Tag Archives: Wilfrid Hodges

The Divided Line

October 31, 2021 – 6:26 pm

Index to this series

We are still in the latter part of Book VI of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates undertakes to explain the education of the philosopher-kings (502c–d). They are not literally so called, as we noted last time. They are going to need to “be able to bear the greatest studies” (503e), and “the idea of the good is the greatest study” (505a). People are confused about what the good is:

  • many say it is pleasure;
  • a few, knowledge (505b).

It rather the case that

  • so the Good makes it possible to have
    • knowledge (508d), and perhaps even
    • pleasure (509a),
  • as the sun makes it possible to see (508b–d).

We looked at that much last time.

Sun through the leaves of planes
Dünya Barış Parkı 2021.10.30

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By David Pierce | Posted in absolute presuppositions, Harper’s, Philosophy, Plato | Also tagged , , , | Comments (9)

Psychology

August 28, 2013 – 9:40 am

Preface (January 17–18, 2019). This essay is built around two extended quotations from Collingwood:

  1. From the posthumous Idea of History (1946) with the core idea, “people do not know what they are doing until they have done it.”
  2. From An Essay on Philosophical Method (1933), about how logic is neither a purely descriptive nor a purely normative science.

The quotations pertain to the title subject of psychology for the following reasons.

  1. Psychological experiments show that we may not know what we are doing until we have done it.
  2. Psychology is a descriptive science.

Psychological experiments can tell us about what we do, only when we presuppose the general applicability of their findings. This is true for any descriptive science. Philosophy demands more. A philosophical science like logic is categorical, in the sense of the second listed quotation, because it is what Collingwood will later call criteriological. I go on to discuss criteriological sciences as such in “A New Kind of Science,” but not here.

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By David Pierce | Posted in Categorical Thinking, Collingwood, Criteriological Science, Euclid, Galileo, Logic, Ontological Proof, Philosophy, Principles of Art, Psychology, Science | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (11)