From Omni interview, "The Smartest Man in the World" (1979) or from the book p. 195.
The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999)
“You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and”
Richard Feynman, in The Pleasure of Finding Things Out (1999), Ch. 9. The Smartest Man in the World
Context: My son is taking a course in philosophy, and last night we were looking at something by Spinoza and there was the most childish reasoning! There were all these attributes, and Substances, and all this meaningless chewing around, and we started to laugh. Now how could we do that? Here's this great Dutch philosopher, and we're laughing at him. It's because there's no excuse for it! In the same period there was Newton, there was Harvey studying the circulation of the blood, there were people with methods of analysis by which progress was being made! You can take every one of Spinoza's propositions, and take the contrary propositions, and look at the world and you can't tell which is right.
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Baruch Spinoza 210
Dutch philosopher 1632–1677Related quotes
Baruch Spinoza
(1632–1677) Dutch philosopher
This proposition is infinitely important; only, negation as such is formless abstraction. However, speculative philosophy must not be charged with making negation or nothing an ultimate: negation is as little an ultimate for philosophy as reality is for it truth. Of this proposition that determinateness is negation, the unity of Spinoza's substance — or that there is only one substance — is the necessary consequence. Thought and being or extension, the two attributes, namely, which Spinoza had before him, he had of necessity to posit as one in this unity; for as determinate realities they are negations whose infinity is their unity. According to Spinoza's definition, of which more subsequently, the infinity of anything is its affirmation. He grasped them therefore as attributes, that is, as not having a separate existence, a self-subsistent being of their own, but only as sublated, as moments; or rather, since substance in its own self lacks any determination whatever, they are for him not even moments, and the attributes like the modes are distinctions made by an external intellect.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Science of Logic, 1812
G - L, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Ludwig Wittgenstein
(1889–1951) Austrian-British philosopher
Original German: Der Satz ist eine Wahrheitsfunktion der Elementarsätze
1920s, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922)
Blaise Pascal
(1623–1662) French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer, and Christian philosopher
The Art of Persuasion
Kenneth Arrow
(1921–2017) American economist
Kenneth Arrow, "Methodological Individualism and Social Knowledge", American Economic Review (1994)
1970s-1980s
Source: Language, Truth, and Logic (1936), p. 20.
Virchand Gandhi
(1864–1901) Jain scholar who represented Jainism at the first World Parliament of Religions in 1893
Christian Missions: A Triangular Debate, Before the Nineteenth Century Club of New York (1895)
“9 Proposition. Everie Seale must containe the Space of Seven yeares.”
John Napier
(1550–1617) Scottish mathematician
A Plaine Discovery of the Whole Revelation of St. John (1593), The First and Introductory Treatise
