버트란트 러셀, 서양 철학사. 서문 및 그리스 철학 (Bertrand Russell - A History of Western Philosophy)

****Bertrand Russell, A History of Western Philosophy

 

 

 

---Introductory--

 

*Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge-so I should contend-belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy. (xiii)

 

 

 

*Uncertainty, in the presence of vivid hopes and fears, is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales. It is not good either to forget the questions that philosophy asks, or to persuade ourselves that we have found indubitable answers to them. To teach how to live without certainty, and yet without being paralyzed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it. (xiv)

 

 

 

*Throughout this long [historical] development, from 600 B. C. to the present day, philosophers have been divided into those who wished to tighten social bonds and those who wished to relax them. (xxii)

 

 

 

*Every community is exposed to two opposite dangers: ossification through too much discipline and reverence for tradition, on the one hand; on the other hand, dissolution, or subjection to foreign conquest, through the growth of an individualism and personal independence that make co-operation impossible. In general, important civilizations start with a rigid and superstitious system, gradually relaxed, and leading, at a certain stage, to a period of brilliant genius, while the good of the old tradition remains and the evil inherent in its dissolution has yet developed. But as the evil unfolds, it leads to anarchy, thence, inevitably, to a new tyranny, producing a new synthesis secured by a new system of dogma. The doctrine of liberalism is an attempt to escape from this endless oscillation. The essence of liberalism is an attempt to secure a social order not based on irrational dogma, and insuring stability without involving more restraints than are necessary for the preservation of the community. Whether this attempt can succeed only the future can determinate. (xxiii)

 

 

 

 

 

--Book one: Ancient Philosophy

 

--Part I. The Pre-Socratics

 

*The civilized man is distinguished from the savage mainly by prudence, or, to use a slightly wider term, forethought. He is willing to endure present pains for the sake of future pleasures, even if the future pleasures are rather distant. This habit began to be important with the rise of agriculture; no animal and no savage would work in the spring in order to have food next winter, except for a purely instinctive forms of action, such as bees making honey or squirrels burying nuts. In these cases, there is no forethought; there is a direct impulse to an act which, to the human spectator, is obviously going to prove useful later on. True forethought only arises when a man does something towards which no impulse urges him, because his reason tells him that he will profit by it at some future date. Hunting requires no forethought, because it is pleasurable; but tilling the soil is labour, and cannot be done from spontaneous impulse. (15)

 

 

 

(러셀이 베르나르의 [개미]를 읽어보았다면 위의 이야기를 쉽사리 할 수 있을까? 그리고 굶주린 배를 채우기 위해서 사냥하는 것이 즐거움일까? 며칠을 굶은 사자는 자신의 목숨을 연명하기 위해 온 힘을 모아 영양을 쫓는 것이 아닌가?)

 

 

 

*. . .Prudence may easily involve the loss of some of the best things in life. The worshipper of Bacchus reacts against prudence. In intoxication, physical or spiritual, he recovers an intensity of feeling which prudence had destroyed; he finds the world full of delight and beauty, and his imagination is suddenly liberated from the prison of every-day preoccupations. The Bacchic ritual produced what was called "enthusiasm," which means, etymologically, having the god enter into the worshipper, who believed that he became one with the god. Much of greatest in human achievement involves some element of intoxication [mental intoxication], some sweeping away of prudence by passion. Without the Bacchic element, life would be uninteresting; with it, it is dangerous. Prudence versus passion is a conflict that runs through history. It is not a conflict in which we ought to side with either party. (16)

 

 

 

*The Orphics were an ascetic sect; wine, to them, was only a symbol, as later in the Christian sacrament. The intoxication that they sought was that of "enthusiasm," of union with the god. They believed themselves, in this way, to acquire mystic knowledge not obtainable by ordinary means. This mystical element entered into Greek philosophy with Pythagoras, who was a reformer of Orphism, as Orpheus was a reformer of the religion of Bacchus. From Pythagoras Orphic elements entered into the philosophy of Plato, and from Plato into most later philosophy that was in any degree religious. (19)

 

 

 

*The Orphics, unlike the priests of Olympian cults, founded what we may call "churches," i. e. religious communities to which anybody, without distinction of race or sex, could be admitted by initiation, and from their influence arose the conception of philosophy as a way of life. (24)

 

 

 

*The speculations of Thales, Anaximander, and Anaximanes are to be regarded as scientific hypotheses, and seldom show any undue intrusion of anthropomorphic desires and moral ideas. The questions they asked were good questions, and their vigour inspired subsequent investigators.

 

The next stage in Greek philosophy, which is associated with the Greek cities in southern Italy, is more religious, and, in particular more Orphic--in some ways more interesting, admirable in achievement, but in spirit less scientific than that of the Milesians. (29)

 

 

 

*Pythagoreanism, he [Cornford] says, was a movement of reform in Orphism, and Orphism was a movement of reform in the worship of Dionysus. (32)

 

 

 

*Most sciences, at their inception, have been connected with some form of false belief, which gave them a fictitious value. Astronomy was connected with astrology, chemistry with alchemy. Mathematics was associated with a more refined type of error. Mathematical knowledge appeared to be certain, exact, and applicable to the real world; moreover it was obtained by mere thinking, without the need of observation. Consequently, it was thought to supply an ideal, from which every-day empirical knowledge fell short. It was supposed, on the basis of mathematics, that thought is superior to sense, intuition to observation. If the world of sense does not fit mathematics, so much the worse for the world of sense. In various ways, methods of approaching nearer to the mathematician's ideal were sought, and the resulting suggestions were the source of much that we mistake in metaphysical and theory of knowledge. This form of philosophy begins with Pythagoras. (35)

 

 

 

 

 

*The greatest discovery of Pythagoras, or of his immediate disciples, was the proposition about right-angled triangles, that the sum of the squares on the sides adjoining the right angle is equal to the square on the remaining side, the hypotenuse. The Egyptians had known that a triangle whose side are 3, 4, 5 has a right angle, but apparently the Greeks were the first to observe that + = , and acting on this suggestion, to discover a poof of the general proposition.

 

Unfortunately for Pythagoras, his theorem led at once to the discovery of incommensurables, which appeared to disprove his whole philosophy. In a right-angled isosceles triangle, the square on the hypotenuse is double of the square on either side. Let us suppose each side an inch long; then how long is the hypotenuse? Let us suppose its length is m/n inches. Then / =2. If m and n have a common factor, divide it out; then either m or n must be odd. Now = , therefore is even. therefore m is even; therefore n is odd. Suppose m=2p. Then 4 = , therefore =2 and therefore n is even, contra hyp. Therefore no fraction m/n will measure the hypotenuse. The above proof is substantially that in Euclid, Book X. (35--36)

 

 

 

<번역 및 해설>

 

피타고라스 혹은 그의 직계 제자들의 가장 큰 발견은 직각 삼각형에 관한 명제, 즉 직각과 인접하는 변들의 제곱의 합은 나머지 한 변, 그러니까 빗변의 제곱과 같다는 것이다. 각변이 3, 4, 5인 삼각형이 직각 삼각형이라는 것은 이집트 인들이 알았으나, + = 라는 것을 처음으로 관찰한 것은 분명 그리스 인들이었으며, 이 사실에 착안하여, 일반 명제의 증명을 발견하게 되었다.

 

피타고라스로 봐서는 불행하게도, 그의 정리(theorem)가 곧바로 약분할 수 없는 수(역주:무리수)의 발견으로 이어졌고, 이 사실은 그의 전 철학이 그릇되었음을 입증하는 듯이 보였다. 직각 이등변 삼각형의 경우, 빗변의 제곱은 각변의 제곱의 두 배이다(역주: 이등변 삼각형이니까 당연한 말이다). 그렇다면 각변이 1인치라고 상정을 해보자: 이 때 빗변의 길이는 얼마인가? 그 길이가 m/n이라고 가정하자. 그렇다면 / =2이다. 만일 m과 n에 공약수가 있다면 나눠나가도록 하자. 그러면 m 이나 n 둘 중에 하나는 홀수일 것이다(역주:물론 둘 다 홀수라고 생각을 해볼 수도 있다). 따라서 = 이고, 당연히 은 짝수이다. 물론 m도 짝수이다; 따라서 n은 홀수이다. 그 다음m=2p라고 가정을 해보자. 그러면 4 = 이다. 따라서 =2 이고, 당연히 n은 짝수이다. 결국 가정은 모순에 봉착하게 되고 만다. 따라서 어떤 분수 m/n도 빗변을 잴 수가 없다. 이 증명은 유클리드 제 10권의 주된 내용이다. (35--36)

 

 

 

(정확히 이해했다고 보지는 않지만 이 사실과 다른 여타 해명 불가능한 문제들로 피타고라스는 신비주의적이고 종교적인입장에 빠져들었고, 플라톤 또한 이러한 신비주의적이고 종교적인 입장을 받아들였으며, 이러한 입장이 서구 기독교의 전통으로 이어지고 있다고 러셀은 파악하고 있는 듯함.)

 

 

 

*Mathematics is, I believe, the chief source of the belief in eternal and exact truth, as well as in a super-sensible intelligible world. (37)

 

 

 

*. . . Rationalistic as opposed to apocalyptic religion has been, ever since Pythagoras, and notably ever since Plato, very completely dominated by mathematics and mathematical method.

 

The combination of mathematics and theology, which began with Pythagoras, characterized religious philosophy in Greece, in the Middle Ages, and in modern times down to Kant. Orphism before Pythagoras was analogous to Asiatic mystery religions. But in Plato, Saint Augustine, Thomas Aqunas, Descartes, Spinoza, and Kant there is an intimate blending of religion and reasoning, of moral aspiration with logical admiration of what is timeless, which come from Pythagoras, and distinguishes the intellectualized theology of Europe from the most straightforward mysticism of Asia. It is only in quite recent times that it has been possible to say clearly where Pythagoras was wrong. I do not know of any other man who has been as influential as he was in the sphere of thought. I say this because what appears as Platonism is, when analysed, found to be in essence Pythagoreanism. The whole conception of an eternal world, revealed to the intellect but not to the senses, is derived from him. But for him, Christians would not have thought of Christ as the Word; but for him, theologians would not have sought logical proofs of God and immortality. (37)

 

 

 

*Now almost all the hypotheses that have dominated modern philosophy were first thought of by the Greeks; their imaginative inventiveness in abstract matters can hardly be too highly praised. (38)

 

 

 

*Geometry, in particular, is a Greek invention, without which modern science would have been impossible. But in connection with mathematics the one-sideness of the Greek genius appears: it reasoned deducdtively from what appeared self-evident, not inductively from what had been observed. (39)

 

 

 

*The wisest man is an ape compared to God, just as the most beautiful ape is ugly compared to man. (Heraclitus, 44)

 

 

 

*The search for something permanent is one of the deepest of the instincts leading men to philosophy. It is derived, no doubt, from love of home and desire for a refuge from danger; we find, accordingly, that it is most passionate in those whose lives are most exposed to catastrophe. Religion seeks permanence in two forms, God and immortality. (45)

 

 

 

*Nothing daunted, the physicists invented new and smaller units, called electrons and protons, out of which atoms were composed; and these units were supposed, for a few years, to have the indestructibility formerly attributed to atoms. Unfortunately it seemed that protons and electrons could meet and explode, forming, not new matter, but a wave of energy spreading through the universe with the velocity of light. Energy had to replace matter as what is permanent. But energy, unlike matter, is not a refinement of the common-sense notion of a "thing"; it is merely a characteristic of physical processes. It might be fancifully identified with the heraclitean Fire, but it is the burning, not what burns. "What burns" has disappeared from modern physics. (47)

 

 

 

*What makes Parmenides historically important is that he invented a form of metaphysical argument that, in one form or another, is to be found in most subsequent metaphysicians down to and including Hegel. He is often said to have invented logic, but what he really invented was metaphysics based on logic. (48)

 

 

 

*"The thing that can be thought and that for the sake of which the thought exists is the same; for you cannot find thought without something that is, as to which it is uttered." (Parmenides)

 

The essence of this argument is: When you think, you think of something; when you use a name, it must be the name of something. Therefore both thought and language require objects outside themselves. And since you can think of a thing or speak of it at one time as well as at another, whatever can be thought of or spoken of must exist at all times. Consequently there can be no change, since change consists in things coming into being or ceasing to be.

 

This is the first example in philosophy of an argument from thought and language to the world at large. It cannot of course be accepted as valid, but it is worth while to see what element of truth it contains. (49)

 

 

 

*Parmenides assumes that words have a constant meaning; this is really the basis of his argument, which he supposes unquestionable. But although the dictionary or the encyclopaedia gives what may be called the official and socially sanctioned meaning of a word, not two people who use the same word have just the same thought in their minds.

 

George Washington himself could use his name and the word "I" as synonyms. He could perceive his own thoughts and the movements of his body, and could therefore use his name with a fuller meaning than was possible for any one else. His friends, when in his presence, could perceive the movements of his body, and could divine his thoughts; to them, the name "George Washington" still denoted something concrete in their own experience. After his death they had to substitute memories for perceptions, which involved a change in the mental processes taking place when they used his name. For us, who never knew him, the mental processes are again different. We may think of his picture, and say to ourselves "yes, that man." We may think "the first President of the United States." If we are very ignorant, he may be to us merely "The man who was called 'George Washington.'" Whatever the name suggests to us, it must be not the man himself, since we never knew him, but something now present to sense or memory or thought. This shows the fallacy of the argument of Parmenides. (51)

 

 

 

*What subsequent philosophy, down to quite modern times, accepted from Parmenides, was not the impossibility of all change, which was too violent a paradox, but the indestructibility of substance. The word "substance" did not occur in his immediate successors, but the concept is already present in their speculations. A substance was supposed to be the persistent subject of varying predicates. (52)

 

 

 

*The most famous passage in Plato, in which he compares this world to a cave, in which we see only shadows of the realities in the bright world above, is anticipated by Empedocles; its origin is in the teaching of the Orphics. (57)

 

 

 

*Leucippus, if not Democritus, was led to atomism in the attempt to mediate between monism and pluralism, as represented by Parmenides and Empedocles respectively. (65)

 

 

 

*Causation must start from something, and wherever it starts no cause can be assigned for the initial datum. The world may be attributed to a Creator, but even then the Creator Himself is unaccounted for. The theory of the atomists, in fact, was more nearly that of modern science than any other theory propounded in antiquity.

 

The atomists, unlike Socrates, and Aristotle, sought to explain the world without introducing the notion of purpose or final cause. The "final cause" of an occurrence is an event in the future for the sake of which the occurrence take place. In human affairs, this conception is applicable. Why does the baker make bread? Because people will be hungry. Why are railway built? Because people will wish to travel. In such cases, things are explained by the purpose they serve. When we ask "why?" concerning an event, we may mean either of two things. We may mean: "What purpose did this event serve?" or we may mean: "What earlier circumstances caused this event? The answer to the former question is a teleological explanation, or an explanation by final causes; the answer to the latter questions a mechanistic explanation. I do not see how it could have been known in advance which of these two questions science ought to ask, or whether ought to ask both. But experience has shown that the mechanistic question leads to scientific knowledge, while the teleological question does not. The atomists asked the mechanistic question, and gave a mechanistic answer. Their successors, until the Renaissance, were more interested in the teleological question, and thus led science up a blind alley.

 

In regard to both questions alike, there is a limitation which is often ignored, both in popular thought and in philosophy. Neither question can be asked intelligibly about reality as a whole (including God), but only about parts of it. As regards the teleological explanation, it usually arrives, before long, at a Creator, or at least an Artificer, whose purposes are realized in the course of nature. But if a man is so obstinately teleological as to continue to ask what purpose is served by the Creator, it becomes obvious that his question is impious. It is, moreover, unmeaning, since, to make it significant, we should have to suppose the Creator created by some super-Creator whose purposes He served. The conception of purpose, therefore, is only applicable within reality, not to reality as a whole.

 

A not dissimilar argument applies to mechanistic explanations. one event is caused by another, the other by a third, and so on. but if we ask for a cause of the whole, we are driven again to the Creator, who must Himself be uncaused. All causal explanations, therefore, must have an arbitrary beginning. That is why it is no defect in the theory of the atomists to have left the original movements of the atoms unaccounted for. (66--7)

 

 

 

*Descartes, whose arguments are of just the same sort as those of early Greek philosophers, said that extension is the essence of matter, and therefore there is matter everywhere. For him, extension is an adjective, not a substantive; its substantive is matter, and without its substantive it cannot exist. Empty space, to him, is as absurd as happiness without a sentient being who is happy. Leibniz, on somewhat different grounds, also believed in the plenum, but he maintained that space is merely a system of relations. on this subject there was a famous controversy between him and Newton, the latter represented by Clarke. The controversy remained undecided until the time of Einstein, whose theory conclusively gave the victory to Leibniz.

 

The modern physicist, while he still believes that matter is in some sense atomic, does not believe in empty space. Where there is not matter, there is still something, notably light-waves. Matter no longer has the lofty status that it acquired in philosophy through the arguments of Parmenides. It is not unchanging substance, but merely a way of grouping events. Some events belong to groups that can be regarded as material things; others, such as light-waves, do not. It is the events that are the stuff of the world, and each of them is of brief duration. In this respect, modern physics is on the side of Heraclitus as against Parmenides. But it was on the side of Parmenides until Einstein and quantum theory.

 

As regards space, the modern view is that it is neither a substance, as Newton maintained, and as Leucippus and Democritus ought to have said, nor an adjective of extended bodies, as Descartes thought, but a system of relations, as Leibniz held. It is not by any means clear whether this view is compatible with the existence of the void. Perhaps, as a matter of abstract logic, it can be reconciled with the void. We might say that, between any two things, there is a certain greater or smaller distance, and that distance does not imply the existence of intermediate things. Such a point of view, however, would be impossible to utilize in modern physics. Since Einstein, distance is between events, not between things, and involves time as well as space. (70-71)

 

 

 

*"With regard to the gods, I cannot feel sure either that they are or that they are not, nor what they are like in figure; for there are many things that hinder sure knowledge, the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of human life."

 

(Protagoras, 77)

 

 

 

*The Sophists were prepared to follow an argument wherever it might lead them. Often it led them to scepticism. one of them, Gorgias, maintained that nothing exist; that if anything exists, it is unknowable; and granting it even to exist and to be knowable by any one man, he could never communicate it to others. (78)

 

 

 

*One of the defects of all philosophers since Plato is that their inquiries into ethics proceed on the assumption that they already know the conclusions to be reached. (79)

 

 

 

*A stupid man's report of what a clever man says is never accurate, because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something that he can understand. (83)

 

 

 

*The oracle of Delphi, it appears, was once asked if there were any man wiser than Socrates, and replied that there was not. Socrates professes to have been completely puzzled, since he knew nothing, and yet a god cannot lie. He therefore went about among men reputed wise, to see whether he could convict the god of error. First he went to a politician, who "was thought wise by many, and still wiser by himself." He soon found that the man was not wise, and explained this to him, kindly but firmly, "and the consequence was that he hated me." He then went to the poets, and asked them to explain passages in their writings, but they were unable to do so. "Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration." Then he went to the artisans, but found them equally disappointing. In the process, he says, he made many dangerous enemies. Finally he concluded that "God only is wise; and by his answer he intends to show that the wisdom of men is worth little or nothing; he is not speaking of Socrates, he is only using my name by way of illustration, as if he said, He, O men, is the wisest, who, like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing." This business of showing up pretenders to wisdom takes up all his time, and has left him in utter poverty, but he feels it a duty to vindicate the oracle. (summary from Apology, 86)

 

 

 

*Fear of death is not wisdom, since no one knows whether death may not be the greater good. (From Apology, 87)

 

 

 

*One morning he was thinking about something which he could not resolve; he would not give it up, but continued thinking from early dawn until noon--there he stood fixed in thought; and at noon attention was drawn to him, and the rumour ran through the wondering crowd that Socrates had been standing and thinking about something ever since the break of day. At last, in the evening after supper, some Ionians out of curiosity (I should explain that this occurred not in winter but in summer), brought out their mats and slept in the open air that they might watch him and see whether he would stand all night. There he stood until the following morning; and with the return of light he offered up a prayer to the sun, and went his way. (From Symposium, 90)

 

 

 

*The Platonic Socrates anticipates both the Stoics and the Cynics. The Stoics held that the supreme good is virtue, and that a man cannot be deprived of virtue by outside causes; this doctrine is implicit in the contention of Socrates that his judges cannot harm him. The Cynics despised worldly goods, and showed their contempt by eschewing the comforts of civilization; this is the same point of view that led Socrates to go barefoot and ill-clad. (91)

 

 

 

*The close connection between virtue and knowledge is characteristics of Socrates and Plato. To some degree, it exists in all Greek thought, as opposed to that of Christianity. In Christian ethics, a pure heart is the essential, and is at least as likely to be found among the ignorants as among the learned. This difference between Greek and Christian ethics has persisted down to the present day. (92)

 

 

 

*No one thinks it unjust to put the best men into a football team, although they acquire thereby a great superiority. If football were managed as democratically as the Athenian government, the students to play for their university would be chosen by lot. But in matters of government it is difficult to know who has the most skill, and very far from certain that a politician will use his skill in the public interest rather than in his own or in that of his class or party or creed.

 

--Plato's Utopia, 115

 

 

 

*On question of fact, we can appeal to science and scientific methods of observation; but on ultimate questions of ethics there seems to be nothing analogous.

 

--116

 

*There is, at this point, a difficulty which seems to have escaped Plato's notice, although it was evident to modern idealistic philosophers. We saw that God made only one bed, and it would be natural to suppose that he made only one straight line. But if there is a heavenly triangle, he must have made at least three straight lines. The objects of geometry, though ideal, must exist in many examples; we need the possibility of two intersecting circles, and so on.

 

--124, Idea론에 대한 반박

 

(참고: 최민홍은 intersecting circles를 원호라고 번역하고 있는데, 그것이 아니라 한 원과 다른 원을 가로지르는 그런 상황이라고 보아야 할 것이다.)

 

*Aristarchus of Samos found such a hypothesis: that all the planets, including the earth, go round the sun in circles. This view was rejected for two thousand years, partly on the authority of Aristotle, who attributes a rather similar hypothesis to "the Pythagoreans"

 

--131.

 

(참고: 플라톤이 선을 강조한 까닭에, 혹성들의 운행의 명백한 무질서함을 감소시킬 방안으로 가정한 것. 이 가정은 어쨌거나, 코페르니쿠스에 의해 타당한 것으로 입증되었다.)

 

*Socrates begins by maintaining that, though any one who has the spirit of philosophy will not fear death, but, on the contrary, will welcome it, yet he will not take his own life, for that is held to be unlawful. His friends inquire why suicide is held to be unlawful, and his answer, which is in accordance with Orphic doctrine, is almost exactly what a Christian might say. "There is a doctrine whispered in secret that man is a prisoner who has no right to open the door and run away; this is a great mystery which I do not quite understand." He compares the relation of man to God with that of cattle to their owner; you would be angry, he says, if your ox took the liberty of putting himself out of the way, and so "there may be reason in saying that a man should wait, and not take his own life until God summons him, as he is now summoning me."

 

--134

 

(소크라테스가 독배를 들기전에 친구에게 하는 말, 따옴표는 Phaedo에서 직접 인용된 부분.)

 

*The distinction between mind and matter, which has become a commonplace in philosophy and science and popular thought, has a religious origin, and began as the distinction of soul and body. The Orphic, as we saw, proclaims himself the child of earth and of the starry heaven; from earth comes the body, from heaven the soul. It is this theory that Plato seeks to express in the language of philosophy.

 

--134

 

*Unlike some of his predecessors, he was not scientific in his thinking, but was determined to prove the universe agreeable to his ethical standards. This is treachery to truth, and the worst of philosophic sins.

 

--142

 

(여기서 he는 플라톤의 저작에 등장하는, 다시 말해 플라톤이 제시하고 있는 소크라테스이다.)

 

*The percept is just an occurrence, and neither true nor false; the percept as filled out with words is a judgment, and capable of truth or falsehood. This judgment I call a "judgment of perception."

 

--153(Knowledge and Perception in Plato)

 

(최민홍은 percept를 ‘지각 표상’으로 옮기고 있다.)

 

*Suppose you say to a child "lions exist, but unicorns don't," you can prove your point so far as lions are concerned by taking him to the Zoo and saying "look, that's a lion." You will not, unless you are a philosopher, add: "And you can see that that exists." If, being a philosopher, you do add this, you are uttering nonsense. To say "lions exist" means "there are lions," i.e. "'x is a lion' is true for a suitable x." But we cannot say of the suitable x that it "exists" ; we can only apply this verb to a description, complete or incomplete. "Lion" is an imcomplete description, because it applies to many objects: "The largest lion in the Zoo" is complete, because it applies to only one object.

 

Now suppose that I am looking at a bright red patch. I may say "this is my present percept"; I may also say "my present percept exists"; but I must not say "this exists," because the word "exists" is only significant when applied to a description as opposed to a name. This disposes of existence as one of the things that the mind is aware of in objects.

 

--155(Knowledge and Perception in Plato)

 

*The relation of the symbol "two" to the meaning of a proposition in which it occurs is far more complicated than the relation of the symbol "red" to the meaning of a proposition in which it occurs.

 

--156(Knowledge and Perception in Plato)

 

*Plato, under the influence of the Pythagoreans, assimilated other knowledge too much to mathematics. He shared this mistake with many of the greatest philosophers, but it was a mistake none the less.

 

--159(Knowledge and Perception in Plato)