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🦋 Aristotelians and Platonists
In his note on "Jorge Luis Borges and William James" (pdf), Jaime Nubiola quotes a passage from Borges' introduction to a Spanish translation of James' Pragmatism. Very nice: I now understand a little better than I ever did before the common distinction between "Aristotelians" and "Platonists". (Also, I never realized this distinction was Coleridge's coinage.) This paragraph is useful in reading Borges' lectures on Emanuel Swedenborg and on Immortality.
Coleridge observes that all men are born Aristotelians
or Platonists. The latter feel that ideas are realities: the
former, that they are generalizations. For the latter,
language is nothing but a system of arbitrary symbols:
for the former, it is the map of the universe. The Platonist
knows that the universe is somehow a cosmos,
an order; that order, for the Aristotelian, can be an
error or a fiction of our partial knowledge. Across the
latitudes and the epochs, the two immortal antagonists
change their name and language: one is Parmenides,
Plato, Anselm, Leibnitz, Kant, Francis Bradley; the
other, Heraclitus, Aristotle, Roscelin, Locke, Hume,
William James. (...) From 1889, this lucid tradition is
enriched with William James. Like Bergson, he fights
against positivism and against idealist monism. He
advocates, like Bergson, in favor of immortality and
freedom.
Here is the source for Coleridge making this observation: Table Talk of S.T. Coleridge, p. 102.
posted morning of Wednesday, February 25th, 2009
➳ More posts about Borges oral
➳ More posts about Jorge Luis Borges
➳ More posts about Readings
➳ More posts about Varieties of Religious Experience
➳ More posts about Philosophy
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