Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

And to this I added that, since I knew some perfections which I did not possess, I was not the only being in existence (I will here, with your permission, freely use the terms of the schools); but, on the contrary, that there was of necessity some other more perfect Being upon whom I was dependent, and from whom I had received all that I possessed; for if I had existed alone, and independently of every other being, so as to have had from myself all the perfection, however little, which I actually possessed, I should have been able, for the same reason, to have had from myself the whole remainder of perfection, of the want of which I was conscious, and thus could of myself have become infinite, eternal, immutable, omniscient, all-powerful, and, in fine, have possessed all the perfections which I could recognize in God.

Once conscious of "time" as a substantive, we ask then about the creation of time.

Another muddle consists in using the phrase "another kind" after the analogy of "a different kind of chair", e.g., that transfinite numbers are another kind of number than rationals, or unconscious thoughts a different kind of thought from conscious ones.

Of course the person who agrees to the reason was not conscious at the time of its being his reason.

They think of themselves as acutely conscious of language and its importance for society, but they do not ask, What is language?

Imagine that there was a species like us, having a full range of prelinguistic conscious experiences, voluntary actions, and prelinguistic thought processes, but no language.

Features Common to Prelinguistic Intentionality and Language I have already said that the hominids have conscious perceptions and intentional actions together with conscious thought processes, all of these in a prelinguistic form.

Another feature of prelinguistic consciousness -- and this will prove crucial for the evolution of language-- is that any animal that has the biologically primitive intentional apparatus of conscious prelinguistic hominids already has a hefty number of the traditional philosophical (e.g. Aristotelian and Kantian) categories.

Though actual discourse takes place in time, the intentionality of the discourse is in discrete segments in a way that the flow of prelinguistic thought and perception in action in conscious life is not in that way in discrete segments.

If, for example, I am dancing or skiing, the stream of conscious thought need not contain any words and can be in a continuous flow.