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)