Reading Notes: September 27th, 2022

“The truth of the matter is that the Cartesian subjectivism and egocentricity have been outdated since before the middle of the nineteenth century; but many contemporary philosophers are too short-sighted to notice it. They hold up further advance by reverting to obsolete metaphysical dogmas which lead to a dead end, and then declare that further progress is irremediably blocked. Others, feeling the discomfort of this situation, fall upon the obsolete doctrines with a welter of destructive criticism, ignorant or neglectful of advances already made beyond them.” (Harris, Thought and Action, 460-461) 

“[The Master Argument] as it appears in Three Dialogues is brief and has seemed to many quite weak. It trades initially on an analogy: just as it seems contradictory to say you saw an unseen tree, so it is contradictory to suppose you can conceive an unconceived tree. Such an analogy seems to embody a confusion. Of course, the idea I am presently conceiving exists in my mind and that idea can’t exist out of my mind, but surely, what my idea is supposed to be of, a tree existing without the mind, is something it is perfectly possible to conceive? This objection however, misses the point of Berkeley’s thought experiment. When Hylas capitulates, this is what he says: “I may indeed conceive in my own thoughts the idea of a tree, or a house, or a mountain, but that is all. And this is far from proving that I can conceive them existing out of the minds of all spirits”. When Hylas supposed his ideas required a support on which they depend and from which they resulted, he was supposing that that support existed independently of all minds. Conceiving a tree, which might involve conceiving rough brown bark, green flexible leaves, or whatever, while merely omitting the presence of a mind, is just putting together the ideas minds have when they perceive trees. It is not conceiving a tree as it would exist out of all minds. It is not the idea of a support for a set of tree ideas as that support exists without any mind at all. “Without the mind” doesn’t mean “in the absence of some mind or other” but as a tree would exist if no minds existed. That is what is inconceivable….So Hylas’s attempts to support his belief that to exist is one thing and to be perceived is another have all failed. Berkeley has argued that no idea I might have can contain or point towards an absolute, mind independent “real” existence.” (Atherton, Berkeley, 138-139) 

“This is a time of philosophies which lend themselves, or at least offer themselves, with great facility to emotional consequences. A time of what a pragmatist friend of mine has called lyric philosophies. James’s philosophical writings constitute an emotional attitude more than a body of dogma; the neo-realistic movement appears to the uninitiated, at least, a spontaneous outburst of feeling, a song without words; and we observe Mr. Bertrand Russell directing with passionate enthusiasm his unearthly ballet of bloodless alphabets. Professor Bosanquet is the prophet who has put off his shoes and talks with the Absolute in a burning bush; to Professor Royce we owe the resuscitation of Christianity by the method of last aid to the dead. And the landscape is decorated with Bergsonians in various degrees of recovery from intellect.” (Eliot, The Relationship between Politics and Metaphysics, 90) 

“There is another order of explanation than those mentioned–that of the explanation of illusion, either in the way of practical hallucination or in a metaphysical sense. This is a problem of cognition rather than of scientific method, but the principle involved is the same. In no case and in no theory of knowledge is illusion ever ultimately explained, for the explanation implies a paradox. You must confine yourself to a limited point of view, according to which, in passing from illusion to reality, the illusion disappears, and yet remains in the status of an unreal object—a class of objects. I may remark in passing, which has proved intractable to so-called “scientific” Gegenstandsforschungen [“studies of objects”], for the reason that it involves the maintenance in consciousness of two points of view at the same time. ” (Eliot, Description and Explanation, 124-125)