26 ideas
| 5988 | Anaximander produced the first philosophy book (and maybe the first book) [Anaximander, by Bodnár] |
| Full Idea: Anaximander was the first to produce a philosophical book (later conventionally titled 'On Nature'), if not the first to produce a book at all. | |
| From: report of Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE]) by István Bodnár - Anaximander | |
| A reaction: Wow! Presumably there were Egyptian 'books', but this still sounds like a stupendous claim to fame. |
| 1496 | The earth is stationary, because it is in the centre, and has no more reason to move one way than another [Anaximander, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Something which is established in the centre and has equality in relation to the extremes has no more reason to move up than it has down or to the sides (so the earth is stationary) | |
| From: report of Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE], A26) by Aristotle - On the Heavens 295b11 |
| 14874 | Anaximander saw the contradiction in the world - that its own qualities destroy it [Anaximander, by Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Anaximander discovers the contradictory character of our world: it perishes from its own qualities. | |
| From: report of Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE]) by Friedrich Nietzsche - Unpublished Notebooks 1872-74 19 [239] | |
| A reaction: A lovely gloss on Anaximander, though I am not sure that I understand what Nietzsche means. |
| 15127 | A categorical basis could hardly explain a disposition if it had no powers of its own [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: The categorical basis would be a poor explanans for the disposition as explanandum, if the categorical basis did not drag any causal powers along with it. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], 2.4) | |
| A reaction: The idea that the world is explained just by some basic stuff having qualities and relations always strikes me as wrong, because the view of nature is too passive. |
| 15123 | Is the causal profile of a property its essence? [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: We might say that the causal profile of a property is its essence. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I associate this view with Shoemaker, and find it sympathetic. We always want to know more. What gives rise to these causal powers? Where does explanation end? He notes that you might say some of the powers are non-essential. |
| 15122 | Could two different properties have the same causal profile? [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: If there is more to the nature of a property than the causal powers that it confers, then two different internal natures of properties might necessitate the same causal profile. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], Intro) | |
| A reaction: If the causal profiles were identical, it is hard to see how we could even propose, let alone test, their intrinsic difference. ...Unless, perhaps, we knew that the properties arose from different substrata. |
| 15124 | If properties are more than their powers, we could have two properties with the same power [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: If a property is something over and above its causal profile, we seem to have conceptual space for an electron to have negative charge 1 and negative charge 2, that have exactly the same causal powers. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], 1.3) |
| 14590 | If we accept scattered objects such as archipelagos, why not think of cars that way? [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: In being willing to countenance archipelagos, one embraces scattered objects. Why not then embrace the 'archipelago' of my car and the Eiffel Tower? | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Three-Dimensionalism v Four-Dimensionalism [2008], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This is a beautifully simple and striking point. Language is full of embracing terms like 'the furniture', but that doesn't mean we assume the furniture is unified. The archipelago is less of an 'object' if you live on one of the islands. |
| 15128 | We can treat the structure/form of the world differently from the nodes/matter of the world [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: It does not seem altogether arbitrary to treat the structure of the world (the 'form' of the world) in a different way to the nodes in the structure (the 'matter' of the world). | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: An interesting contemporary spin put on Aristotle's original view. Hawthorne is presenting the Aristotle account as a sort of 'structuralism' about nature. |
| 15121 | An individual essence is a necessary and sufficient profile for a thing [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: An individual essence is a profile that is necessary and sufficient for some particular thing. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], Intro) | |
| A reaction: By 'for' he presumably means for the thing to have an existence and a distinct identity. If it retained its identity, but didn't function any more, would that be loss of essence? |
| 14591 | Four-dimensionalists say instantaneous objects are more fundamental than long-lived ones [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Self-proclaimed four-dimensionalists typically adopt a picture that reckons instantaneous objects (and facts about them) to be more fundamental than long-lived ones. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Three-Dimensionalism v Four-Dimensionalism [2008], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: A nice elucidation. As in Idea 14588, this seems motivated by a desire for some sort of foundationalism or atomism. Why shouldn't a metaphysic treat the middle-sized or temporally extended as foundational, and derive the rest that way? |
| 8970 | Our notion of identical sets involves identical members, which needs absolute identity [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Our conceptual grip on the notion of a set is founded on the axiom of extensionality: a set x is the same as a set y iff x and y have the same members. But this axiom deploys the notion of absolute identity ('same members'). | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Identity [2003], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: Identity seems to be a primitive, useful and crucial concept, so don't ask what it is. I suspect that numbers can't get off the ground without it (especially, in view of the above, if you define numbers in terms of sets). |
| 14589 | A modal can reverse meaning if the context is seen differently, so maybe context is all? [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: One person says 'He can't dig a hole; he hasn't got a spade', and another says 'He can dig a hole; just give him a spade', and both uses of the modal 'can' will be true. So some philosophers say that all modal predications are thus context-dependent. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Three-Dimensionalism v Four-Dimensionalism [2008], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: Quine is the guru for this view of modality. Hawthorne's example seems to me to rely too much on the linguistic feature of contrasting 'can' and 'can't'. The underlying assertion in the propositions says something real about the possibilities. |
| 19553 | Commitment to 'I have a hand' only makes sense in a context where it has been doubted [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: If I utter 'I know I have a hand' then I can only be reckoned a cooperative conversant by my interlocutors on the assumption that there was a real question as to whether I have a hand. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (The Case for Closure [2005], 2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to point to the contextualist approach to global scepticism, which concerns whether we are setting the bar high or low for 'knowledge'. |
| 19551 | How can we know the heavyweight implications of normal knowledge? Must we distort 'knowledge'? [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Those who deny skepticism but accept closure will have to explain how we know the various 'heavyweight' skeptical hypotheses to be false. Do we then twist the concept of knowledge to fit the twin desiderata of closue and anti-skepticism? | |
| From: John Hawthorne (The Case for Closure [2005], Intro) | |
| A reaction: [He is giving Dretske's view; Dretske says we do twist knowledge] Thus if I remember yesterday, that has the heavyweight implication that the past is real. Hawthorne nicely summarises why closure produces a philosophical problem. |
| 19552 | We wouldn't know the logical implications of our knowledge if small risks added up to big risks [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Maybe one cannot know the logical consequences of the proposition that one knows, on account of the fact that small risks add up to big risks. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (The Case for Closure [2005], 1) | |
| A reaction: The idea of closure is that the new knowledge has the certainty of logic, and each step is accepted. An array of receding propositions can lose reliability, but that shouldn't apply to logic implications. Assuming monotonic logic, of course. |
| 19554 | Denying closure is denying we know P when we know P and Q, which is absurd in simple cases [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: How could we know that P and Q but not be in a position to know that P (as deniers of closure must say)? If my glass is full of wine, we know 'g is full of wine, and not full of non-wine'. How can we deny that we know it is not full of non-wine? | |
| From: John Hawthorne (The Case for Closure [2005], 2) | |
| A reaction: Hawthorne merely raises this doubt. Dretske is concerned with heavyweight implications, but how do you accept lightweight implications like this one, and then suddenly reject them when they become too heavy? [see p.49] |
| 6017 | Nomos is king [Pindar] |
| Full Idea: Nomos is king. | |
| From: Pindar (poems [c.478 BCE], S 169), quoted by Thomas Nagel - The Philosophical Culture | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the earliest recorded shot in the nomos-physis wars (the debate among sophists about moral relativism). It sounds as if it carries the full relativist burden - that all that matters is what has been locally decreed. |
| 405 | The essential nature, whatever it is, of the non-limited is everlasting and ageless [Anaximander] |
| Full Idea: The essential nature, whatever it is, of the non-limited is everlasting and ageless. | |
| From: Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE], B2), quoted by (who?) - where? |
| 13222 | The Boundless cannot exist on its own, and must have something contrary to it [Aristotle on Anaximander] |
| Full Idea: Those thinkers are in error who postulate ...a single matter, for this cannot exist without some 'perceptible contrariety': this Boundless, which they identify with the 'original real', must be either light or heavy, either hot or cold. | |
| From: comment on Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE]) by Aristotle - Coming-to-be and Passing-away (Gen/Corr) 329a10 | |
| A reaction: A dubious objection, I would say. If there has to be a contrasting cold thing to any hot thing, what happens when the cold thing is removed? |
| 404 | Things begin and end in the Unlimited, and are balanced over time according to justice [Anaximander] |
| Full Idea: The non-limited is the original material of existing things; their source is also that to which they return after destruction, according to necessity; they give justice and make reparation to each other for injustice, according to the arrangement of Time. | |
| From: Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE], B1), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 24.13- | |
| A reaction: Simplicius is quoting Theophrastus |
| 1495 | Anaximander introduced the idea that the first principle and element of things was the Boundless [Anaximander, by Simplicius] |
| Full Idea: Anaximander said that the first principle and element of existing things was the boundless; it was he who originally introduced this name for the first principle. | |
| From: report of Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE], A09) by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 9.24.14- | |
| A reaction: Simplicius is quoting Theophrastus |
| 15126 | Maybe scientific causation is just generalisation about the patterns [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps science doesn't need a robust conception of causation, and can get by with thinking of causal laws in a Humean way, as the simplest generalization over the mosaic. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: The Humean view he is referring to is held by David Lewis. That seems a council of defeat. We observe from a distance, but make no attempt to explain. |
| 15125 | We only know the mathematical laws, but not much else [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: We know the laws of the physical world, in so far as they are mathematical, pretty well, but we know nothing else about it. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Causal Structuralism [2001], Ch.25) | |
| A reaction: Lovely remark [spotted by Hawthorne]. This sums up exactly what I take to be the most pressing issue in philosophy of science - that we develop a view of science that has space for the next step in explanation. |
| 14588 | Modern metaphysicians tend to think space-time points are more fundamental than space-time regions [Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Nowadays it is common for metaphysicians to hold both that space-time regions are less fundamental than the space-time points that compose them, and that facts about the regions are less fundamental than facts about the points and their arrangements. | |
| From: John Hawthorne (Three-Dimensionalism v Four-Dimensionalism [2008], 1) | |
| A reaction: I'm not quite sure what a physicist would make of this. It seems to be motivated by some a priori preference for atomism, and for system-building from minimal foundations. |
| 1746 | The parts of all things are susceptible to change, but the whole is unchangeable [Anaximander, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: The parts of all things are susceptible to change, but the whole is unchangeable. | |
| From: report of Anaximander (fragments/reports [c.570 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.An.2 |