: This would give you ontological commitment to truth, without commitment to existence. It undercuts the use of identity statements as the basis of existence claims, which was Frege's strategy. |
| 12229 | Maybe we have abundant properties for semantics, and sparse properties for ontology [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: There is a compatibilist view which says that it is for the abundant properties to play the role of 'bedeutungen' in semantic theory, and the sparse ones to address certain metaphysical concerns. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §9) | |
| A reaction: Only a philosopher could live with the word 'property' having utterly different extensions in different areas of discourse. They similarly bifurcate words like 'object' and 'exist'. Call properties 'quasi-properties' and I might join in. |
| 18443 | A successful predicate guarantees the existence of a property - the way of being it expresses [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: The good standing of a predicate is already trivially sufficient to ensure the existence of an associated property, a (perhaps complex) way of being which the predicate serves to express. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §9) | |
| A reaction: 'Way of being' is interesting. Is 'being near Trafalgar Sq' a way of being? I take properties to be 'features', which seems to give a clearer way of demarcating them. They say they are talking about 'abundant' (rather than 'sparse') properties. |
| 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. |
| 12227 | Abstractionism needs existential commitment and uniform truth-conditions [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: Abstractionism needs a face-value, existentially committed reading of the terms occurring on the left-hand sides together with sameness of truth-conditions across the biconditional. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §5) | |
| A reaction: They employ 'abstractionism' to mean their logical Fregean strategy for defining abstractions, not to mean the older psychological account. Thus the truth-conditions for being 'parallel' and for having the 'same direction' must be consistent. |
| 12228 | Equivalence abstraction refers to objects otherwise beyond our grasp [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: Abstraction principles purport to introduce fundamental means of reference to a range of objects, to which there is accordingly no presumption that we have any prior or independent means of reference. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §8) | |
| A reaction: There's the rub! They make it sound like a virtue, that we open up yet another heaven of abstract toys to play with. As fictions, they are indeed exciting new fun. As platonic discoveries they strike me as Cloud-Cuckoo Land. |
| 12231 | Reference needs truth as well as sense [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: It takes, over and above the possession of sense, the truth of relevant contexts to ensure reference. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §9) | |
| A reaction: Reference purely through sense was discredited by Kripke. The present idea challenges Kripke's baptismal realist approach. How do you 'baptise' an abstract object? But isn't reference needed prior to the establishment of truth? |
| 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. |