Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

Frazer concludes that since people at one time were burnt, dressing up an effigy for burning is what remains of that practice. This may be so; but it need not be, for this reason.

The idea which underlies this sort of method is that every time what is sought is the motive. People at one time thought it useful to kill a man, sacrifice him to the god of fertility, in order to produce good crops.

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

And further, I continued to exercise myself in the method I had prescribed; for, besides taking care in general to conduct all my thoughts according to its rules, I reserved some hours from time to time which I expressly devoted to the employment of the method in the solution of mathematical difficulties, or even in the solution likewise of some questions belonging to other sciences, but which, by my having detached them from such principles of these sciences as were of inadequate certainty, were rendered almost mathematical: the truth of this will be manifest from the numerous examples contained in this volume.

At one time, animals more or less like us, hominids, walked the earth without language. Now we have language. What happened in between?

It already has space, time, causation, agency and object; and with object it has to have identity and individuation together with property and relation.

I do not mean that it has to have concepts corresponding to these categories, but rather, for example, that it has to be able to recognize that one object is over there in front of it and another one on the left (space), it has to recognize that its eating occurred in a temporal sequence (time), that it did something, as opposed to something just happening (agency), that some things it did, made other things happen (causation).

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.

A typical speech act, though performed in time, is, semantically speaking, instantaneous.

This difference between unsegmented consciousness and segmented discourse is disguised from us, or at least, for a long time was disguised from me, by the fact that beliefs and desires are naturally talked about as if they were discrete units.