"My table is now brightly, now dimly lighted. Its temperature varies. It may receive an ink stain. One of its legs may be broken. It may be repaired, polished, and replaced part by part. But, for me, it remains the table at which I daily write"
About this Quote
Mach takes the most boring object in the room and turns it into a grenade tossed at “common sense.” A table, he notes, is never simply a stable thing: its brightness shifts with the hour, its warmth with the season, its surface with accidents and repairs. If you take experience seriously, the table is a stream of changing sensations and practical encounters, not an unchanging nugget of “table-ness” hidden behind them.
The sly move is the last line: “for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.” Identity, Mach suggests, is not a property lodged inside matter but a function of continuity in use, memory, and habit. The table persists because it plays the same role in his life, even if it has been sanded down, re-legged, and swapped out “part by part” like a domestic Ship of Theseus. That “for me” is doing heavy philosophical work: objecthood is anchored in the human standpoint, not in metaphysical permanence.
Context matters. Mach was a major critic of Newtonian absolutes and a key influence on early logical positivism; he wanted science to keep its feet on observable relations, not occult substances. The quote reads like a lab-note version of that program: stay close to what is given (light, temperature, stains), distrust claims about what the table “really is” beyond experience, and admit that our categories are tools. There’s a quiet provocation here, too: if a table’s identity is stitched together by practice, what about the self doing the writing?
The sly move is the last line: “for me, it remains the table at which I daily write.” Identity, Mach suggests, is not a property lodged inside matter but a function of continuity in use, memory, and habit. The table persists because it plays the same role in his life, even if it has been sanded down, re-legged, and swapped out “part by part” like a domestic Ship of Theseus. That “for me” is doing heavy philosophical work: objecthood is anchored in the human standpoint, not in metaphysical permanence.
Context matters. Mach was a major critic of Newtonian absolutes and a key influence on early logical positivism; he wanted science to keep its feet on observable relations, not occult substances. The quote reads like a lab-note version of that program: stay close to what is given (light, temperature, stains), distrust claims about what the table “really is” beyond experience, and admit that our categories are tools. There’s a quiet provocation here, too: if a table’s identity is stitched together by practice, what about the self doing the writing?
Quote Details
| Topic | Deep |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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