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To ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might result from the truth of that conception—and the sum of these consequences constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

submitted 16 hours ago • 0 comments

Philosophy, in spite of all its tiresome features, is not a luxury but a necessity, because we always have to use it when things get difficult. That is why I have spent such a lot of my life on it. -- Mary Midgley

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

It appears, then, that the rule for attaining the third grade of clearness of apprehension is as follows: Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is /1

submitted 23 hours ago • 1 comment

Such a guiding principle with regard to copper would be much safer than with regard to many other substances — brass, for example.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

Suppose, for example, that we observe that a rotating disk of copper quickly comes to rest when placed between the poles of a magnet, and we infer that this will happen with every disk of copper. The guiding principle is, that what is true of one piece of copper is true of another.

submitted 1 day ago • 0 comments

It is true that we do generally reason correctly by nature. But that is an accident; the true conclusion would remain true if we had no impulse to accept it; and the false one would remain false, though we could not resist the tendency to believe in it.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

It is not in the least the question whether, when the premisses are accepted by the mind, we feel an impulse to accept the conclusion also.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

A being the facts stated in the premisses and B being that concluded, the question is, whether these facts are really so related that if A were B would generally be. If so, the inference is valid; if not, not.

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Every sort of permutation and combination is possible in human nature; and if I now proceed to define more fully what I have in mind when I speak of rationalists and empiricists, by adding to each of those titles some secondary qualifying characteristics, that is to a certain extent arbitrary.

submitted 2 days ago • 0 comments

The scientists, not the philosophers, now address most effectively the great questions of existence, the mind, and the meaning of the human condition. -- Edward O. Wilson

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Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. -- John Dewey

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Mr. Darwin proposed to apply the statistical method to biology. The same thing has been done in a widely different branch of science, the theory of gases.

submitted 3 days ago • 0 comments

The Darwinian controversy is, in large part, a question of logic.

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One may say 'the eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility'. -- Einstein

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Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily. -- William of Occam

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🏆 We are pleased to announce the 2025 Lakatos Award winner Mazviita Chirimuuta, who receives the award for her book “The Brain Abstracted: Simplification in the History and Philosophy of Neuroscience” Congratulations! 👏 👉More about the award: www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/b...

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Of all kinds of experience, the best, he [Roger Bacon] thought, was interior illumination, which teaches many things about Nature which the external senses could never discover, such as the transubstantiation of bread.

submitted 4 days ago • 0 comments

Accordingly, as soon as a boy was perfect in the syllogistic procedure, his intellectual kit of tools was held to be complete.

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Its fundamental principle, according to them, was, that all knowledge rests either on authority or reason; but that whatever is deduced by reason depends ultimately on a premiss derived from authority.

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The medieval schoolman, following the Romans, made logic the earliest of a boy's studies after grammar, as being very easy. So it was as they understood it.

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We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences, the last of all our faculties; for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficult art. The history of its practice would make a grand subject for a book.

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Let us, at any rate, get all the good from the vital element in which we are all at one that it can yield: and the good that it can yield is simply all that is anyway possible, and richer than is easily conceivable. Let us endeavor, then, with all our might /1

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

I'm flabbergasted to find no discussion of what is arguably one of Rorty's most powerful & revealing admissions: "I have been trying to show how Darwinism, utilitarianism and pragmatism conspired to exalt plurality over unity." The exaltation of pluralism over unity. WOW! #Rorty #Pluralism

submitted 4 days ago • 1 comment

Yet it is absurd to say that religion is a mere belief. You might as well call society a belief, or politics belief, or civilisation a belief. Religion is a life, and can be identified with a belief only provided that belief be a living belief,—a thing to be lived rather than said or thought.

submitted 5 days ago • 0 comments

Men color-blind have more than once learnedly discussed the laws of color-sensation, and have made interesting deductions from those laws. But when it comes to positive knowledge, such knowledge as a lawyer has of the practice of the courts, that can only rest on long experience, direct or indirect.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

It is easy to chop logic about matters of which you have no experience whatever.

submitted 6 days ago • 0 comments

Yet a purpose essentially involves growth, and so cannot be attributed to God. Still it will, according to the hypothesis, be less false to speak so than to represent God as purposeless.

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Though the mere catalogue of known carbon-compounds alone would fill an unwieldy volume, and perhaps, if the truth were known, the number of amido-acids alone is greater, yet it is unlikely that there are in all more than about 600 elements, /1

submitted 7 days ago • 1 comment

The matter of Nature is in every star of the same elementary kinds, and (except for variations of circumstance) what is more wonderful still, throughout the whole visible universe, about the same proportions of the different chemical elements prevail.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

We find it extraordinarily convenient to express a certain contrast in our various ways of taking the universe, by talking of the 'empiricist' and of the 'rationalist' temper. These terms make the contrast more simple and massive than are usually those of whom the terms are predicated.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

It is here that one finds those questions that at first seem to offer no handle for reason's clutch, but which readily yield to logical analysis.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

Psychological speculations will naturally lead on to musings upon metaphysical problems proper, good exercise for a mind with a turn for exact thought.

submitted 7 days ago • 0 comments

If one's observations and reflections are allowed to specialise themselves too much, the Play will be converted into scientific study; and that cannot be pursued in odd half-hours.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

It begins passively enough with drinking in the impression of some nook in one of the three Universes. But impression soon passes into attentive observation, observation into musing, musing into a lively give-and-take of communion between self and self.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

The Center for Dewey Studies at SIU is pleased to announce that we have updated and relaunched the directory of Dewey Centers around the world. Many of these Centers were initially opened with the cooperation of the Center for Dewey Studies at SIU and the John Dewey Foundation,/🧵1 of 2

submitted 8 days ago • 1 comment

Ahem.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

An "Argument" is any process of thought reasonably tending to produce a definite belief. An "Argumentation" is an Argument proceeding upon definitely formulated premisses.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Terribly, terribly sad to hear that Helen de Cruz has died. One of the kindest and most luminous people in philosophy

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Me: just have to write a few hundred words consistently every day. Then I'll be able to finish this article. Also me: jokes on you, it'll be a few hundred words of rambling garbage that are largely unusable

submitted 9 days ago • 6 comments

The value of a whole must not be assumed to be the same as the sum of the value of its parts. -- G.E. Moore

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Cut the pie any way you like, 'meanings' just ain't in the head! -- Hilary Putnam

submitted 10 days ago • 0 comments

But in this monadism the nakedness of the thing in itself is laid bare, and it plainly appears that nothing exists but monads and their harmonizing dreams. A single monad, we are told, transcends the limits of possible experience, although some finite collection of them is cognizable.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

Kant himself allows us to surmise that there is some unintelligible root from which each special appearance springs, although all that makes them intelligible is our own embroidery.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

An important departure from Leibniz is the rejection of all actual infinite multitude (and hence, of all continuity) as self-contradictory. Kantian nominalism is carried to an extreme, every conception of intellectual value (space, time, etc.) being regarded as untrue of substances.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

In place of Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles, that things other than one another must differ in some qualities, Scotus’s doctrine of hecceity (substantially that of Kant) is adopted-that individual existence is no general character, but is an irrational act.

submitted 8 days ago • 0 comments

But in this monadism the nakedness of the thing in itself is laid bare, and it plainly appears that nothing exists but monads and their harmonizing dreams. A single monad, we are told, transcends the limits of possible experience, although some finite collection of them is cognizable.

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments

Kant himself allows us to surmise that there is some unintelligible root from which each special appearance springs, although all that makes them intelligible is our own embroidery.

submitted 9 days ago • 0 comments