Some people regard this as the deepest of philosophical questions. Some even regard it as the heart of metaphysics. What is reality? or ... what does it mean to be?
In wrestling with this, philosophers and wanna-bes alike have produced gnomic answers. What is it to be?
To be is to be perceived. That's a good one, George.
Existence is identity. Noted, Ayn. But Prince Hamlet has an "identity" of sorts. He is a very specific fictional character. Identity, then, is not always existence.
Reality is the fulfillment of purpose, complete or incomplete. said Josiah Royce.
Being never was, and never will be, because it is completely whole in the now. Classic -- one of the fragments of Parmenides.
And so forth.
The pragmatic answer to "what is reality," though, is to un-ask the question. For any effort to give a verbal answer to the question will only amount to substituting for the word "reality" or the word "existence" some other word or collection of words. And how will that be an advance, unless there is some confusion in the first word that requires such clarification?
There is no confusion as to what is reality, except the artificial confusion caused by philosophic niggling. Why not? because reality is a primary notion. It is the turtle at the bottom of whatever tower of turtles you want to postulate. It doesn't rest on any other turtle further down so efforts to conjure one up, by "defining" reality, are themselves necessarily unreal.
If you are going to argue over what is reality you may as well argue over what is Nothing, and move thence to the classic dispute over whether it is a verb, whether nothing noths and nihil annihilates.
Beyond the question of "what is reality" there is the far more valuable question, "what is real?" What kinds of things do we acknowledge as the furniture of the world and what are their relations to one another?
Showing posts with label George Berkeley. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Berkeley. Show all posts
31 March 2011
03 January 2010
Top 20 Philosophers???
The history of philosophy is about the long-haul, not this month or next week, so it really doesn't matter that I'm a few months late in learning that in the spring, blogger Brian Leiter has polled his readers and listed what they believed to be the top 20 philosophers of all time.
Follow that link, and I expect many will agree with me that that is an extraordinary list. Blaise Pascal isn't there. Neither is George Berkeley. Neither is William James! The list is entirely western: No Lao-Tzu, no Buddha. And in general it seems to value the more abstract realms of philosophy (metaphysics and epistemology) over those with a more practical bent (political, social, aesthetic).
The middle three on this list -- Frege, Aquinas, and Hegel at positions 9 - 11 -- are all vastly overrated thereby.
At any rate, the test produced an intriguing series of comments, including one who apparently thinks of Socrates as a fictional character invented by Plato. He said that including them both on the list is like including both Nietzsche and Zarathustra. Cute, though I can't really buy it. Like Leiter himself, I find the first six names reasonable enough.
Still, anyone working up such a list, or even voting and thereby contributing to a list in the collectivist methodology used here, ought to confront the basic ambiguity: vote for the twenty who seem to you most nearly right? or for the twenty who seem of most world-historical significance? or some combination of the two standards?
[Edited to correct some misstatements regarding the list.]
Follow that link, and I expect many will agree with me that that is an extraordinary list. Blaise Pascal isn't there. Neither is George Berkeley. Neither is William James! The list is entirely western: No Lao-Tzu, no Buddha. And in general it seems to value the more abstract realms of philosophy (metaphysics and epistemology) over those with a more practical bent (political, social, aesthetic).
The middle three on this list -- Frege, Aquinas, and Hegel at positions 9 - 11 -- are all vastly overrated thereby.
At any rate, the test produced an intriguing series of comments, including one who apparently thinks of Socrates as a fictional character invented by Plato. He said that including them both on the list is like including both Nietzsche and Zarathustra. Cute, though I can't really buy it. Like Leiter himself, I find the first six names reasonable enough.
Still, anyone working up such a list, or even voting and thereby contributing to a list in the collectivist methodology used here, ought to confront the basic ambiguity: vote for the twenty who seem to you most nearly right? or for the twenty who seem of most world-historical significance? or some combination of the two standards?
[Edited to correct some misstatements regarding the list.]
20 June 2007
Dublin
Dublin is not a city of skyscrapers. This isn't a matter of spontaneous equilibrium, either. The city's Site Planning Committee is vigilant on the point. It's a city of four or five story buildings for long stretches.
So when something does stand out of this low-level pattern, the site line extends a long distance. This is true of the two fine Gothic Cathedrals -- St. Patrick's and Christ's Church -- it is true of two beery corporate buildings -- Heineken's and Guinness -- it is true of "the spire," a 120 meter high needle-shaped hunk of concrete in the center of the shopping district.
Nobody to whom I spoke quite knew what, if anything, the spire is supposed to symbolize. A cabbie sardonically suggested that, given the drug activity on O'Connell Street at nights, it might symbolize a syringe. More serious suggestions made it out to be a matter of civic pride. "We're an important town and we can have a high needle if we want to."
The aesthetics of the needle didn't appeal to me. But there is much in Dublin to delight the eye. The two cathedrals I've mentioned above are examples. The eighteenth century neo-classical architecture of Trinity College is another.
On my tour through Trinity my group had as a leader a first year student of economics there who knew that he was attending a fine old college with a distinguished history but seemed vague on the particulars. He was telling us that a certain building -- which once housed a printing press -- is ("now that the college doesn't print its own books anymore") devoted to music and the recording arts. Another student, who just happened to be walking by, said, "Excuse me, that's electrical engineering." Our guide immediately accepted the correction and apologized.
The Trinity Library is known as "Berkeley Library," after the subjectivist philosopher George Berkeley, who was a fellow here early in the college's history. Our guide, of course, pronounced his name in the original old-world way, Barkley. (It has been Americanized in the name of the city in California and its university, though they too owe their names to the philosopher.)
Our guide didn't know the famous limerick illustrating Berkeley's philosophy with a tree in the quad, even though he had just led us through that very quad and any number of trees. Not to worry, reader, I informed him of the limerick.
As his last duty, our guide led us to a building where Trinity keeps some of its medieval treasures under glass. There I saw half of the Book of Kells. The book appears to have been chopped into four parts in the 1950s, the better to display it. Two of the quarters were put in one building, two in another. In each of the displays, one of the portions of the book is open to a page chiefly of text, the other is open to a page dominated by an illustration/illumination. Both are convincing demonstrations of early-medieval Celtic piety -- the force that pulled the west of Europe through the darkest of the dark ages.
So when something does stand out of this low-level pattern, the site line extends a long distance. This is true of the two fine Gothic Cathedrals -- St. Patrick's and Christ's Church -- it is true of two beery corporate buildings -- Heineken's and Guinness -- it is true of "the spire," a 120 meter high needle-shaped hunk of concrete in the center of the shopping district.
Nobody to whom I spoke quite knew what, if anything, the spire is supposed to symbolize. A cabbie sardonically suggested that, given the drug activity on O'Connell Street at nights, it might symbolize a syringe. More serious suggestions made it out to be a matter of civic pride. "We're an important town and we can have a high needle if we want to."
The aesthetics of the needle didn't appeal to me. But there is much in Dublin to delight the eye. The two cathedrals I've mentioned above are examples. The eighteenth century neo-classical architecture of Trinity College is another.
On my tour through Trinity my group had as a leader a first year student of economics there who knew that he was attending a fine old college with a distinguished history but seemed vague on the particulars. He was telling us that a certain building -- which once housed a printing press -- is ("now that the college doesn't print its own books anymore") devoted to music and the recording arts. Another student, who just happened to be walking by, said, "Excuse me, that's electrical engineering." Our guide immediately accepted the correction and apologized.
The Trinity Library is known as "Berkeley Library," after the subjectivist philosopher George Berkeley, who was a fellow here early in the college's history. Our guide, of course, pronounced his name in the original old-world way, Barkley. (It has been Americanized in the name of the city in California and its university, though they too owe their names to the philosopher.)
Our guide didn't know the famous limerick illustrating Berkeley's philosophy with a tree in the quad, even though he had just led us through that very quad and any number of trees. Not to worry, reader, I informed him of the limerick.
As his last duty, our guide led us to a building where Trinity keeps some of its medieval treasures under glass. There I saw half of the Book of Kells. The book appears to have been chopped into four parts in the 1950s, the better to display it. Two of the quarters were put in one building, two in another. In each of the displays, one of the portions of the book is open to a page chiefly of text, the other is open to a page dominated by an illustration/illumination. Both are convincing demonstrations of early-medieval Celtic piety -- the force that pulled the west of Europe through the darkest of the dark ages.
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