Kant (Roger Scruton)
p.17 The Critique of Pure Reason is the most important work of philosophy
to have been written in modern times; it is also one of the most difficult.
p.24 Neither experience nor reason are alone able to provide knowledge...
Only in their synthesis is knowledge possible; hence there is no knowledge that does not bear the marks of reason
and of experience together... Experience contains within itself the features of space, time and causality.
p.36 Kant argued that space and time... are basic forms of
intuition, meaning that every sensation must bear the imprint of temporal, and sometimes of spatial, organization.
p.31 Judgement requires, then, the joint operation of sensibility
and understanding. A mind without concepts would have no capacity to think; equally, a mind armed with concepts,
but with no sensory data to which they could be applied, would have nothing to think about.
p.52,53 Kant's intention in the Dialectic is to show that we cannot
know the 'world as it is', meaning the world conceived apart from the perspective of the knower... Reason always
aims to view the world, as Leibniz had viewed it, from no point of view.
p.69 for a rational being there is not only action, but also the
question of action (the question 'What shall I do?'), and this question demands a reasoned answer...
some of my actions are intentional... Of all such actions the question can be asked: Why do that? This question
asks, not for a cause or explanation, but for a reason.
p.70 Reasons are designed to justify action, and not primarily
to explain it.
p.70 Reason can neither generate, nor justify, the ends of our activity,
since, in Hume's words, 'reason is, and ought to be, the slave of the passions'. It is from the 'passions' that our
ends are drawn, since it is passion, and passion only, that provides the ultimate motive to act. Reason can persuade
us to act only when we are already motivated to obey it.
p.101 For Fichte, Kant's great achievement was to have shown that the
mind has knowledge only through its own activity; in an important sense, the objects of knowledge are a product
of that activity.
Hegel (Peter Singer)
p.109 No philosopher of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries has
had as great an impact on the world as Hegel. The only possible exception to this sweeping statement would be Karl
Marx - and Marx himself was heavily influenced by Hegel.
p.139 We have seen that Hegel believes all the events of the past
to have been leading up to the goal of freedom.
p.145 Motivation to action can come from desires, or from reason.
p.166 a phenomenology of mind is really a study of how mind appears to itself.
p.167 Should we therefore embrace the sceptical position that there is nothing
we can truly know? ...the sceptical argument we have been considering has its own presuppositions... It starts with the idea
that there is such a thing as reality, and that knowledge is some kind of instrument or medium by which we grasp reality.
In so doing, it presupposes a distinction between ourselves and reality, or the absolute. Worse still, it takes for granted
that our knowledge and reality are cut off from one another, but at the same time still treats our knowledge as something
real, that is, part of reality.
p.168 Kant argued that we can never see reality as it is;
for we can only comprehend our experiences within the frameworks of space, time and causation. Space, time
and causation are not part of reality, but the necessary forms in which we grasp it; therefore we can never know things as
they are independently of our knowledge.
p.168 The only possible approach to knowledge is an examination of consciousness from the inside as it appears
to itself - in other words, a phenomenology of mind.
p.174 At the level of perception, consciousness classifies objects according
to their universal properties; this proves inadequate, and so at the level of understanding, consciousness imposes its own
laws on reality.
p.175 To desire something is to wish to possess it
p.176 the self-conscious being finds that to realise itself fully
it must set about changing the external world and making it its own.
p.188 Absolute knowledge is knowledge of the world as it really is, in contrast
to knowledge of mere appearances.
p.188 Hegel believes, then, that the ultimate reality is mind, not matter.
p.189 The raw information received by the senses proved meaningless until
it was brought under a conceptual system produced by consciousness. Consciousness had to shape the world intellectually, to
classify and order it, before knowledge was possible. So-called 'material objects' turned out to be not things existing quite
independently of consciousness, but constructs of consciousness
p.189 absolute knowledge is reached when mind realises that what
it seeks to know is itself.
p.194-195 Validity is a matter of form, not content. To the logician the
content is of no interest.
It follows from this separation of form and content that logic
tells us nothing about the actual world. The forms of argument which logic describes would be exactly as they are if humans
are immortal, or if tortoises were furry. They would not change if there were no humans or tortoises at all.
p.203 The Young Hegelians saw Hegel's philosophy as a demand for a better world, a world
in which the opposition between individual and society would be overcome, a rationally organised world, a world of genuine
freedom, in short a world fashioned to reflect the absolute supremacy of the human mind and its powers of reason.
p.205 We need neither theology nor philosophy, Fruerbach said, but a science which studies real people in
their actual lives... Karl Marx came to the University of Berlin some six years after Hegel's death. He soon attached
himself to the Young Hegelians and joined in the prevailing criticism of religion. When Fruerbach proclaimed
the need to go beyond the realm of thought, Marx responded eagerly to the call.
Schopenhauer (Christopher Janaway)
p.232 Schopenhauer's philosophical thinking is easiest to grasp if one first
sees the backbone that runs right through it. This is the distinction, which he found in Kant, between appearance and thing
in itself.
p.233 The rules of the empirical world are that it must contain enduring things, arranged in space and time,
and having systematic effects upon one another.
p.239 Individual material things exist in space and time. A material thing is something capable of interacting
causally with other material things.
p.242-243 the 'law of motivation', or the principle of the sufficient reason of acting... states simply
that every act of will can be explained as ensuing from some motive.
p.251 Wanting, striving, and trying are to be seen as things that we do with our bodies, not as events that
occur in detachment from our bodies.
p.252 The body itself is will; more specifically, it is a manifestation of will to life (Wille zum Leben),
a kind of blind striving, at a level beneath that of conscious thought and action, which is directed towards the preservation
of life, and towards engendering life anew.
p.289 the genius has an uncommon ability 'to see the universal in the particular'... It is important that
this is a capacity for heightened perception... The true province of genius is imaginative perception, and not conceptual
thinking.
p.302 Freedom to act is the ability to do something, if one wills to do it. This freedom can be removed
by external obstacles to action, by constraining motives, laws or threats of various consequences if one acts
p.313-314 what happens when we achieve an end towards which our striving has been directed? The resulting
state is called satisfaction or happiness; but, he claims, this state is of value only relative to the deficiency which it
removes. Satisfaction can occur only in a being that has suffered... satisfaction is an absence; to be satisfied is simply
to return to neutral by wiping out a felt deficiency.
p.314 'Every satisfied desire gives birth to a new one': whatever striving of ours is successful, we shall
soon continue to strive for further ends... While we exist, nothing we can undertake to do will stop us from willing
Nietzsche (Michael Tanner)
p.421 after he heard Eduard Hitschmann read excerpts from GM [The Genealogy of Morals] in 1908 that Freud
said Nietzsche 'had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or was likely to live'
