HKB
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Often appears with: truth and dispute · translation and the transmission of texts · superstition · reason and the intellect · positive and negative · logic, method, and demonstration · life and death · language, naming, and meaning · indian texts · french royal library · ezourveidam · extreme examples
Usually: argument (1) · reflection (1) · crisis of belief (1) · censure (1) · irony (1) · skepticism (1)
Engels criticizes metaphysical reasoning (“yea, yea; nay, nay”) as unable to handle interrelations, using examples about life and death to show natural processes blur fixed oppositions.
and Locke, this point of view has been carried over from science into philosophy, and has constituted the specially narrow view of the last century, the metaphysical mode of thought. For the metaphysician, things and their pictures in the minds, concepts, are separate entities, one following the other without any regard to each other, stable, rigid, eternally fixed objects of investigation. The metaphysician thinks …
Voltaire ridicules the purported Indian text “Ezourveidam,” describing it as an ancient Brahmin commentary in the French king’s library, and turns to skepticism about whether Jews copied Indians or vice versa.
know if literature does good to a nation; compare the two extremes, Cicero and an uncouth ignoramus. See if it is Pliny or Attila who caused the fall of Rome. One asks if one should encourage superstition in the people; see above all what is most extreme in this disastrous matter, St. Bartholomew, the massacres in Ireland, the crusades; the question is soon answered. Is there any truth in metaphysics? Seize first o…