Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: History of Philosophy

  • ‘Leibniz’s Law’: A Useless Expression

    Pedant and quibbler that I am, it annoys me when I hear professional philosophers use the phrase 'Leibniz's Law.'  My reason is that it is used by said philosophers in three mutually incompatible ways.  That makes it a junk phrase, a wastebasket expression, one to be avoided.  Some use it as Dale Tuggy does, here, to refer…

  • Hume’s Fork and Leibniz’s Fork

    No doubt you have heard of Hume's Fork.  'Fork,' presumably from the Latin furca, suggests a bifurcation, a division; in this case  of meaningful statements into two mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes, the one consisting of relations of ideas, the other of matters of fact. In the Enquiry, Hume writes:      Propositions of this…

  • The History of Philosophy as Akin to an Intellectual Arms Race

    Nicholas Rescher, The Strife of Systems: An Essay on the Grounds and Implications of Philosophical Diversity (University of Pittsburg Press, 1985), pp. 205-206: The history of philosophy is akin to an intellectual arms race where all sides escalate the technical bases for their positions.  As realists sophisticate their side of the argument, idealists sophisticate their…

  • Emile-Auguste Chartier

    Emile Chartier (1868-1951) was a French professor of philosophy among whose students were Raymond Aron and Simone Weil. Chartier's sunny disposition, however, did not rub off on the brooding Weil. Under the pseudonym 'Alain,' Chartier published thousands of two-page essays in newspapers. What follows is a striking sentence from the essay "Maladies of the Mind"…

  • Bertrand Russell on Arabic Philosophy

    The following passage is from Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy (New York: Simon & Shuster, 1945), p. 427. I found it here, but without a link and without a reference. So, exploiting the resources of my well-stocked library, I located the passage, and verified that it had been properly transcribed. Whether Russell is…

  • Why Brentano is Important

    If Edmund Husserl is the father of phenomenology, Franz Brentano is its grandfather: his Psychology From an Empirical Standpoint, along with his lectures at the University of Vienna were powerful influences on the young Husserl who, though a Ph.D. in mathematics (under Weierstrass on the calculus of variations) abandoned mathematics for philosophy. (2) Brentano's dissertation…