alles anderes ist Menschenwerk

English

Etymology

A corruption of German mathematician Leopold Kronecker's finite dictum “die ganzen Zahlen hat Gott gemacht; alles andere ist Menschenwerk” : “God made the integers; everything else is the work of man”. The reason for the addition of an "s" to "andere" ("anderes" is grammatically incorrect and not present in the German phrase) is unclear.

Phrase

alles anderes ist Menschenwerk

1. “Everything else is the work of man.” “Everything else is a human construct.”
   • 1972, Bernard Williams, Morality (1993 Canto edition, →ISBN, chapter 2: “Subjectivism: First thoughts”, pages 14–15

     Yet in its inadequate way it seems to gesture towards something which is closest of all to what has concerned many who have been worried about moral objectivity: the idea that there is no moral order ‘out there’ – out there, in the world, are only the sorts of things and the sorts of facts that science, and the more everyday processes of human enquiry of which science is a refinement, deal. Alles anderes ist Menschenwerk. Statement (c) [There are no moral facts; there are only the sorts of facts that science or common observation can discover, and the values that men place on those facts.] can be said – using the word in an unambitious way – to express a metaphysical view.

   • 1980, Don S. Mannison, Michael A. McRobbie, R. Routley, Richard Sylvan, editors, Environmental Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences Canberra Department of Philosophy, →ISBN, page 187, →ISBN:

     It would help overthrow the pernicious chauvinistic idea that, apart from certain elementary facts, Alles anderes ist Menschenwerk, all necessity, all intensionality, all value.

   • 1989, W. E. Morrow, Chains of Thought: Philosophical Essays in South African Education (Southern Book Publishers), page 41

     ‘Facts’ and ‘things’ are ‘out there’ in the world, alles anderes ist Menschenwerk.

Usage notes

In German, the phrase is "alles andere ist Menschenwerk"; "anderes" would be grammatically incorrect and is not used. English authors, however, often do use "anderes".