Sublime
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freedom of thought and correctness of thought,
Gary Gutting • What Philosophy Can Do
ALLOW ME to recapitulate. The Stoics thought they could prove that Stoicism was the one correct philosophy of life, and in their proof, they assumed that Zeus exists and created us for a certain purpose. I think it is possible, though, for someone to reject the Stoic proof of Stoicism without rejecting Stoicism itself. In particular, someone who th
... See moreWilliam B. Irvine • A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
Hume had proved that the law of causality is not analytic, and had inferred that we could not be certain of its truth. Kant accepted the view that it is synthetic, but nevertheless maintained that it is known a priori. He maintained that arithmetic and geometry are synthetic, but are likewise a priori. He was thus led to formulate his problem in th
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
One is that "[humans are..] the measure of all things, of things that are that they are, of things that are not that they are not" which is commonly interpreted as affirming philosophical relativism, but it can also be interpreted as claiming that knowledge is only relevant to humankind, that moral rightness and other forms of knowle
... See moreMOST modern men take it for granted that empirical knowledge is dependent upon, or derived from, perception. There is, however, in Plato and among philosophers of certain other schools, a very different doctrine, to the effect that there is nothing worthy to be called “knowledge” to be derived from the senses, and that the only real knowledge has t
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
Whatever was not problematical and suspected about this young man – for example, a certain showiness as to foreign ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and forgotten by his elders – was positively unwelcome to a physician whose standing had been fixed thirty years before by a treatise on Meningitis, of which at least one copy
... See moreGeorge Eliot • Middlemarch
Philosophy
Prabjyot Sudan • 17 cards
Some of Locke’s opinions are so odd that I cannot see how to make them sound sensible. He says that a man must not have so many plums that they are bound to go bad before he and his family can eat them; but he may have as much gold and as many diamonds as he can lawfully get, because gold and diamonds do not go bad. It does not occur to him that th
... See moreBertrand Russell • History of Western Philosophy
In Leibniz, if the principle is completely true and the deductions are entirely valid, all is well; but the structure is unstable, and the slightest flaw anywhere brings it down in ruins. In Locke or Hume, on the contrary, the base of the pyramid is on the solid ground of observed fact, and the pyramid tapers upward, not downward; consequently the
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