On the Difference between Talent and Genius

I usually find the pithy phrase generalises too much and ends up being of little value. Schopenhauer's power of metaphor, however, makes light work of profound pith. From volume II of his World as Will and Representation:

Talent is like a marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like a marksman who hits a target which others cannot see.

Proust as Philosophical Inspiration

Did Quine read Proust? From The Way by Swann's:

But the fact that M. Vinteuil peraps knew about his daughter's behaviour does not imply that his worship of her would thereby be diminished. Facts do not find their way into the world in which our beliefs reside; they did not produce our beliefs, they do not destroy them; they may inflict on them the most constant refutations without weakening them, and an avalanche of afflictions or ailments succeeding one another without interruption in a family will not make it doubt the goodness of its God or the talent of its doctor.

Kripke and Identity Statements

From AC Grayling's An introduction to Philosophical Logic:

In Kripke's view, names are 'rigid designators', that is, terms which refer to the same individual in every possible world in which that individual exists. Because individuals will have different properties in different possible worlds -- their being different possible worlds will turn in in some cases just on the hypothesis that some selected individual answers to different descriptions in those worlds -- it cannot be the case that the name of that individual is synonymous with some set of descriptions. In other possible dispensations of things Aristotle may have been a hoplite, a physician, or whatever; but his name still rigidly designates him in all the worlds in which he exists. He will only possess in all possible worlds such properties as are essential to his being Aristotle. This allows what is surely true, that we can discover of individuals that certain descriptions fail to fit them. For example, suppose it is confirmed that Bacon did indeed write Othello, Hamlet, and the rest; nevertheless the name 'Shakespeare' will not cease to refer because the description 'the author of Hamlet' ceases to apply to that individual. For if we irreversibly identify whoever is designated by 'Shakespeare' with 'the author of Hamlet', it would be impossible to discover that he did not write Hamlet.

This then is the first important feature of the causal theory, that ordinary proper names are rigid designators and not abbreviations for clusters of descriptions. An interesting consequence of this relates to identity statements. It is commonly held that identity statements like 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' are contingent, because the fact that the two are one is something that had to be established a posteriori. But Kripke argues that if 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is true, thens since both names are rigid designators and refer to the same entity in all possible worlds in which that entity exists, the identity statement is necessarily true. Philosophers had supposed this identity statement to be only contingently true because 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is not analytic; but a failure to distinguish the metaphysical notion of necessity both from the epistemological notion of apriority and the semantic notion of analyticity makes for the muddle here. On Kripke's view, 'necessarily true' means 'true in all possible worlds'; so although 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is a posteriori, it is necessary -- and if this is right, it establishes the existence of neceesary a posteriori truths, an exciting result.

The Sports Pages

It's a delicious irony that many of the cognoscenti look down upon those whose interests in a newspaper do not extend much farther than the sports pages when much of the best writing available can be found there.

Case in point: Peter Roebuck writing about the poor umpiring decisions that India suffered against Australia in the recent test in Sydney:

INDIA has been dudded. No-one with the slightest enthusiasm for cricket will take the least satisfaction from the victory secured by the local team in an SCG Test match that entertained spectators at the ground, provided some excellent batting but left a sour taste in the mouth. It was a match that will have been relished only by rabid nationalists and others for whom victory and vengeance are the sole reasons for playing sport. Truth to tell the last day was as bad as the first. It was a rotten contest that singularly failed to elevate the spirit.

Popper and Language

From David Edmonds's and John Eidinow's Wittgenstein's Poker:

Popper compared the interest in language to the practice of cleaning spectacles. Language philosophers might think this is worthwhile in itself. Serious philosophers realise that the only point of the cleaning is to enable the wearer to see the world more clearly.

Frege's Venus, Sense and Reference

I've never studied logic formally at university, but I have read up on the subject here and there. What I always found most confusing, however, was the presentation of the classic example illustrating the difference between sense and reference, that of the morning star and the evening star. The problem was that in quite a few noteworthy books, the point of the example was completely lost on me because it was not explicitly explained that the morning star and the evening star are actually the same object!

Thankfully though, I did discover what the morning star and evening star were referring to and, consequently, why distinguishing between sense and reference is so important.

And that is also why I'm so happy to have read perhaps the most lucid explanation of this distinction in AC Grayling's An Introduction to Philosophical Logic, and is why I'm hoping all books on logic will just reprint the following passage from here on in:

The classic example used is the planet Venus, which the Greeks thought was not one planet but two stars, namely the evening star Hesperus and the morning star Phosphorus. Because the evening and morning stars are the same entity, it is evident that both expressions denote the same entity, viz., Venus. But clearly the expressions 'morning star' and 'evening star' differ in sense despite having the same reference, which follows from the fact that if one says 'the morning star is identical with the morning star', the truth of what one says is a simple matter of logic and can be determined by inspecting the sentence itself; but if one says 'the morning star is identical with the evening star', the truth of what one says is a matter of astronomy, not logic. No one could discover that the morning and evening stars are in fact one and the same entity merely by inspecting the expressions 'the morning star' and 'the evening star' alone. It follows that although these two expressions are coreferential, which is to say, refer to the same thing, they differ in sense

Morality, Wittgenstein and Schopenhauer

The hallmarks of Wittgenstein's deprecating grand notions of the Good found in section sixty-six of Schopenhauer's World as Will and Representation:

The deeds and ways of acting of the individual and of a nation can be very much modified by dogmas, example and custom. In themselves, however, all deeds (opera operata) are merely empty figures, and only the disposition that leads to them gives them moral significance. But this disposition can be actually quite the same, in spite of a very different external phenomenon. With an equal degree of wickedness one person can die on the wheel, and another peacefully in the bosom of his family. It can vbe the same degree of wickedness that expresses itself in one nation in the crude characteristics of murder and cannibalism, and in another finely and delicately in miniature, in court intrigues, oppressions, and subtle machinations of every kind; the inner nature remains the same. It is conceivable that a perfect State, or even perhaps a complete dogma of rewards and punishments after death firmly believed in, might prevent every crime. Politically much would be gained in this way; morally, absolutely nothing; on the contrary, only the mirroring of the will through life would be checked.

Genuine goodness of disposition, disinterested virtue, and pure nobleness of mind, therefore, do not come from abstract knowledge; yet they do come from knowledge. But it is a direct and intuitive knowledge that cannot be reasoned away or arrived at by reasoning; a knowledge that, just because it is not abstract, cannot be communicated, but must dawn on each of us. It therefore finds its real and adequate expression not in words, but simply and solely in deeds, in conduct, in the course of a man's life. We who are here looking for the theory of virtue, and who thus have to express in abstract terms the inner nature of the knowledge lying at its foundation, shall nevertheless be unable to furnish that knowledge itself in this expression, but only the concept of that knowledge. We thus always start from conduct, in which alone it becomes visible, and refer to such conduct as its only adequate expression. We only interpret and explain this expression, in other words, express in the abstract what really takes place in it.