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What Is Insight?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

William Marias Malisoff
William Marias Malisoff*
Affiliation:
Polytechnic Institute, Brooklyn, N. Y.
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Extract

Philosophers are often praised for their insight even if they are found wanting in their powers of analysis. The noble edifices of thought raised by the famous have been reduced to more or less noble ruins, if we consider what disintegrating, analytical time and tide have done to the weaker members of the structures. Some of the palaces of thought even seem to stand without any foundations. Yet they stand. They are admired no longer for their utility or for their massiveness, but for the beauty of their conception. Their conception is said to represent the insight of their authors.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , April 1940 , pp. 135 - 139
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1940

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References

1, 2, 3 (1) What is an Atom? Philosophy of Science 6, 261-5 (1939).

(2) What is a Gene? Philosophy of Science 6, 385-9 (1939).

(3) What is a Monad? Philosophy of Science 7, 1-6 (1940).

4 Loc. cit.

5 Conjugates are inseparable pairs of terms as up-down, here-there, now-then.

6 The German original for “empathy” is “Einfühlung” and is featured (e.g. by Lipps) as the outstanding essential of the appreciation of art. It is “putting ourselves inside” of things. Perhaps a clue comes from Lotze who discovers a “projection of our inner experience into the forms which we see and realize.” Groos uses the term “inner mimicry.” An experimentalist, Vernon Lee, puts it in physiological terms: “We follow lines by muscular adjustments more considerable than those of the eye and these muscular adjustments result in a sense of direction and velocity in ourselves and a consequent attribution of direction and velocity to the lines perceived.”

7 If one who shows sympathy is a sympathizer, one who practices empathy might as well be an “empathizer.”

8 The numbering of all the points on a line involves the full problem of the continuum which seems to be inexhaustible.