11 ideas
| 15570 | Phenomenology is the science of essences - necessary universal structures for art, representation etc. [Husserl, by Polt] |
| Full Idea: For Husserl, phenomenology must seek the essential aspects of phenomena - necessary, universal structures, such as the essence of art or the essence of representation. He sought a science of these essences. | |
| From: report of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations [1900]) by Richard Polt - Heidegger: an introduction 2 'Dilthey' |
| 7614 | Bracketing subtracts entailments about external reality from beliefs [Husserl, by Putnam] |
| Full Idea: In effect, the device of bracketing subtracts entailments from the ordinary belief locution (the entailments that refer to what is external to the thinker's mind). | |
| From: report of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations [1900]) by Hilary Putnam - Reason, Truth and History Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: This seems to leave phenomenology as pure introspection, or as a phenomenalist description of sense-data. It is also a refusal to explain anything. That sounds quite appealing, like Keats's 'negative capability'. |
| 6893 | Phenomenology aims to describe experience directly, rather than by its origins or causes [Husserl, by Mautner] |
| Full Idea: Phenomenology, in Husserl, is an attempt to describe our experience directly, as it is, separately from its origins and development, independently of the causal explanations that historians, sociologists or psychologists might give. | |
| From: report of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations [1900]) by Thomas Mautner - Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy p.421 | |
| A reaction: In this simple definition the concept sounds very like the modern popular use of the word 'deconstruction', though that is applied more commonly to cultural artifacts than to actual sense experience. |
| 18914 | Davidson controversially proposed to quantify over events [Davidson, by Engelbretsen] |
| Full Idea: An alternative, and still controversial, extension of first-order logic is due to Donald Davidson, who allows for quantification over events. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969]) by George Engelbretsen - Trees, Terms and Truth 3 | |
| A reaction: I'm suddenly thinking this is quite an attractive proposal. We need to quantify over facts, or states of affairs, or events, or some such thing, to talk about the world properly. Objects, predicates and sets/parts is too sparse. I like facts. |
| 9843 | You can't identify events by causes and effects, as the event needs to be known first [Dummett on Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Davidson's criterion for the identity of events is a mistake, because we cannot know the causes and effects of an event until we know what that event comprises. | |
| From: comment on Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.10 | |
| A reaction: How many attempts by analytical philosophers to give necessary and sufficient conditions for things seem to founder in this way. Their predecessor is at the end of 'Theaetetus'; you have to know what the sun is before you can define it. |
| 14602 | Events can only be individuated causally [Davidson, by Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: Davidson claims that events can only be individuated causally. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969], 3) by Jonathan Schaffer - Causation and Laws of Nature 3 | |
| A reaction: Schaffer rejects this in favour of individuating events by their spatiotemporal locations and intrinsic natures (which seem to be property instantiations, a la Kim). Schaffer was a pupil of David Lewis. |
| 14004 | We need events for action statements, causal statements, explanation, mind-and-body, and adverbs [Davidson, by Bourne] |
| Full Idea: Davidson claims that we require the existence of events in order to make sense of a) action statements, b) causal statements, c) explanation, d) the mind-body problem, and e) the logic of adverbial modification. | |
| From: report of Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969], Intro IIb) by Craig Bourne - A Future for Presentism | |
| A reaction: Events are a nice shorthand, but I don't like them in a serious ontology. Prior says there objects and what happens to them; Kim reduces events to other things. Processes are more clearly individuated than events. |
| 8278 | The claim that events are individuated by their causal relations to other events is circular [Lowe on Davidson] |
| Full Idea: Davidson has urged that events are individuated by the causal relations which they bear to one another, in accordance with the principle that events are identical just in case they have the same causes and effects. But the principle is viciously circular. | |
| From: comment on Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969]) by E.J. Lowe - The Possibility of Metaphysics 7.4 | |
| A reaction: You wouldn't want to identify a person just by their relationships, even though those will certainly be unique. Generally it is what I am (right now) naming as the Functional Fallacy: believing that specifying the function of x explains x. |
| 21216 | Husserl says we have intellectual intuitions (of categories), as well as of the senses [Husserl, by Velarde-Mayol] |
| Full Idea: The novelty of Husserl is to describe that we have intellectual intuitions, intuitions of categories as we have intuitions of sense objects. | |
| From: report of Edmund Husserl (Logical Investigations [1900], II.VI.24) by Victor Velarde-Mayol - On Husserl 2.4.4 | |
| A reaction: This is 'intuitions' in Kant's sense, of something like direct apprehensions. This idea is an axiom of phenomenology, because all mental life must be bracketed, and not just the sense experience part. |
| 13304 | Learned men gain more in one day than others do in a lifetime [Posidonius] |
| Full Idea: In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes. | |
| From: Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]), quoted by Seneca the Younger - Letters from a Stoic 078 | |
| A reaction: These remarks endorsing the infinite superiority of the educated to the uneducated seem to have been popular in late antiquity. It tends to be the religions which discourage great learning, especially in their emphasis on a single book. |
| 20820 | Time is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed [Posidonius, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: Posidonius defined time thus: it is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed and slowness. | |
| From: report of Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.08.42 | |
| A reaction: Hm. Can we define motion or speed without alluding to time? Looks like we have to define them as a conjoined pair, which means we cannot fully understand either of them. |