Possibility
Cód:
491_9781406745986
International Library of Psychology Philosophy and Scientific Method Possibility Possibility By SCOTT BUCHANAN LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER Co., LTD. NEW YORK HARCOURT, BRACE COMPANY, INC. 1927 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE 9 INTRODUCTION i I. INTELLECTUAL IMAGINATION . 17 II. SCIENTIFIC POSSIBILITY . . 33 III. ABSOLUTE POSSIBILITY . . 67 IV. DEFINITION OF POSSIBILITY . 81 V. POSSIBILITY AND ACTUALITY . 97 APOLOGY FOR HISTORICAL PIRACY . . . . in VI. KANT .... 115 VII. ARISTOTLE . . . .141 VIII. DYNAMISM .... 161 IX. CONCLUSION . . . .177 INDEX 197 POSSIBILITY INTRODUCTION THE life of man might be portrayed as a series of rebirths, each of which consists in a passage from one world into another. The state of affairs at any given instant is an unstable equilibrium between opposing forces and values. One lives in one world and believes in another, suffering this and at the same time expecting or desiring that. It would seem highly important to know which world this is, and to be able to describe that. But most of us are hard-pressed when we are compelled to do so. Even poets and prophets, whose business it is to speak of such matters, admit the difficulty. Some years ago Walter De la Mare wrote an essay on the Intellectual Imagination. It was originally an address at Eton on the occasion of a memorial service to Rupert Brooke. It was an attempt to capture the spirit of a young man who died before his poetry had disclosed the height and depth of the world in which he lived. What he had expressed was enough to place him among those artists, who instead of taking permanent flight from this world, are content to see the commonplace in the shifting crosslights POSSIBILITY of the ideal. The result was an intellectual insight which only philosophers are supposed to achieve in rare moments of clarity. The majority of persons achieve something less. The other world is for them a heaven, sometimes distant and unreal, at other times just round the corner. If it is near, t
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