Reading Notes: April 20th, 2022

“It is impossible to describe the immediate experience which every person has of himself, and by means of which he knows that he exists, or that a given content is undergoing changes….As far as our experience extends, so far our ego extends. But whence experience originates, cannot be explained, because it is the original fact to which all explanations revert; it is the given occurrence, the phenomenon, which must be assumed….This something which I experience is called the content of my ego; it is experienced. The content and the ego are not to be separated; the one without the other is unthinkable. In so far as the content is experienced as a unit, we have an ego, a mind, a thing which does the experiencing; and in so far as all unity presupposes multiplicity, which is one by virtue of that unity, we have a content, a thing experienced.” (Lasswitz, Nature and the Individual Mind, 406) 

“Lord Kelvin defines matter as the rotating parts of an inert perfect fluid, which fills all space, but which is, when not rotating, absolutely unperceived by our senses….Boskovitch, like Leibnitz, regarded atoms as mere centres of force, the result of whose coexistence is that no two atomic centres can approach each other within a certain distance. This approaches to energism, but Boskovitch’s atoms have position in space, are capable of motion, in a continuous path, and possess a certain mass, so that a certain amount of force is required to produce a change of motion. The atom is endowed with a potential force, and two atoms will repel or attract each other, with a force depending on their distance apart, and, for  distances greater than about one-thousandth of an inch, this attraction varies inversely as the square of the distance, while the law of repulsive force is not known. The ultimate force is repulsion which increases without limit, as the distance increases without limit, so that no two atoms can ever coincide. All action between bodies is action at a distance. No such thing as contact between bodies occurs in nature.” (Herrick, The Passing of Scientific Materialism, 49-52) 

“Indeed, if matter be a conception at all, like the conception of a circle, it ought to be a clear and definite idea, whereas the reader who will honestly ask himself what he conceives by matter he will find that an answer is impossible, or that in attempting one he is sinking deeper and deeper into the metaphysical quagmire. Proceeding further, we naturally turn to the little work termed Matter and Motion, by Clerk-Maxwell, one of the greatest British physicists of our generation. This is what he writes of matter:—“We are acquainted with matter only as that which may have energy communicated to it from other matter, and which may in its turn communicate energy to other matter.” Now this appears something definite; the only way in which we can understand matter is through the energy which it transfers. What, then, is energy? Here is Clerk-Maxwell’s answer:—“Energy, on the other hand, we know only as that which in all natural phenomena is continually passing from one portion of matter to another.” All our hopes are shattered! The only way to understand energy is through matter. Matter has been defined in terms of energy, and energy again in terms of matter.” (Pearson, The Grammar of Science, 244-245)

“We are acquainted with matter only as that which may have energy communicated to it from other matter. Energy, on the other hand, we know only as that which in all natural phenomena is continually passing from one portion of matter to another.” (Maxwell, Matter and Motion, 89) 

“Physicists might suggest that the essence of matter is mass, and mass is something additional to such primary qualities as extension and solidity. To be a material object, then, is just to have some mass or other. I see three main problems. First, this does not tell us what constitutes matter, only how much of whatever that is an object contains. Second, mass is usually understood in terms of inertia—the amount of force it would take to accelerate a body from a resting position or a state of uniform motion—and this is an operationalist definition. In effect, mass is interpreted as a dispositional concept, captured by suitable counterfactual conditionals; but we seek something intrinsic and grounding—in virtue of what does an object have a certain dispositionally defined mass? The quantity of matter it contain, surely—but then what is that? To be sure, pieces of matter have mass (typically: see shortly), but having mass is not what matter is—mass is a merely consequential property of matter. Third, we are told that some particles, notably neutrinos, have zero mass, while presumably being material (they occupy space and travel through it). The concept of zero-mass matter (defined in terms of inertia) does not seem contradictory, anymore than infinite-mass matter does….To occupy space is not the same thing as needing some degree of force to be accelerated. A related idea equates matter with energy. This can be either a straightforward identity or a claim of derivation. Suppose we say that matter just is energy: does that answer our question? Only if we know what energy is. We had better not define it operationally, as is usually done, but then we are left without any account of what constitutes it. Energy is just as enigmatic as matter, being known only structurally.” (McGinn, Basic Structures of Reality: Essays in Meta-Physics, 63-64) 

“Knowledge involves the ideas (1) of Truth and (2) of Meaning. (i) How does the analysis of knowledge as a systematic function, or system of functions, explain that relation in which truth appears to consist, between the human intelligence on the one hand and fact or reality on the other….If the object-matter of reality lay genuinely outside the system of thought, not only our analysis, but thought itself, would be unable to lay hold of reality. For logic, at all events, it is a postulate that “the truth is the whole”. The forms of thought have the relation which is their truth in their power to constitute a totality; which power, as referred to the individual mind, is its power to understand a totality. The work of intellectually constituting that totality which we call the real world is the work of knowledge. The work of analyzing the process of this constitution or determination is the work of logic, which might be described as the self-consciousness of knowledge, or the reflection of knowledge upon itself….The relation of logic to truth consists in examining the characteristics by which the various phases of that one intellectual function are fitted for their place in the intellectual totality which constitutes knowledge. The truth, the fact, the reality, may be considered, in relation to the human intelligence, as the content of a single persistent and all-embracing judgment, by which every individual intelligence affirms the ideas that form its knowledge to be true of the world which is brought home to it as real by sense-perception. The real world for every individual is thus emphatically his world; an extension and determination of his present perception, which perception is to him not indeed reality as such, but his point of contact with reality as such….Thus the world of truth and the world of meaning are not really distinct, and the process which logic investigates is the single process and individual self-determination of the whole which is the truth or reality.” (Bosanquet, Logic: Or the Morphology of Knowledge, Vol. I, 2-6)