So much onto-psychology just for a puzzle about negation? Why not naturalize logic, and truth too? Kimhi acknowledges resistance to the putative uniqueness of thinking, then sets it aside. And beyond nature is … what? We have to use our imagination. Nature is a whole, but not the whole of being. He says nature does not include thinkers or thinking, which places human beings somewhere beyond nature. That sounds fine until we ask, What is this self-consciousness, and what is happening when one becomes self-aware of agreement or disagreement? Is that a natural activity like respiration or an evolved animal power like vision? Kimhi says the thinking in ' S thinks that p' is an activity sui generis, without analogy in living nature, a conclusion that is not available to anyone who takes Darwin seriously. There is no difference of content between S and not-S the difference lies entirely in the self-consciousness we bring to it. To brutally summarize, the idea is that to think what is not is to think what is, with a self-consciousness of disagreement.

This position is Kimhi's, as well as that of Parmenides, Plotinus, and Hegel, though I find Kimhi too discreet about the idealistic quality of the philosophy he explains. If I think it, truly think it, then it is. The truth of thinking (including thinking what is not) must depend on nothing but thinking itself, and the favorite way of explaining that proposition is to identify being with thought. The price they usually pay for their explanation is metaphysical idealism. Parmenides, the first of many who did, drew the conclusion that one simply cannot say or think what is not, admonishing followers: 'Say and think only this, being is.' The challenge philosophers inherit from Parmenides is to explain an account of thought and being that liberates negation from its ontological prison and lets it loose into the world again. No less fastidious a logician than Rudolf Carnap sneered at philosophers who take such trifles seriously. Wittgenstein called this state of affairs 'the mystery of negation.' In making a negative judgment, I can be right in what I say even though I say nothing at all. A negative judgment (' S is not p') says what is not the case, but since what is not the case is nothing and does not exist, a negative judgment says nothing and is not a judgment at all.

Irad kimhi pdf