“Life in itself is neither good nor evil. It is the place of good and evil, according to what you make it.” — Michel de Montaigne: Essays
“For it is one thing to know, and another to love; one thing to understand, and another to will. I don’t deny that [Aristotle] teaches us the nature of virtue. But reading him offers us none of those exhortations, or only a very few, that goad and inflame our minds to love virtue and hate vice […] What good is there in knowing what virtue is, if this knowledge doesn’t make us love it? What point is there in knowing vice, if this knowledge doesn’t make us shun it? By heaven, if the will is corrupt, an idle and irresolute mind will take the wrong path when it discovers the difficulty of the virtues and the alluring ease of the vices.” — Francesco Petrarca: De sui ipsius et multorum aliorum ignorantia
“There are scholars for whom the history of philosophy (ancient as well as modern) is itself their philosophy; the present prolegomena have not been written for them. They must wait until those who endeavour to draw from the wellsprings of reason itself have finished their business, and then it will be their turn to bring news of these events to the world. Otherwise, in their opinion nothing can be said that has not already been said before; and in fact this opinion can stand for all time as an infallible prediction, for since the human understanding has wandered over countless subjects in various ways through many centuries, it can hardly fail that for anything new something old should be found that has some similarity with it.” — Immanuel Kant: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will be Able to Come Forward as Science
“Almost all our discoveries are due to our violence, to the exacerbation of our instability. Even God, insofar as He interests us – it is not in our innermost selves that we discern God, but at the extreme limits of our fever, at the very point where, our rage confronting His, a shock results, an encounter as ruinous for Him as for us.” — Émile Michel Cioran: ‘Thinking Against Oneself’
“The notion that truths external to the human mind may be known by intuition or consciousness, independently of observation and experience, is, I am persuaded, in these times, the great intellectual support of false doctrines and bad institutions.” — John Stuart Mill: Autobiography
Ernst Bloch, photographed by Ernst Bloch
“Oh! I see my life clearly now […] a passionate, frantic search. […] I didn’t know that one could dream of death by metaphysical despair; sacrifice everything to the desire to know. […] I didn’t know that every system is an ardent, tormented thing, an effort of life, of being, a drama in the full sense of the word, and that it does not engage only the abstract intelligence. But I know it now, and that I can no longer do anything else.” — Simone de Beauvoir: The Coming of Age (translated by Patrick O’Brian)
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Structuralism’s basic ontological assumptions are as follows:
(1) There are scientific theories (in at least three different senses of the term ‘theory’).
(2) Scientific theories are cultural objects of a rather abstract kind in the sense that they are not spatiotemporally localized the way macroscopic physical objects are. Their ontological status is similar to that of other abstract cultural objects like languages [..], symphonies, computer programs, and the like.
(3) In a way similar to other abstract cultural objects, scientific theories have a ‘deep structure’. This means that their identity criteria and essential components cannot be detected in a straightforward manner by just ‘looking at’ the surface appearance of the concrete objects (e.g scientific texts) instantiating them. To display them is a non-trivial task.
(4) Scientific theories are genidentical entities. They have a ‘life’ of their own, like persons or nations do.
(5) Scientific theories are not ‘monads’. They are essentially related to things outside themselves. At least part of this outside world consists of other scientific theories. This means that there are intertheoretical relations and that they belong to the ‘essence’ of scientific theories.
As for structuralism’s specific methodology, its choice is, in part, prompted by the previous ontological assumptions.
(6) The best way to reveal the deep structure of a scientific theory as an abstract entity is by means of formal analysis. As far as possible, formal techniques of analysis and reconstruction should be preferred to explications in ordinary language. […]
(7) More specifically, given the kind of conceptual analysis required by structuralism, the most adequate formal tool, because of its universal character, appears to be set theory. […]
” — Carlos Ulises Moulines: ‘Structuralism: The Basic Ideas’