![]() ![]() On the other hand it is impossible and it really results in an aporia to try and conceptualise movement as concrete, intrinsic plurality while keeping the logic of the identity. The only way to “conceptualise” (but the Hegelian one is no ordinary concept) change and to conceive of the plurality as concrete rather than abstract, that is, as a pure sum of the unit, is the Hegelian synthesis or any other doctrine that privileges an experience of movement over an aseptic attempt to understand it. This as I said, though, was not a solution to Zeno’s paradoxes as it simply embraces a new “logic”, the logic of becoming that denies the identity. The response of the pluralists and all those who embraced a similar philosophical creed (see in more recent times Hegel and Bergson) was to refuse to think of the existent as being, but to think of it as becoming. If we want to think logically, we can only think the identical, because identity is the form of our thought: our thought can only be identical with itself when it thinks, that is it cannot think two things at the same time. " Zeno’s paradoxes do not add anything to the Parmenidean prohibition to think only of the identity. Here is how Papa-Grimaldi describes Hegel's move in Why Mathematical Solutions of Zeno's Paradoxes Miss the Point: He did not phrase his break as prioritizing action over being, indeed action appears quite late in his system, but his elevation of change and movement into the place of Parmenidian self-identical being is hard to miss. Hegel says for himself what Wolff had to spell out for Kant:“ It is just as impossible for anything to break forth from it as to break into it with Parmenides as with Spinoza, there is no progress from being or absolute substance to the negative, to the finite” (Science of Logic, 94-95). What might be a bit of a stretch in Kant comes to the surface in Fichte's and especially Hegel's dialectic (who owe some to Heraclitus, of course). Wolff in Kant’s Theory of Mental Activity explicitly emphasizes Kant's break with Parmenides on the issues of being/becoming and one/many:" The paradox of a multiplicity which has unity without losing its diversity - the problem which the ancients called the one and the many - is resolved by the notion of rule-directed activity". ![]() ![]() By function I mean the unity of the act of ordering various representations under one common representation" (CPR B93/A68). " Whereas all intuitions, as sensible, rest on affections, concepts rest on functions. In particular, Kant characterized concepts as actions, rather than traditional essences, in almost Wittgensteinian manner: In modern times the origins of the idea can be traced to Kant, who first elevated epistemology over ontology, and then emphasized the active role of the subject in shaping the former (and by implication the latter). One can perhaps see the seed being planted in Aquinas' characterization of esse (existence) as " act of being", a new addition to the Aristotelian matter/form duality. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |