11 Matching Annotations
  1. Jan 2024
    1. read [[Dan Allosso]] in Actual Books

      Sometimes a physical copy of a book gives one information not contained in digital scans. Allosso provides the example of Charles Knowlton's book The Fruits of Philosophy which touched on abortion and was published as a tiny hand-held book which would have made it easy to pass from person to person more discretely for its time period.

  2. Apr 2023
    1. The Incoherence also marked a turning point in Islamic philosophy in its vehement rejections of Aristotle and Plato.

      The Incoherence of the Philosophers by al-Ghazali marks a dramatic turn in Islamic philosophy away from Aristotle and Plato which had been followed by previous Arab philosophers like Avicenna and al-Farabi.

    2. the Tahāfut al-Falāsifa ("Incoherence of the Philosophers") is a landmark in the history of philosophy, as it advances the critique of Aristotelian science developed later in 14th-century Europe.[35]
  3. Oct 2022
  4. Jul 2022
    1. Mechanical and vitalist systems existed concurrently, and although it might seem easy to distinguish them,when we come to look at most specific characters and their thought, the distinctions appear blurred

      Mechanical philosophy and vitalism were popular and co-existed on a non-mutually exclusive spectrum in the seventeenth century.

      Mechanical philosophy is a philosophy of nature which arose broadly in the 17th century and sought to explain all natural phenomenon in terms of matter and motion without relying on "action at a distance" or the idea of a cause and effect that occurred without any physical contact or direct motivation.

      René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Marin Mersenne all held mechanistic viewpoints.

      See also: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_philosophy

      Link to: - spooky action at a distance (quantum mechanics)

  5. Feb 2021
    1. Foucault probably offers the most helpful theoretical approach. His “archaeology of knowledge” suggests a way to study texts as sites that bear the marks of epistemological activity, and it has the advantage of doing justice to the social dimension of thought.

  6. Oct 2020
    1. Scholars like Annette Gordon-Reed and Woody Holton have given us a deeper understanding of the ways in which leaders like Thomas Jefferson committed to new ideas of freedom even as they continued to be deeply committed to slavery.

      I've not seen any research that relates the Renaissance ideas of the Great Chain of Being moving into this new era of supposed freedom. In some sense I'm seeing the richest elite whites trying to maintain their own place in a larger hierarchy rather than stronger beliefs in equality and hard work.

  7. Jan 2019
    1. UTILITARIANISM

      Via Stanford Encyclopedia - History of Utilitarianism: "Though there are many varieties of the view discussed, utilitarianism is generally held to be the view that the morally right action is the action that produces the most good. There are many ways to spell out this general claim. One thing to note is that the theory is a form of consequentialism: the right action is understood entirely in terms of consequences produced. What distinguishes utilitarianism from egoism has to do with the scope of the relevant consequences. On the utilitarian view one ought to maximize the overall good — that is, consider the good of others as well as one's own good."

  8. Oct 2016
    1. Just as the professionalization of philosophy--and the endless need for doctoral students to find new topics--has brought us a large volume of scholarship on obscure figures of dubious philosophical merit associated with, e.g., 19th-century German Idealism and Neo-Kantianism, so too it is hard to imagine that there won't be for a long time scholarship on the central figures of 20th-century analytical philosophy, like Russell, Carnap, Quine, and Kripke.
    2. Near the end of the twentieth century, very few philosophers of the nineteenth are much read: Peirce and Frege, Mill, Bentham, and Sidgwick, Hegel, Nietzsche, and perhaps Schopenhauer.
    3. around mid-20th-century, the Harvard Philosophy Department, then clearly the dominant department in the U.S., included on its faculty (not all at the same time) a young W.V.O. Quine, a much older C.I. Lewis, as well as Donald Williams, Ralph Barton Perry, John Wild, William Ernest Hocking, Raphael Demos. Just a half-century later, almost all these (at the time) eminent and widely respected figures are largely forgotten.