Sheep magazine Archive 2: issues 10-17

There are no ideas in Bristol
only IDEALS
The word ‘idea’ can have a variety of meanings. It can refer to any content
of the mind, or the thought or mental representation of a particular
thing, or a plan or intention to do something, or the characterisation of
something in general terms, that is, a concept or category.
For Plato, reality consisted of immaterial universals that he called forms or
ideas. These were external to the mind, whereas for idealist philosophers,
there is no external reality separate from the ideas that occur within the
mind. Rationalists hold that we are born with certain innate ideas from
which all knowledge can be deduced, whereas empiricists reject innate
ideas, prefering that the mind only acquires ideas through experience of
the external world. Instrumentalists hold that ideas are no more than tools
for dealing with practical problems. from Big Ideas In Brief: Ian Crofton
23
Artwork: Alan Rutherford
‘A cabbage is truthful or not truthful (or both at once).
Therefore by infallible demonstration a cabbage is a liar. For
otherwise it will be both at once, which we know it cannot be,
or else it must be truthful, which we know it is not. QED’
F. H. Bradley disappearing up his own arsehole,
taken from volume 2 of Collected Works of F. H. Bradley,
published by Thoemmes Press, Bristol 1999.
THERE ARE NO IDEAS IN BRISTOL BECAUSE OLD BRISTOLIANS ADD AN ‘L’ TO SOME WORDS
mid-June 2016