Ideas such as love, hatred, courage, jealousy, and pride are all abstract. You may feel love or jealousy, or you may act courageously, but the single entity of love or jealousy or courage has no tangible existence. When a philosopher asks, "What is courage," and then refuses to take examples as an answer, he assumes the existence of an entity which he then takes it upon himself to define. These are the imagined abstractions. It's an old trick. Socrates was very good at it.
1) a function of philosophers in the first place, which makes the debate to test (rather than debate) them, fairly ironic, although I suppose it is the natural of philosopher as is the nature of science; or
2) they're a product of society, in which case, they are not ethical, but a justification for our natural behaviour which, most likely, came about during the days when society needed to find reason for the negativity they found in the human state.
However, that is not to say abstractions do not exist, but possibly, they are constructs instead that help us to define existing human states. After all, one of the biggest sciences yet to be understood is our own human mind.
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Imagined abstractions of what?
Ideas such as love, hatred, courage, jealousy, and pride are all abstract. You may feel love or jealousy, or you may act courageously, but the single entity of love or jealousy or courage has no tangible existence. When a philosopher asks, "What is courage," and then refuses to take examples as an answer, he assumes the existence of an entity which he then takes it upon himself to define. These are the imagined abstractions. It's an old trick. Socrates was very good at it.
Imagined abstractions are either;
1) a function of philosophers in the first place, which makes the debate to test (rather than debate) them, fairly ironic, although I suppose it is the natural of philosopher as is the nature of science; or
2) they're a product of society, in which case, they are not ethical, but a justification for our natural behaviour which, most likely, came about during the days when society needed to find reason for the negativity they found in the human state.
However, that is not to say abstractions do not exist, but possibly, they are constructs instead that help us to define existing human states. After all, one of the biggest sciences yet to be understood is our own human mind.
I think we're getting there on the mind, but some people aren't happy about what we're finding.
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