| Annotation Metadata
|
^"permissions":^"read":ӶӺ,"update":ӶӺ,"delete":ӶӺ,"admin":ӶӺ°,"user":^"id":6,"name":"Sarah Oberbichler"°,"id":"Mozmevgrca","ranges":Ӷ^"start":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/pӶ6Ӻ","startOffset":371,"end":"/divӶ3Ӻ/divӶ4Ӻ/divӶ1Ӻ/blockquoteӶ6Ӻ/pӶ1Ӻ","endOffset":278°Ӻ,"quote":"To clarify the core of the notion, I once more return to Locke, because he produced a very simple and widely accepted description of the process:\n\nThis is called Abstraction, whereby ideas taken from particular beings become general representations of all the same kind; and their names general names, applicable to whatever exists conformable to such abstract ideas. (ibid. Book II, Ch. X, §9)\nLocke’s use of the words “being” and “exist” in this context caused Berkeley, who had a very different view of “existence”, to voice a sarcastic objection against his predecessor.\n\nWhether others have this wonderful faculty of abstracting their ideas, they best can tell; for myself, I find indeed I have a faculty of imagining, or representing to myself, the ideas of those particular things I have perceived, and of variously compounding them. I can imagine a man with two heads, or the upper parts of a man joined to the body of a horse, I can consider the hand, the eye, the nose, each by itself abstracted or separated from the rest of the body. But then whatever hand or eye I imagine, it must have some particular shape and colour. (1710; Introd., p.10)\nThis passage is interesting for two reasons. Berkeley claims, much as did von Humboldt, that we are able to represent to ourselves particular experiential items and that we are also able to segment them and to recombine the parts at will. Then however, he goes on to claim that whatever we re-present to ourselves must have the character of a particular—from which he concludes that we cannot have general ideas.\nBoth these claims concern re-presentation and are, I believe, perfectly valid. But what follows from them is that we are unable to re-present general ideas, not that we cannot have them. Berkeley, it seems, unwittingly trapped himself into this position about abstraction. At the beginning of his Treatise, he says among other things:\n\nThus, for example, a certain colour, taste, smell, figure and consistence having been observed to go together, are accounted one distinct thing, signified by the name apple; other collections of ideas constitute a stone, a tree, a book, and the like sensible things. (1710; p.1)","highlights":Ӷ^"jQuery321000354405909149324572":^°°,^"jQuery321000354405909149324572":^°°,^"jQuery321000354405909149324572":^°°,^"jQuery321000354405909149324572":^°°,^"jQuery321000354405909149324572":^°°,^"jQuery321000354405909149324572":^°°,^"jQuery321000354405909149324572":^°°Ӻ,"text":"","order":"mw-content-text","category":"WissenschaftlicheReferenz2","data_creacio":1560418898215°
|
