Abstract

Abstract Reism or concretism are the labels for a position in ontology and semantics that is represented by various philosophers. As Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Jan Woleński have shown, there are two dimensions with which the abstract expression of reism can be made concrete: The ontological dimension of reism says that only things exist; the semantic dimension of reism says that all concepts must be reduced to concrete terms in order to be meaningful. In this paper we argue for the following two theses: (1) Arthur Schopenhauer has advocated a reistic philosophy of language which says that all concepts must ultimately be based on concrete intuition in order to be meaningful. (2) In his semantics, Schopenhauer developed a theory of logic diagrams that can be interpreted by modern means in order to concretize the abstract position of reism. Thus we are not only enhancing Jan Woleński’s list of well-known reists, but we are also adding a diagrammatic dimension to concretism, represented by Schopenhauer.

Highlights

  • In his article published in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the doctrine of reism, Jan Woleński remarks that it has been anticipated by a number of philosophers from antiquity to modernity

  • Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz and Woleński concretize the abstract concept of reism by dividing it into an ontological and a semantic dimension [1], [31]

  • We argue (1) that the above-given list should be enhanced by the name of the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who was born in Danzig in 1788 and died in Frankfurt in 1860, and who is for example known for having influenced Wittgenstein [18], [7]

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Summary

Introduction

In his article published in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the doctrine of reism, Jan Woleński remarks that it has been anticipated by a number of philosophers from antiquity to modernity. We argue for reism in Schopenhauer’s work and for the fact (2) that in his Berlin Lectures of the 1820s Schopenhauer has developed a diagrammatic method of concretization. We will develop a diagrammatic method that Schopenhauer used in his Berlin Lectures to illustrate his reistic doctrines. We argue that they can show another, namely diagrammatic dimension to understand the position of reism or concretism. These diagrams have already been introduced in [8] as a general tool for philosophy of language. The diagrammatic method has certain similarities to the diagram systems of e.g. Leonhard Euler, Immanuel Kant, and even John Venn, we use the term “Schopenhauer diagrams” to avoid further clarifying the relationship to already known logic diagrams

Schopenhauer’s Reist Philosophy of Language
Introduction to Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Language
Schopenhauer’s Theory of Concepts
Schopenhauer’s Reism
Schopenhauer Diagrams and Epistemological Concretism
An Introduction to Schopenhauer Diagrams
A Level Theory for Concretism
Concretion of Concretism with Schopenhauer Diagrams
Summary and Outlook
Full Text
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