13 ideas
| 23531 | Philosophers should interpret the world, by expressing its possibilities [Berardi] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher's task is to interpret the world, that is, to capture its tendency and above all to enunciate the possibilities inscribed therein. …The politician's eye does not see the possible, being attracted instead by the probable. | |
| From: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi (The Second Coming [2019], How to) | |
| A reaction: An inspiring idea! He is rejecting Marx's aim of changing the world, which had 'catastrophic' results. But I love his view of interpretation as spotting tendencies and possibilities. This fits my preferred ontology of dispositions and powers. |
| 11211 | If a sound conclusion comes from two errors that cancel out, the path of the argument must matter [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: If a designated conclusion follows from the premisses, but the argument involves two howlers which cancel each other out, then the moral is that the path an argument takes from premisses to conclusion does matter to its logical evaluation. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], II) | |
| A reaction: The drift of this is that our view of logic should be a little closer to the reasoning of ordinary language, and we should rely a little less on purely formal accounts. |
| 11210 | Standardly 'and' and 'but' are held to have the same sense by having the same truth table [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: If 'and' and 'but' really are alike in sense, in what might that likeness consist? Some philosophers of classical logic will reply that they share a sense by virtue of sharing a truth table. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000]) | |
| A reaction: This is the standard view which Rumfitt sets out to challenge. |
| 11212 | The sense of a connective comes from primitively obvious rules of inference [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: A connective will possess the sense that it has by virtue of its competent users' finding certain rules of inference involving it to be primitively obvious. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], III) | |
| A reaction: Rumfitt cites Peacocke as endorsing this view, which characterises the logical connectives by their rules of usage rather than by their pure semantic value. |
| 23538 | Nothingness only exists in consciousness [Berardi] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is the only place where nothingness exists. | |
| From: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi (The Second Coming [2019], II 'Expanding') | |
| A reaction: Not sure about this, but an interesting remark from someone with a Hegelian background. We certainly have a concept of nothingness (a mental file of it, even). |
| 23532 | The delusion of free will brings a sense of guilt [Berardi] |
| Full Idea: A sense of guilt is linked to the delusion of free will. | |
| From: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi (The Second Coming [2019], How to) | |
| A reaction: I agree that free will is a delusion, but I'm not sure about this. Clearly if you think you are 'ultimately' responsible for all of your actions this will increase guilt, but belief in free will is compatible with various excuses for actions. |
| 11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
| Full Idea: The standard view is that affirming not-A is more complex than affirming the atomic sentence A itself, with the latter determining its sense. But we could learn 'not' directly, by learning at once how to either affirm A or reject A. | |
| From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], IV) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems fairly anti-Fregean in spirit, because it looks at the psychology of how we learn 'not' as a way of clarifying what we mean by it, rather than just looking at its logical behaviour (and thus giving it a secondary role). |
| 23537 | American white men trusted the philosophy of winning, and then discovered losing [Berardi] |
| Full Idea: American white men trusted the promises of neoliberal selfishness, they trusted the philosophy of winning, then discovered losing. | |
| From: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi (The Second Coming [2019], I 'Fascism') | |
| A reaction: The most pernicious terminology in the English-speaking world is the labelling of people as 'winners' and 'losers'. We celebrate the one winner, and ignore everyone else. Celebrity, excessive wealth, honourable titles. |
| 23536 | Community is now a nostalgic memory, which no longer exists [Berardi] |
| Full Idea: Community is only a nostalgic memory of a past condition of belonging that exists no longer. Regret, not a living experience. | |
| From: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi (The Second Coming [2019], I 'Fascism') | |
| A reaction: It is hard to disagree with this. Local heroes in my town make lovely efforts to improve the place (with flowers, sculptures) but most of us don't know who they are. Capitalist competition erodes community. |
| 23534 | Communism failed to unite western workers with the oppressed of the south [Berardi] |
| Full Idea: Communist internationalism was the only attempt to reconcile the workers of the West and the oppressed population of the Global South, and this attempt failed. | |
| From: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi (The Second Coming [2019], I 'Hundred') | |
| A reaction: It was unfortunate that communism was launched in Russia, which we now see (in 2023) as poisoned by imperialist ambitions, and quite unsuited to international idealism. The Chinese are notably active in Africa. |
| 23533 | The economy has replaced medieval theocracy at the centre of our society [Berardi] |
| Full Idea: The economy has progressively acquired the central place in the system of knowledge and research. Re-enacting the privilege of theocracy in the Middle Ages. | |
| From: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi (The Second Coming [2019], I 'Knowledge') | |
| A reaction: Illuminating. This is indeed how the economy is treated, centring on Gross National Product (no matter how distributed), and economic league tables. Is it even a quasi-religion? |
| 23535 | Western workers turn to nationalism, to avert the effects of globalisation [Berardi] |
| Full Idea: Western workers are following nationalist agendas in order to avert the effects of globalization, and resorting to nationalist and racist forms of identification. | |
| From: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi (The Second Coming [2019], I 'Hundred') | |
| A reaction: By 'globalisation' must be meant the impersonal work and exploitation that results from huge ruthless anonymous companies. People barely know who they are working for, so it can't give them an identity. |
| 17009 | I won't object if someone shows that gravity consistently arises from the action of matter [Newton] |
| Full Idea: If someone explains gravity along with all its laws by the action of some subtle matter, and shows that the motion of the planets and comets will not be disturbed by this matter, I shall be far from objecting. | |
| From: Isaac Newton (Letters to Leibniz 1 [1693], 1693.10.16) | |
| A reaction: Important if you think that Newton is the hero of the descriptive regularity theory of laws. Newton probably thought laws came from God, but he wouldn't object to Leibniz's view, that God planted the laws within the matter. |