To the Realists:
Ye sober beings who feel yourselves armed against passion and fantasy,
and would gladly make a pride and an ornament out of your emptiness, you call yourselves realists, and give to understand that the world is actually constituted as it appears to you
before you alone reality stands unveiled, and you yourselves would perhaps be the best part of it, -oh, you dear images of Sais!
But are not you also in your unveiled condition still extremely passionate and dusky beings compared with the fish, and still all too like an enamoured artist ? *-and what is "reality" to an enamoured artist!
You still carry about with you the valuations of things which had their origin in the passions and infatuations of earlier centuries! There is still a secret and ineffaceable drunkenness embodied in your sobriety! Your love of "reality," for example
-oh, that is an old, primitive " love "! — Gay Science 57
Whenever one believes in a great first principle, one can no longer produce anything but huge sterile dualisms. Philosophers willingly surrender themselves to this and centre their discussions on what should be the first principle (Being, the Ego, the Sensible? ... ). But it is not really worth invoking the concrete richness of the sensible if it is only to make it into an abstract principle. In fact the first principle is always a mask, a simple image. That does not exist, things do not start to move and come alive until the level of the second, third, fourth principle, and these are no longer even principles. Things do not begin to live except in the middle.
A philosophic theory is a developed question, and nothing other. By itself, in itself, it consists not in resolving a problem, but in developing to its limit the necessary implications of a formulated question. It shows us what things are, what they would have to be, supposing that the question is a good and rigorous one. To place in question means to subordinate, to submit things to the question in such a way that, in this constrained and forced submission, they reveal an essence, a nature. To criticize the question means to show under what conditions it is possible and well-posed, that is, how things would not be what they are if the question were not posed in that way. Which is to say... there is no critique of solutions, but only a critique of problems.
One might almost say that oversimplification is the occupational hazard of a philosophy, if it were not the occupation. — J. L. Austin
Knowledge of logical fallacies are more often than not used to defend one's own views instead of entertaining new ones. — Question
Maybe Q could have put it a bit more strongly and more interestingly by saying that we never turn our eye for logical fallacies on to ourselves, or something like that. — jamalrob
I think the biggest problem with it is that it's a truism. We tend to argue for our own views, so our knowledge about fallacies will obviously be used in the service of those views. Maybe Q could have put it a bit more strongly and more interestingly by saying that we never turn our eye for logical fallacies on to ourselves, or something like that.
(When you quote yourself, you're asking for a kicking) — jamalrob
The "are" should be an "is" — Sapientia
and that last part, "...instead of entertaining new ones" needs to be reworded. Maybe "...instead of being used to entertain new ones" — Sapientia
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