display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
5 ideas
| 7650 | All thought is feeling, and rationality is the sensitive soul contemplating reasoning [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: Thought is only a capacity to feel, and the rational soul is only the sensitive soul applied to the contemplation of ideas and to reasoning. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.33) | |
| A reaction: What a very nice idea. La Mettrie wants to bring us closer to animals. Because we can pursue a train of rational thought, it does not follow that we have a faculty called 'rationality'. A dog can follow a clever series of clues that lead to food. |
| 18409 | Indexicals apply to singular thought, and mental files have essentially indexical features [Recanati] |
| Full Idea: I defend the applicability of the indexical model to singular thought, and to mental files qua vehicles of singular thought. Mental files, I will argue, possess the essential features of indexicals. | |
| From: François Recanati (Mental Files [2012], 05.1) | |
| A reaction: I love mental files, but am now (thanks to Cappelen and Dever) deeply averse to giving great significance to indexicals. A revised account of files will be needed. |
| 22247 | Indexicality is not just a feature of language; examples show it also occurs in thought [Recanati] |
| Full Idea: People once took indexicality to be exclusively a property of language, ....but a series of examples seemed to establish that the thought expressed by uttering an indexical sentence is itself indexical (and is thus 'essential'). | |
| From: François Recanati (Mental Files in Flux [2016], 6.1) | |
| A reaction: Perry's example of not realising it is him leaking the sugar in a supermarket is the best known example. Was this a key moment for realising that philosophy of thought is (pace Dummett) more important than philosophy of language? |
| 22248 | How can we communicate indexical thoughts to people not in the right context? [Recanati] |
| Full Idea: Indexical thoughts create an obvious problem with regard to communication. How can we manage to communicate such thoughts to those who are not in the right context? | |
| From: François Recanati (Mental Files in Flux [2016], 7.1) | |
| A reaction: One answer is that you often cannot communicate them. If I write on a wall 'I am here now', that doesn't tell the next passer-by very much. But 'it's raining here' said in a telephone call works fine - if you know the location of the caller. |
| 16354 | Indexicality is closely related to singularity, exploiting our direct relations with things [Recanati] |
| Full Idea: Singularity and indexicality are closely related: for indexicals systematically exploit the contextual relations in which we stand to what we talk about. | |
| From: François Recanati (Mental Files [2012], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: Recanati builds a nice case that we may only have an ontology of singular objects because we conceptualise and refer to things in a particular way. He denies the ontology, but that's the bit that interests me. |