Reading Notes: March 17th, 2023

“With such barren forms of thought, that are always in a world beyond, Philosophy has nothing to do. Its object is always something concrete, and in the highest sense present.” (Hegel, Logic, 150) 

“Never will the stock of human knowledge be increased by meditating & debating on what has been said by others: it is like pouring liquor from one vessel into another. Only the contemplation of things themselves may enrich our store, & this alone is the vivid fountain always ready, & always near. Therefore, it is odd to see how these pretended philosophers are always busy in the first way, entirely neglecting the other, turning, as it were, old vessels over & over again, to see whether there be not some drop left in them, while the vivid fount runs neglected at their feet: by nothing do they so much betray their incapacity, & give the lye to their assumed airs of importance, profoundness & originality. Ego.” (Schopenhauer, Cogitata I, §44)

“The explanation of mind, as the product of material forces, is, moreover, necessarily stated in terms and by means of concepts essentially mental. We are confronted, therefore, with this anomaly, that the mind is accounted for by an idea, namely, the idea of universal causation, which idea must have been itself constructed by the mind which it purports to explain. There is here evidently a ‘weak arguing and a fallacious drift’….We know nothing of matter pure and simple, only of matter as it is perceived and translated into the terms of conscious experience.” (Hibben, The Problems of Philosophy, 44-50) 

“As for the difference which Keeling finds between McTaggart and Russell on the role of science in metaphysical enquiry, the important point lies in McTaggart’s claim that the “The phrase ‘ultimate nature’ distinguishes philosophy from science, which systematically studies the nature of reality, and not its ultimate nature”….With this Keeling points out that what Passmore called the central teaching of the Neo-Hegelians, that existents gain their characteristics in part through being members of a whole, is present in McTaggart and distinguishes him from Russell. This notion of a rational system in which members gain qualities through being related to the whole of which they are a part we found in Green, but it is an idea which has been lost since the advent of analytical philosophy, atomism, positivism, and the resurgence of empiricism.” (Kernaghan, A Treatment of McTaggart’s Rejection of Time, 18-19)