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I ask the above since I believe I have stumbled across a philosopher who puts forth a circular argument (which can be represented by a similar statement).

Christopher Janaway writes that “Schopenhauer states that the thing-in-itself is the inner essence or common substance found empirically in appearances, with this essence (conditioned by time) as the will. Will is itself an appearance since it is conditioned by time.”

This strikes me as circular (or otherwise something is logically fallacious):

(i.) the thing-in-itself is the inner essence. (ii.) will is the inner essence. (iii.) will= the thing-in-itself. (iv.) will is found in will= appearance is found in appearance?

Thank you in advance for any feedback.

Mauro ALLEGRANZA
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rux23
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  • I hope it means something very deep, Lord know what that is. –  Feb 28 '22 at 15:44
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    Take the apparent contradiction 'There's more to life than life.' It can make sense if we're using different senses of 'life' here, polysemy-with-hypernymy. A paraphrase is 'There's [potentially, at least] an awful lot more we can experience / be aware of / pursue ... in our lives than the daily routine we often robotically accept as all there is'. The original is more punchy, but could be argued to violate the Gricean maxim of clarity. –  Feb 28 '22 at 15:49
  • This might be better posted on Philosophy SE. Janaway is probably not giving the full argument that Schopenhauer presented across multiple works. – Stuart F Feb 28 '22 at 16:00
  • An argument can be "logically fallacious"; a statement is... a statement, and it is either true or false. – Mauro ALLEGRANZA Feb 28 '22 at 16:13
  • @Mauro ALLEGRANZA 12 mins ago But is 'Love is found in love' classed as a statement or an argument? 'This statement is false' is a declarative sentence making two claims (This declarative sentence carries a 'statement' / This particular 'statement' is false). – Edwin Ashworth Feb 28 '22 at 16:28
  • The quoted text is not syntactically circular. He states thing-in-itself is defined as (that x such that inner-essence(x) and found-empirically-in-experience(x)) and conditioned-by-time(thing-in-itself) and thing-in-itself=will and conditioned-by-time(will). – David Gudeman Mar 01 '22 at 00:31
  • he makes the claim that will is thing-in-itself. Will is appearance. thus thing-in-itself is appearance...will (thing in itself) is appearance. or is he talking of another appearance (other than will)? his distinctions are not clear. – rux23 Mar 02 '22 at 08:39

1 Answers1

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Answer

The appearance of circularity is only temporary. The paraphrase provides the resolution. What you have provided is called an elliptical construction. From your post and the resultant comments it seems according to Edwin Ashworth's comment* resolves to:

'There is more to life than life'.

simply resolves to:

'There is more to (living) life than (how you currently live) life.

* Take the apparent contradiction 'There's more to life than life.' It can make sense if we're using different senses of 'life' here, polysemy-with-hypernymy. A paraphrase is 'There's [potentially, at least] an awful lot more we can experience / be aware of / pursue ... in our lives than the daily routine we often robotically accept as all there is'. The original is more punchy, but could be argued to violate the Gricean maxim of clarity.

This is very typical of the Continental tradition, to arouse certain passions by challenging the intuition and to create apparent contradictions, then resolve them. It might be seen as an exercise in dialetheism. You'll find certain philosophers have different styles that sometimes frustrate philosophers of the analytic tradition who aspire to ordinary language philosophy.

  1. The use of historical context to validate claims about 'objective truths'. This is a habit of historicism.
  2. Repurposing languages to deliberately provoke the reader to think about the definition of the words being used, followed by defining new terms to differentiate the venacular from the jargon generally where the jargon creates a novel polysemy that is often more or less intuitional depending on a personal preference. A classic example of this is Heidegger's use of Being or Dasein which is a definition of 'being' that is neither quite 'being' nor quite 'existence', but arguably somewhere in between both conventional definitions.

On a ontological note, it's often used to add a dimension such as temporality to an atemporal definition. For instance:

Argle: There's more to a child than a child.
Bargle: Isn't that a violation of the law of identity?
Argle: Not at all! Doesn't a child become an adult, and therefore every child is an adult-to-be?
Bargle: Certainly, if you're willing to dig up Heraclitus and his process philosophy to confuse me. Now why would you do that? Let's keep to the instaneous Platonic form, shall we?
Argle: Oh dear Bargle, Forms don't exist according to good science, and you know it.

J D
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  • There is more to (living) life than (how* you currently live) life. Until I just looked down, I'd never consciously realised how close n* and *h* are both in appearance *and* physical proximity on a qwerty keyboard! A bit more subtle than the *pwn / own* confusion! – FumbleFingers Feb 28 '22 at 19:10
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    @FumbleFingers Dang it. I corrected it from right to wrong this morning. :D I pwned myself, I guess. :D And that FumbleFingers pointed out my fumble fingers is particularly amusing. – J D Feb 28 '22 at 23:33