36 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? |
| 19275 | You cannot understand what exists without understanding possibility and necessity [Hale] |
| Full Idea: I defend the thesis that questions about what kinds of things there are cannot be properly understood or adequately answered without recourse to considerations about possibility and necessity. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Good. I would say that this is a growing realisation in contemporary philosophy. The issue is focused when we ask what are the limitations of Quine's approach to metaphysics. If you don't see possibilities around you, you are a fool. |
| 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. |
| 6564 | To affirm 'p and not-p' is to have mislearned 'and' or 'not' [Quine] |
| Full Idea: To affirm a compound of the form 'p and not-p' is just to have mislearned one or both of these particles. | |
| From: Willard Quine (From Stimulus to Science [1995], p.23), quoted by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.1 | |
| A reaction: Quoted by Fogelin. This summarises the view of logic developed by the young Wittgenstein, that logical terms are 'operators', rather than referring terms. Of course the speaker may have a compartmentalised mind, or not understand 'p' properly. |
| 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. |
| 19291 | A canonical defintion specifies the type of thing, and what distinguish this specimen [Hale] |
| Full Idea: One might think of a full dress, or canonical, definition as specifying what type of thing it is, and what distinguishes it from everything else within its type. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 06.4) | |
| A reaction: Good! At last someone embraces the Aristotelian ideas that definitions are a) quite extensive and detailed (unlike lexicography), and b) they aim to get right down to the individual. In that sense, an essence is captured by a definition. |
| 19297 | The two Barcan principles are easily proved in fairly basic modal logic [Hale] |
| Full Idea: If the Brouwersche principle, p ⊃ □◊p is adjoined to a standard quantified vesion of the weakest modal logic K, then one can prove both the Barcan principle, and its converse. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 09.2) | |
| A reaction: The Brouwersche principle (that p implies that p must be possible) sounds reasonable, but the Barcan principles strike me as false, so something has to give. They are theorems of S5. Hale proposes giving up classical logic. |
| 19301 | With a negative free logic, we can dispense with the Barcan formulae [Hale] |
| Full Idea: I reject both Barcan and Converse Barcan by adopting a negative free logic. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 11.3) | |
| A reaction: See section 9.2 of Hale's book, where he makes his case. I can't evaluate this bold move, though I don't like the Barcan Formulae. We can anticipate objections to Hale: are you prepared to embrace the unexpected consequences of your new logic? |
| 19296 | If second-order variables range over sets, those are just objects; properties and relations aren't sets [Hale] |
| Full Idea: Contrary to what Quine supposes, it is neither necessary nor desirable to interpret bound higher-order variables as ranging over sets. Sets are a species of object. They should range over entities of a completely different type: properties and relations. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 08.2) | |
| A reaction: This helpfully clarifies something which was confusing me. If sets are objects, then 'second-order' logic just seems to be the same as first-order logic (rather than being 'set theory in disguise'). I quantify over properties, but deny their existence! |
| 19289 | Maybe conventionalism applies to meaning, but not to the truth of propositions expressed [Hale] |
| Full Idea: An old objection to conventionalism claims that it confuses sentences with propositions, confusing what makes sentences mean what they do with what makes them (as propositions) true. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 05.2) | |
| A reaction: The conventions would presumably apply to the sentences, but not to the propositions. Since I think that focusing on propositions solves a lot of misunderstandings in modern philosophy, I like the sound of this. |
| 19298 | Unlike axiom proofs, natural deduction proofs needn't focus on logical truths and theorems [Hale] |
| Full Idea: In contrast with axiomatic systems, in natural deductions systems of logic neither the premises nor the conclusions of steps in a derivation need themselves be logical truths or theorems of logic. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 09.2 n7) | |
| A reaction: Not sure I get that. It can't be that everything in an axiomatic proof has to be a logical truth. How would you prove anything about the world that way? I'm obviously missing something. |
| 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. |
| 19295 | Add Hume's principle to logic, to get numbers; arithmetic truths rest on the nature of the numbers [Hale] |
| Full Idea: The existence of the natural numbers is not a matter of pure logic - it cannot be proved in pure logic. It can be proved in second-order logic plus Hume's principle. Truths of arithmetic are not logic - they depend on the nature of natural numbers. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 07.4) | |
| A reaction: Hume's principles needs entities which can be matched to one another, so a certain ontology is needed to get neo-logicism off the ground. |
| 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. |
| 19281 | Interesting supervenience must characterise the base quite differently from what supervenes on it [Hale] |
| Full Idea: Any intereresting supervenience thesis requires that the class of facts on which the allegedly supervening facts supervene be characterizable independently, without use or presupposition of the notions involved in stating the supervening facts. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 03.4.1) | |
| A reaction: There might be intermediate cases here, since having descriptions which are utterly unconnected (at any level) might be rather challenging. |
| 19278 | There is no gap between a fact that p, and it is true that p; so we only have the truth-condtions for p [Hale] |
| Full Idea: There is no clear gap between its being a fact that p and its being true that p, no obvious way to individuate the fact a true statement records other than via that statement's truth-conditions. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 03.2) | |
| A reaction: Typical of philosophers of language. The concept of a fact is of something mind-independent; the concept of a truth is of something mind-dependent. They can't therefore be the same thing (by the contrapositive of the indiscernability of identicals!). |
| 19302 | If a chair could be made of slightly different material, that could lead to big changes [Hale] |
| Full Idea: How shall we prevent a sorites taking us to the conclusion that a chair might have originated in a completely disjoint lot of wood, or even in some other material altogether? | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 11.3.7) | |
| A reaction: This seems a good criticism of Kripke's implausible claim that his lectern is necessarily (or essentially) made of the piece of wood it is made of. Could his lectern have had a small piece of plastic inserted in it? |
| 19290 | Absolute necessities are necessarily necessary [Hale] |
| Full Idea: I argue that any absolute necessity is necessarily necessary. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 05.5.2) | |
| A reaction: This requires the principle of S4 modal logic, that necessity implies necessary necessity. He argues that S5 is the logical of absolute necessity. |
| 19286 | 'Absolute necessity' is when there is no restriction on the things which necessitate p [Hale] |
| Full Idea: The strength of the claim that p is 'absolutely necessary' derives from the fact that in its expression as a universally quantified counterfactual ('everything will necessitate p'), the quantifier ranges over all propositions whatever. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 04.1) | |
| A reaction: Other philosophers don't seem to use the term 'absolute necessity', but it seems a useful concept, in contrast to conditional or local necessities. You can't buy chocolate on the sun. |
| 19288 | Logical and metaphysical necessities differ in their vocabulary, and their underlying entities [Hale] |
| Full Idea: The difference between logical and metaphysical necessities lies, not in the range of possibilities for which they hold, but - at the linguistic level - in the kind of vocabulary essential to their expression, and the kinds of entities that explain them. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 04.5) | |
| A reaction: I don't think much of the idea that the difference is just linguistic, and I don't like the idea of 'entities' as grounding them. I see logical necessities as arising from natural deduction rules, and metaphysical ones coming from the nature of reality. |
| 19285 | Logical necessity is something which is true, no matter what else is the case [Hale] |
| Full Idea: We can identify the belief that the proposition that p is logically necessary, where p may be of any logical form, with the belief that, no matter what else was the case, it would be true that p. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 04.1) | |
| A reaction: I find this surprising. I take it that logical necessity must be the consequence of logic. That all squares have corners doesn't seem to be a matter of logic. But then he seems to expand logical necessity to include conceptual necessity. Why? |
| 19287 | Maybe each type of logic has its own necessity, gradually becoming broader [Hale] |
| Full Idea: We can distinguish between narrower and broader kinds of logical necessity. There are, for example, the logical necessities of propostional logic, those of first-order logic, and so on. Maybe they are necessities expressed using logical vocabulary. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 04.5) | |
| A reaction: Hale goes on to prefer a view that embraces conceptual necessities. I think in philosophy we should designate the necessities according to their sources. This might clarify a currently rather confused situation. First-order includes propositional logic. |
| 19282 | It seems that we cannot show that modal facts depend on non-modal facts [Hale] |
| Full Idea: I think we may conclude that there is no significant version of modal supervenience which both commands acceptance and implies that all modal facts depend asymmetrically on non-modal ones. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 03.4.3) | |
| A reaction: This is the conclusion of a sustained and careful discussion, recorded here for interest. I'm inclined to think that there are very few, if any, non-modal facts in the world, if those facts are accurately characterised. |
| 19276 | The big challenge for essentialist views of modality is things having necessary existence [Hale] |
| Full Idea: Whether the essentialist theory can account for all absolute necessities depends in part on whether the theory can explain the necessities of existence (of certain objects, properties and entities). | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Hale has a Fregean commitment to all sorts of abstract objects, and then finds difficulty in explaining them from his essentialist viewpoint. His book didn't convince me. I'm more of a nominalist, me, so I sleep better at nights. |
| 19293 | Essentialism doesn't explain necessity reductively; it explains all necessities in terms of a few basic natures [Hale] |
| Full Idea: The point of the essentialist theory is not to provide a reductive explanation of necessities. It is, rather, to locate a base class of necessities - those which directly reflect the natures of things - in terms of which the remainder may be explained. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 06.6) | |
| A reaction: My picture is of most of the necessities being directly explained by the natures of things, rather than a small core of natures generating all the derived ones. All the necessities of squares derive from the nature of the square. |
| 19294 | If necessity derives from essences, how do we explain the necessary existence of essences? [Hale] |
| Full Idea: If the essentialist theory of necessity is to be adequate, it must be able to explain how the existence of certain objects - such as the natural numbers - can itself be absolutely necessary. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 07.1) | |
| A reaction: Hale and his neo-logicist pals think that numbers are 'objects', and they necessarily exist, so he obviously has a problem. I don't see any alternative for essentialists to treating the existing (and possible) natures as brute facts. |
| 19279 | What are these worlds, that being true in all of them makes something necessary? [Hale] |
| Full Idea: We need an explanation of what worlds are that makes clear why being true at all of them should be necessary and sufficient for being necessary (and true at one of them suffices for being possible). | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 03.3.2) | |
| A reaction: Hale is introducing combinatorial accounts of worlds, as one possible answer to this. Hale observes that all the worlds might be identical to our world. It is always assumed that the worlds are hugely varied. But maybe worlds are constrained. |
| 19299 | Possible worlds make every proposition true or false, which endorses classical logic [Hale] |
| Full Idea: The standard conception of worlds incorporates the assumption of bivalence - every proposition is either true or false. But it is infelicitous to build into one's basic semantic machinery a principle endorsing classical logic against its rivals. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 10.3) | |
| A reaction: No wonder Dummett (with his intuitionist logic) immediately spurned possible worlds. This objection must be central to many recent thinkers who have begun to doubt possible worlds. I heard Kit Fine say 'always kick possible worlds where you can'. |
| 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). |
| 19300 | The molecules may explain the water, but they are not what 'water' means [Hale] |
| Full Idea: What it is to be (pure) water is to be explained in terms of being composed of H2O molecules, but this is not what the word 'water' means. | |
| From: Bob Hale (Necessary Beings [2013], 11.2) | |
| A reaction: Hale says when the real and verbal definitions match, we can know the essence a priori. If they come apart, presumably we need a posteriori research. Interesting. It is certainly dubious to say a stuff-word means its chemical composition. |
| 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. |