Reading Notes: July 13th, 2024

“The only thinker within the early Cartesian School who called in question the doctrine of representative perception was Arnauld. In his Traite des Vraies et Des Fausses Idees, which was written as a criticism of Malebranche’s Recherche de la Verite, he states in the most definite manner that there is no direct evidence of the existence of subjective states, acting as intermediaries between mind and matter, and that the sole (and on his view insufficient) ground for their assumption is (as we have already seen in the Chapter on Descartes’ problem) the local difference between object known and the brain through which it is known….Even the ground that objects cannot be known directly, since they are material and therefore wholly different from the immaterial mind, reduces to this one ground. For it is because the mind is unextended, that, even though it be locally present to a body, it still remains external to it. As Malebranche remarks, though the mind were to issue out of the body in order to visit the sun, being unextended, it could not contain that star within itself, and would therefore, even though it got inside it, still remain as external to it as one body is to another.” (Kemp Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, 115-116)

“Sense and imagination are, therefore, [in Descartes philosophy] related to thought in the same way that figure and motion are related to extension, that is, as modes to their common attribute.” (Kemp Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, 127)

“In [self-consciousness] we have experience of a unity that is capable of maintaining itself throughout the variety of its states, and of an activity that progressively unfolds that unity in the realisation of desire. Further, within the unity of each perception there is always involved a multiplicity, infinitely complex.” (Kemp Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy, 167)

“Materialism has on its side a formidable array of arguments from facts. It can point to certain and undeniable and invariable sequences of cause and effect. All sorts of disturbances and alterations of consciousness arise when poisons are introduced into the blood, from the excitement or stupor of intoxication to the profound coma of Bright’s disease. Again, my brain processes slacken down, and I pass into the unconsciousness of dreamless sleep. They are interfered with by the rupture of a blood vessel, and, either special departments of my consciousness are interfered with, or I lose consciousness altogether, or for so long as the interference lasts, that is to say, according to the extent and persistence of the lesion. My brain processes cease altogether, and—the inference seems too obvious to state. And yet the extreme conclusion does not follow unless materialism can show that physical processes give rise to consciousness in the first place. If they cannot, there will be no need to infer that their ceasing must cause its extinction.” (Sinclair, A Defense of Idealism, 76-77)

Reading Notes: July 12th, 2024

“The ignorant physicist sometimes says, “We know that there is matter. Why need we go further to an unknown something called mind?” But his very assertion is self-destructive. It implies the priority of the something knowing to the something known. He has not been able to assert matter without postulating mind. You not only can not prove matter, you can not define it, without implying the existence of mind.” (Krauth, The Strength and Weaknesses of Idealism, 294)

“The murder of matter is the suicide of mind.” (Krauth, The Strength and Weaknesses of Idealism, 301)

“No purely physiological investigation can explain the phenomena of consciousness….How it is that molecular changes in the brain cells coincide with modifications of consciousness; how, for instance, the vibrations of light falling on the retina excite the modification of consciousness termed a visual sensation, is a problem which cannot be solved. We may succeed in determining the exact nature of the molecular changes which occur in the brain cells when a sensation is experienced, but this will not bring us one whit nearer the explanation of the ultimate nature of that which constitutes the sensation. One is objective and the other subjective, and neither can be expressed in terms of the other. We cannot say that they are identical, or even that the one passes into the other; but only, as Laycock expresses it, that the two are correlated, or, with Bain, that the physical changes and the psychical modifications are the objective and subjective sides of a ‘double-faced unity’….The physiological activity of the brain is not, however, altogether co-extensive with its psychological functions. The brain as an organ of motion and sensation, or presentative consciousness, is a single organ composed of two halves; the brain as an organ of ideation, or re-presentative consciousness, is a dual organ, each hemisphere complete in itself. When one hemisphere is removed or destroyed by disease, motion and sensation are abolished unilaterally, but mental operations are still capable of being carried on in their completeness through the agency of the one hemisphere. The individual who is paralyzed as to sensation and motion by disease of the opposite side of the brain (say the right), is not paralyzed mentally, for he can still feel and will and think, and intelligently comprehend with the one hemisphere. If these functions are not carried on with the same vigour as before, they at least do not appear to suffer in respect of completeness.” (Ferrier, The Functions of the Brain, 256-257) 

“Davidson’s account of subjectivity (or ‘the subjective’) as first-person authority is, we believe, a cause of a philosopher simply being blind to subjectivity as a question in its own right. His point is that once we get rid of the idea of subjectivity as a ‘parade of objects before the mind’ (the Cartesian idea), all that remains is privacy and asymmetry, and these can be explained as a mere side effect of natural language in our minds. Whereas Davidson officially intends to account for ‘the subjective’, and in investigating the possibility of truth and objective knowledge for beings such as ourselves, sets out relating the objective, the intersubjective and the subjective, the fact is, his whole approach rests on the priority of a third-person perspective, and takes behavioural evidence as touchstone (even considering that the appeal to the intersubjective in his last writings aims at taking distance from Quinean-like behaviorism, itself undoubtably an even more radically third-personal approach). Still, Davidson’s overall view of subjectivity as first-person authority in linguistic creatures amounts to an elimination of subjectivity and a trivialization of the problem of self-knowledge.” (Miguens and Preyer, Are There Blindspots in Thinking About Consciousness and Subjectivity?, 13)

“Nature teaches me by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst, etc., that I am not only lodged in my body as a pilot in a vessel, but that I am besides so intimately conjoined, and, as it were, intermixed with it, that my mind and body compose a certain unity. For if this were not the case I should not feel pain when my body is hurt, seeing I am merely a thinking thing, but should perceive the wound by the understanding alone, just as a pilot perceives by sight that part of his vessel is damaged.” (Descartes, Meditations, VI, 336)

Reading Notes: July 11th, 2024

“If any system, whether under the influence of other objects or not, has been quiescent for a finite time it can only be through the action of external objects and not through its own nature that it ceases to be quiescent. Such a system will neither change its qualities nor move as a whole or in parts, nor cease to exist as a whole or in parts unless it is forced to do so by changes in objects external to it.” (Broad, Perception, Physics, and Reality: An Enquiry into the Information that Physical Science Can Supply About the Real, 85-86)

“The continuity of space is defined mathematically as an infinite series of points or positions, and therefore as absolutely discrete, and the infinity of the series is defined by the negation of contact. No member is next another and between any two points there is another. So also with the continuity of time the instants are points and the process succession, and the compactness of a period consists in no two instants being next one another so as to exclude an intervening instant.” (Carr, Symposium: The Quantum Theory: How Far Does it Modify the Mathematical, the Physical and the Psychological Concepts of Continuity?, 48-49)

Reading Notes: July 9th, 2024

“It is not, therefore, surprising that philosophers who have openly or tacitly subscribed to the metaphysical presuppositions of formal logic have been tireless in their efforts to find a justification for inductive generalization, or somehow extricate it from Hume’s criticism….The so-called pragmatic justification of induction, which claims that the procedure is vindicated by its ubiquitous success, fails, because, first, no attempt is ever made to demonstrate the prevalence of the alleged success. It is simply assumed that the triumph of empirical science is that of inductive reasoning because it is assumed that no other method is available. No investigation is made by those claiming this kind of justification for induction into the actual procedures adopted by practising scientists, and it has never been established that induction as traditionally described—inference from observed conjunction of particulars to the major recurrence of similar conjunctions—has ever been the source of major scientific discoveries. Secondly, however, even if it had, the argument from past success of the method as a justification of its future use is a petitio principii, because it invokes the very principle it is meant to justify.” (Harris, Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking, 52-53)

“Sentience or feeling is the pervasive characteristic of mind, which persists at all levels and throughout its dialectical development. It is the matrix of all mental process—its “proximate matter” (to use an Aristotelian concept). But it is not yet cognition. Like the prior phases, of which it is the formal unity, and which are all dynamic processes, sentience too is a form of activity. It is the organism’s activity as felt—the active registration of the impingement upon it of its environment, its own reactivity to it. As such, it is internally diversified, but as felt it is a unified totality within which the differences have yet to be delineated. This requires ordered selection, differentiation, contrast, and interrelation of qualitative distincta. The activity by which sentience thus differentiates and organizes itself is a specialization of its own functioning, namely the discursive activity of attention, which singles out particular qualitative elements and sets them in context. The organic needs and impulses are its initial guides, causing it to focus on particular sense-contents in turn and to set each against a felt background, organizing the sentient field into a figure-and-ground structure, which is the minimum requirement for cognition, or perception.” (Harris, Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking, 177)

“It is not easy to define psychologically or to identify the physiological counterpart of attention, but it cannot be regarded as a merely mechanical process of sorting and singling out. Although it has a character analogous to a searchlight directed and focused upon an object, and although terms appropriate to light are often used to describe its effect, it is no mere illumination, because it is cognitive. It does not merely reveal an object, it grasps and assimilates it. In fact, it virtually creates the so-called datum, for apart from its selectivity no cognizable object exists, only the indiscriminate conglomerate of primitive sentience. Attention is no merely passive unveiling, but is an active comprehending of the discriminated elements in their mutual relation. Accordingly, it is (or involves) incipient judgment. The datum it creates is a “somewhat” in contrast with another (somewhat else), and this contrast is cognized, or apprehended. It is an awareness, not simply of the single datum, but of that in relation to its background, or other. It is the apprehension and inchoate intellectual articulation of a structured whole.” (Harris, Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking, 177)

“The principles of organization on which the sentient matrix is thus perceptually ordered so as to constitute objects of cognition are categories of concepts….The pure, indefinite, confused mass of feeling is qualitatively utterly indefinite. It is the mere “manifold of sense” of which Kant remarked that it is “as good as nothing.” It is likewise the equivalent of what Hegel called pure being and which he, too, identified with nothing. It is only in the discursus of mutually contrasted contents, of “this” distinguished from “that,” a figure on a ground, that perception of an object arises—perception of something definite in contrast to something else.” (Harris, Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking, 177-178)

“This contraposition of figure and ground, of the object centered by attention against a less distinct background, or, within attention, of contrasted qualities and levels, is a cognition entirely dependent upon the mutual mediation of the moments. It is a dynamic process of comparison and contrast, an activity or motion which is not improperly identified as becoming. The object comes to be for consciousness in this movement, and without it…no object is cognized. The object…is created by attention, and attention is the concentrated focus of the discursive activity.” (Harris, Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking, 178)

“Actuality is thus the integrated whole of the universe specifying itself as the self-differentiating space-time unity of the physical world which evolves to the self-differentiating biocoenosis of the biosphere…” (Harris, Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking, 195)

“Knowledge is the object—the world—come to consciousness in the living organism, which in its organicism epitomizes the whole which it brings to consciousness. Knowledge, therefore, is from the first the self-consciousness of the object. It is the object aware of itself. Subject and object are thus ab origine identical; but they are also non-identical because the first is a higher phase in the dialectic through which the whole is realizing itself and has come to consciousness of itself. Hence, while it is itself of which it becomes aware, its awareness is a different and more adequate phase of itself than that of which it is aware, the immediately prior phase of its own dialectical development. In knowledge, the object (which is its own earlier phase) is sublated and transformed as self-consciousness. But this consciousness is not at first consciousness of self as object, but is consciousness of object as other than or nonidentical with self. In the first instance, then, it is inadequate to the completeness and coherence of the whole, which is dirempt in the opposition of object to subject.” (Harris, Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking, 237-238)

“A magnitude is essentially one, not many. Thus no magnitude is correctly expressed as a number of terms….It is necessary, in order to obtain divisibility, to take the whole strictly as one, and to regard divisibility as its adjective….The whole has a certain relation, which for convenience we may call that of inclusion, to all its parts. This relation is the same whether there be many parts or few; what distinguishes a whole of many parts is that it has many such relations of inclusion. But it seems reasonable to suppose that a whole of many parts differs from a whole of few parts in some intrinsic respect.” (Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, 173)

“Continuity applies to series (and only to series) whenever these are such that there is a term between any two given terms. Whatever is not a series, or a compound of series, of whatever is a series not fulfilling the above condition, is discontinuous. Thus the series of rational numbers is continuous, for the arithmetic mean of two of them is always a third rational number between the two. The letters of the alphabet are not continuous. We have seen that any two terms in a series have a distance, or a stretch which has magnitude. Since there are certainly discrete series (e.g., the alphabet), there are certainly discrete magnitudes, namely, the distances or the stretches of terms in discrete series. The distance between the letters A and C is greater than that between the letters A and B, but there is no magnitude which is greater than one of these and less than the other.” (Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, 173)

“As regards the realistic criticisms of Idealism, it seems necessary to conclude that not one is a valid criticism of Objective Idealism. In so far as they were intended to be such, they fail because they are based upon misconceptions of the meaning of Objective Idealism or because they involve faulty inferences….[Realism’s chief aim], “the refutation of idealism” or “the refutation of the monistic theory,” has not been achieved….As a result of the protests of the Realists, Objective Idealists have been led to define their position more carefully and to distinguish it more sharply from other types of Idealism.” (Hawes, The Logic of Contemporary English Realism, 58-59)

“[According to Russell] real or mathematical space is composed of an infinite number of points, and time of an infinite number of instants. Points are without extension, and instants without duration. Things are composed of extensionless, durationless elements which occupy only a point and an instant. The ultimate formal constituent of matter in physics is such a point-instant particle. Motion is the successive occupation of successive positions at successive times.” (Hawes, The Logic of Contemporary English Realism, 102)

“You cannot have truth except as reality in ideal form. And you cannot know reality except by apprehending the ideal form in its concrete spirit and all its detail. This does not mean that reality is qualified as or by a series of psychical events. The qualification of reality by ideas is from the beginning a qualification by meanings. This is the significance of thought, which is in its essence an effort to define the universe by meanings adequately conditioned; to reconstruct the unity of the real in ideal or discursive form.” (Bosanquet, Implication and Linear Inference, 149)

“First, my mind does not come to me as a separable source that judges by connecting particulars ab extra. It comes to me as a full world which reshapes itself by its own impulse, involving, as it does so in certain respects, more or less of a peculiar satisfaction which attends upon adequacy and coherency. So far from misrepresenting the world, my mind as a volitional and capricious being cannot in the least affect that reshaping by the world of its own meanings which is judgment….Further, my mind has nothing but the world’s reality to draw from; and, again, the world has no way of becoming ideally determinate but through it.” (Bosanquet, Implication and Linear Inference, 152)

“The extreme behaviorist frankly denies that what we mean by consciousness exists at all, and substitutes for the study of consciousness the study of the motions of the body and its parts. He rejects consciousness because there is no place in his system of materialistic mechanism for such a reality as conscious is experienced to be. Would it not be more reasonable to revise the system in light of experience than to reject experience on account of the demands of the system?” (Brightman, An Introduction to Philosophy, 273)

“Without the power to hold in mind at once events that take time, all temporal and all rational experience would be impossible. The mind, then, is temporal in that it experiences sequence and duration, but it is supertemporal in that it is able to grasp in a single conscious act a series of events that take time….No account of mind is complete or philosophically sound that considers the temporal features of mind without also considering its time-transcending features and the relations between the two. Mechanism, then, is inadequate.” (Brightman, An Introduction to Philosophy, 275)

“If the materialist still lives a wholesome, active, human life, his life has no logical connection with his philosophy. Like Hume, he forgets his speculations; and what is more, he lives as if they were not true….There is a double tragedy in the life of a good materialist: the tragedy of a worthless universe and the tragedy of self-contradiction between theory and life.” (Brightman, An Introduction to Philosophy, 363)