Tag Archives: Science

Beyond Good and Evil: 205-210

Posted on March 2, 2012 by Harland Grant

N- considers three difficulties, ‘dangers for a philosopher’s development’.  First, that there seems to be progressively greater amounts of specialized knowledge in the world, ‘The scope and the tower-building of the sciences has grown to be enormous…’ to the extent … Continue reading →

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Beyond Good and Evil: 201-204

Posted on March 1, 2012 by Harland Grant

N- detects in ‘community values’ or ‘the utility of the herd’, a situation at once self-contradictory and absurd.  He does not think that one can have a genuine situation of ‘neighbor love’ in a communal situation, as love is one … Continue reading →

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Beyond Good and Evil: 191-200

Posted on February 29, 2012 by Harland Grant

‘The ancient theological problem of “faith” and “knowledge”– or more clearly, of instinct and reason– in other words, the question whether regarding the valuation of things instinct deserves more authority than rationality, which wants us to evaluate and act in … Continue reading →

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Beyond Good and Evil: 21-23

Posted on February 22, 2012 by Harland Grant

Nietzsche begins here continuing his ridicule of the ‘free will’ concept, no believer he in the ‘causa sui’, but he quickly moves beyond this ‘boorish simplicity’ to a much larger claim: ‘One should not wrongly reify “cause” and “effect” as … Continue reading →

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Science and the Goals of Man: Chapters 15 & 16

Posted on February 7, 2012 by Harland Grant

‘the functioning of language depends on our knowledge of the distortions that inevitably enter our verbalizations…If our watch runs fifteen minutes slow, the thing that makes us miss appointments is not so much that it is running slow as the … Continue reading →

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Science and the Goals of Man: Chapter 10

Posted on February 4, 2012 by Harland Grant

In the olden days, they made what most of us today would call ‘funny looking’ maps.  Sometimes you can even find maps which were made comically on purpose, R- mentions a ‘New Yorker’s map’ where Manhattan takes up most of … Continue reading →

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Science and the Goals of Man: Chapters 4-6

Posted on January 31, 2012 by Harland Grant

‘What is truth…Perhaps I can tempt you to ask it…’  You got it R-, I’m willing to consider that question.  What have you to say about it?  ‘Do you believe in duckbills?  Perhaps you have seen one in a zoo…’  … Continue reading →

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The Really Hard Problem: Chapter 1

Posted on January 22, 2012 by Harland Grant

Flanagan defines ‘the hard problem’ as: ‘to explain how mind is possible in a material world’.  But the ‘really hard problem‘ of the subtitle is the problem of how meaning is possible in a material world; ‘meaning‘ as in ‘the … Continue reading →

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Process and Reality: Chapter 1: Sections III & IV

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Harland Grant

W- thinks that philosophy as a whole does make progress, but accuses most philosophers of ‘overstatements’ which he classifies as chiefly of two kinds: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness, ‘neglecting the degree of abstraction involved when an actual entity is … Continue reading →

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