69 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. |
| 23966 | The personal view can still be objective, so I call sciences 'impersonal', rather than objective [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: 'Objective' is misleading because it is possible to be, from a personal point of view, more or less objective; objectivity admits of degrees… I prefer to speak of sciences as 'impersonal', because the personal view is lost. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This evidently relates to Perry's claim that the world contains additional indexical facts. I think I agree with this thought. Objectivity is a mode of subjectivity. Thermometers are not 'objective'. Physics is certainly impersonal. |
| 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 |
| 15879 | The Square of Opposition has two contradictory pairs, one contrary pair, and one sub-contrary pair [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Square of Opposition: 'all A are B' and 'no A are B' are contraries; 'some A are B' and 'some A are not B' are sub-contraries; the pairs 'all A are B'/'some A are B' and 'no A are B'/'some A are B' are contradictories. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: [the reader may construct his own diagram from this description!] The contraries are at the extremes of contradiction, but the sub-contraries are actual compatible. You could add possible worlds to this picture. |
| 15891 | Traditional quantifiers combine ordinary language generality and ontology assumptions [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The generalising function and the ontological function of discourse are elided in the traditional quantifier. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: This simple point strikes me as helping enormously to disentangle the mess created by over-emphasis on formal logic in ontology, and especially in the Quinean concept of 'ontological commitment'. |
| 15878 | Some quantifiers, such as 'any', rule out any notion of order within their range [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The quantifier 'any' unambiguously rules out any presupposition of order in the members of the range of individuals quantified. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: He contrasts this with 'all', 'each' and 'every', which are ambiguous in this respect. |
| 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. |
| 15874 | Scientific properties are not observed qualities, but the dispositions which create them [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The properties of material things with which the sciences deal are not the qualities we observe them to have, but the dispositions of those things to engender the states and qualities we observe. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be the correct use of the word 'qualities', so that properties are not qualities (in the way Heil would like). |
| 15884 | Laws of nature remain the same through any conditions, if the underlying mechanisms are unchanged [Harré] |
| Full Idea: A statement is a law of nature if it is true in all those worlds which differ only as to their initial conditions, that is in which the underlying mechanisms of nature are the same. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 4) | |
| A reaction: Harré takes it that laws of nature have to be necessary, by definition. I like this way of expressing natural necessity, in terms of 'mechanisms' rather than of 'laws'. Where do the mechanisms get their necessity? |
| 15880 | In physical sciences particular observations are ordered, but in biology only the classes are ordered [Harré] |
| Full Idea: In the physical sciences the particular observations and experimental results are usually orderable, while in the biological sciences it is the classes of organism which are ordered, not the particular organisms. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: Harré is interesting on the role of ordering in science. Functions can be defined by an order. Maths feeds on orderings. Physics, he notes, focuses on things which vary together. |
| 15869 | Reports of experiments eliminate the experimenter, and present results as the behaviour of nature [Harré] |
| Full Idea: In accounts of experiments, by Faraday and others, the role of the guiding hand of the actual experimenter is written out in successive accounts. The effect is to display the phenomenon as a natural occurrence, existing independently of the experiments. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: He records three stages in Faraday's reports. The move from active to passive voice is obviously part of it. The claim of universality is thus implicit rather than explicit. |
| 15881 | We can save laws from counter-instances by treating the latter as analytic definitions [Harré] |
| Full Idea: When we come upon a counter-instance to a generalisation we can save the putative law, by treating it as potentially analytic and claiming it as a definition. ...Thus magnetism doesn't hold for phosphorus, so we say phosphorus is not a magnetic substance. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: He notes this as being particularly true when the laws concern the dispositions of substances, rather than patterns of events. |
| 15882 | Since there are three different dimensions for generalising laws, no one system of logic can cover them [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Since there are three different dimensions of generality into which every law of nature is generalised, there can be no one system of logic which will govern inference to or from every law of every kind. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at the covering-law approach, which actually aims to output observations as logical inferences from laws. Wrong. |
| 15888 | The grue problem shows that natural kinds are central to science [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The grue problem illustrates the enormous importance that the concept of a natural-kind plays in real science. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: The point is that we took emeralds to be a natural kind, but 'grue' proposes that they aren't, since stability is the hallmark of a natural kind. |
| 15887 | 'Grue' introduces a new causal hypothesis - that emeralds can change colour [Harré] |
| Full Idea: In introducing the predicate 'grue' we also introduce an additional causal hypothesis into our chemistry and physics; namely, that when observed grue emeralds change from blue to green. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: [The 'when observered' is a Harré addition] I hate 'grue'. Only people who think our predicates have very little to do with reality are impressed by it. Grue is a behaviour, not a colour. |
| 15889 | It is because ravens are birds that their species and their colour might be connected [Harré] |
| Full Idea: It is because ravens are birds that it makes sense to contemplate the possibility of a lawful relation between their species and their colour. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: Compare the 'laws' concerning leaf colour in autumn, and the 'laws' concerning packaging colour in supermarkets. Harré's underlying point is that raven colour concerns mechanism. |
| 15890 | Non-black non-ravens just aren't part of the presuppositions of 'all ravens are black' [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Non-black non-ravens have no role to play in assessing the plausibility of 'All ravens are black' because their existence is not among the existential presuppositions of that statement. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Strawson for the 'presupposition' approach] |
| 15885 | The necessity of Newton's First Law derives from the nature of material things, not from a mechanism [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The 'must' of Newton's First Law is different. There is no deeper level relative to the processes described to give a mechanism which generates uniform motion. There is no such mechanism. ..It specifies what it is for something to be a material thing. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 4) | |
| A reaction: Harré says the law can only exist as part of a network of other ideas. |
| 24005 | We know other's emotions by explanation, contagion, empathy, imagination, or sympathy [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: We know others' emotions by 1) understanding and explaining them, 2) emotional contagion, 3) empathy, 4) in-his-shoes imagining, and 5) sympathy. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 7 Intro) | |
| A reaction: He says these must be clearly distinguished, because they are often confused. In-his-shoes is 'me in their position', where empathy is how the position is just for them. The Simulationist approach likes these two. Sympathy need not share the feelings. |
| 24006 | Empathy and imagining don't ensure sympathy, and sympathy doesn't need them [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: Empathy and in-his-shoes imagining are not sufficient for sympathy. Nor are they necessary. You can even sympathise with another when these are impossible, with the sufferings of a whale or a dog, for example. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 7 'Sympathy') | |
| A reaction: Goldie is right that these distinct faculties are a blurred muddle in most of our accounts of dealing with other people. Empathy with a whale in not actually impossible, because we recognise their suffering, and we understand suffering. |
| 15868 | Idealisation idealises all of a thing's properties, but abstraction leaves some of them out [Harré] |
| Full Idea: An 'idealisation' preserves all the properties of the source but it possesses these properties in some ideal or perfect form. ...An 'abstraction', on the other hand, lacks certain features of its source. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: Yet another example in contemporary philosophy of a clear understanding of the sort of abstraction which Geach and others have poured scorn on. |
| 23973 | Unlike moods, emotions have specific objects, though the difference is a matter of degree [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: Emotions have more specific objects than moods. The difference is a matter of degree, so emotions don't necessarily have a specific object, and moods are not necessarily undirected towards an object, or lacking in intentionality. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 2 'Intentionality') | |
| A reaction: Could you simultaneously have an emotion and a mood which were in conflict, such as joy and misery (singing the blues), or love and hate ('odi et amo')? Could one transition into the other, as the object became clear, or faded away? |
| 23974 | Emotional intentionality as belief and desire misses out the necessity of feelings [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: Many philosophers who discuss the intentionality of the emotions seek to capture the intentionality of the emotions in terms of beliefs, or beliefs and desires. I think this is a mistake, and runs the risk of leaving feelings out of emotional experience. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 2 'Intentionality') | |
| A reaction: [He gives a list, which includes Kenny and Davidson] I would have thought that desires, at least, necessarily involve feelings, and neuroscientists seem to find emotions everywhere, including as part of belief. Be more holistic? |
| 23972 | A long lasting and evolving emotion is still seen as a single emotion, such as love [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: In narratives the different elements of an emotion are conceived of as all being part of the same emotion, in spite of its complex, episodic and dynamic features. Verbs expressing emotions don not use continuous tenses, such as 'he is being in love'. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 2 'What') | |
| A reaction: Goldie is keen on seeing emotions as part of a life narrative. An intriguing problem for the metaphysics of identity. If someone's love for a person comes and goes, is it the same love each time? |
| 23978 | 'Having an emotion' differs from 'being emotional' [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: There is a contrast in commonsense psychology between 'being emotional' and 'having an emotion'. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 2 'Conclusion') | |
| A reaction: Is this just that being emotional is displaying the existing emotion? Though we say someone is 'being emotional' when the emotion seems to take control of their actions. |
| 23992 | Some Aborigines have fifteen different words for types of fear [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: The Pintupi Aborigines of the Western Australian Desert have no less than fifteen words for different types of fear, including one for a sudden fear which leads one to stand up to see what caused it. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 4 'Evidence') | |
| A reaction: Reminiscent of the many Inuit words for snow, but this time it is about human experience, rather than the environment. We must assume they can distinguish the different types, so these gradations are real. |
| 23979 | Emotional responses can reveal to us our values, which might otherwise remain hidden [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: Our emotional responses can reveal to us what we value, and what we value might not be epistemically accessible to us if we did not have such responses. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 2 'Conclusion') | |
| A reaction: This obviously invites the question of whether the emotion reveals the value, or determines the value. I suspect it is more the latter, because it is hard to see what art (for example) could have for us if we had no emotional responses. |
| 23976 | If we have a 'feeling towards' an object, that gives the recognition a different content [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: The content of the recognition in 'feeling towards' is different from the content of the recognition where no emotion is involved. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 2 'Education') | |
| A reaction: ['Feeling toward' is Goldie's coinage, to capture the intentionality in felt emotion] Interesting, but not convinced. Maybe the emotion just follows fast after the mere recognition. When I recognise a friend in a crowd, that triggers a feeling. |
| 23977 | When actions are performed 'out of' emotion, they appear to be quite different [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: Consider striking a blow or seeking safety unemotionally. Now consider when you act out of emotion: angrily striking the blow, or fearfully running away. The phenomenology of such actions is fundamentally different in character. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 2 'Explanation') | |
| A reaction: True, I guess. This has the behaviourist's problem of Superactors and Superspartans, of pretended or suppressed anger or fear. There is a sliding scale from stone cold to frenzied emotion. |
| 23980 | It is best to see emotions holistically, as embedded in a person's life narrative [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: The best understanding of a person's emotions …will be holistic in its overall approach, seeing feelings as embedded in an emotion's narrative, as part of a person's life. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 3 Intro) | |
| A reaction: Sounds reasonable, but I didn't find it very helpful. When told that my Self or my life has a 'narrative' I don't learn much. The concept of narrative relies on selves and lives. Ditto for being told that emotions or language are 'holistic'. |
| 23982 | If emotions are 'towards' things, they can't be bodily feelings, which lack aboutness [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: If emotion has the world-directed intentionality of 'feeling towards' it follows that it is not bodily feeling, for bodily feelings lack the required 'direct' (as contrasted with 'borrowed') intentionality. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 3 'Towards') | |
| A reaction: This is a direct response to William James's view, and seems correct. It is a widely held view that emotions are usually 'about' something, and it is hard to see how getting red in the face could do that. |
| 24001 | Moods can focus as emotions, and emotions can blur into moods [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: A mood can focus into an emotion, and an emotion can blur out of focus into the non-specificity of mood. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 6 'Mood') | |
| A reaction: I am struck by how the strong emotion of a vivid dream can remain as an inarticulate mood for the rest of the day. |
| 23968 | If reasons are seen impersonally (as just causal), then feelings are an irrelevant extra [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: If someone thought that reasons can be characterised impersonally, say in terms of causal role …it is then glaringly obvious that feelings cannot be left out, so they have to be added on. Hence I introduce the idea of 'feeling towards'. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], Intro) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] That is, he wants us to see feelings as intentional, active, motivating and causal, and not the marginal epiphenomena implied by an impersonal account. I think he is right. |
| 23969 | We have feelings of which we are hardly aware towards things in the world [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: One can be unreflectively emotionally engaged with the world, having feelings towards some object in the world, and yet at that moment not be reflectively aware of having those feelings. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I'm thinking that we do not just await some 'object' to trigger a background feeling, because we always have feelings. They are the continuous shifting wallpaper of our mental dwellings - which we sometimes notice. |
| 23984 | An emotion needs episodes of feeling, but not continuously [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: I see no need to insist that feelings …must be present at all times whilst you are having an emotion, …but without at least episodes of feeling, of which you can be more or less aware, an experience would not be an emotional one. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 3 'Unreflective') | |
| A reaction: [He cites William James] An odd situation, but it is the same as many chronic illnesses. Presumably because of the actual episodes the person will be aware of the emotion as a background state of potential episodes. |
| 23970 | Emotions are not avocado pears, with a rigid core and changeable surface [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: In an evolutionary and cultural account of emotions, I resist the 'avocado pear' conception of emotions, that our emotional behaviour comprises an inner core of 'hard-wired' reaction, and an out element which is open to cultural influences. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], Intro) | |
| A reaction: He is concerned with whether emotions can be educated, and defends the view that they can all be channelled or changed. In particular he rejects the idea that the stone consists of 'basic' emotions, which are untouchable. |
| 23985 | A basic emotion is the foundation of a hierarchy, such as anger for types of annoyance [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: The idea of basic emotions is that our concepts of emotions are hierarchically organised. For example, if anger is a basic emotion, then less basic species of anger might be annoyance, fury, rage, indignation, and so forth. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 4 'Evidence') | |
| A reaction: Most modern theorists seem to reject this idea. In a family of related emotions (each having a similar focal object), it is hard to see which one of them is basic, other than being the best known. Maybe the weakest one is basic? |
| 23986 | Early Chinese basic emotions: joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, disliking, and liking [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: The Chinese Li Chi encyclopaedia (1st century BCE) says there are seven 'feelings of men': joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, disliking, and liking. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 4 'Evidence') | |
| A reaction: [In J.Russell 1991] Love sounds like a stronger version of liking. If you are trying to train your feelings, it is helpful to have a basic list of them, even if the list is rather speculative. |
| 23991 | Cross-cultural studies of facial expressions suggests seven basic emotions [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: It has been suggested that there are seven 'basic' emotions, based on cross-cultural studies of facial expressions. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 4 'Evidence') | |
| A reaction: [Paul Ekman is cited] This makes the idea of universal basic emotions much more plausible. Goldie respects the research, but is cautious about inferences, mainly because digging deeper (such as interviews) makes it more complex. |
| 23967 | Some emotions are direct responses, and neither rational nor irrational [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: It is perfectly intelligible and entirely human to experience an emotion when seeing a low-flying bat, where we would not want to say that the experience was either rational or irrational. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Goldie is attacking the common tendency of philosophers to over-intellectualise emotions. This example makes his point conclusively. |
| 23971 | Emotional thought is not rational, but it can be intelligible [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: Emotions are not based on syllogistic reasoning ….but the thoughts involved in an emotion can show it to be intelligible, intelligibility being a thinner notion than rationality. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 1 Intro) | |
| A reaction: A nice distinction. The emotion is the best explanation. Compare 'intuition' and 'sensible' behaviour as also intelligible. An obvious problem is that if a person runs amok because they have a brain tumour, that is intelligible, but in no way rational. |
| 23975 | Learning an evaluative property like 'dangerous' is also learning an emotion [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: The process of teaching a child how to identify things which are dangerous is typically one and the same process as teaching that child when fear is merited. ...'Dangerous' is an evaluative property, meriting a certain sort of response. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 2 'Education') | |
| A reaction: I like this, because it shows the unity between our inner life and our experience of the external world. Concepts and emotions are usually responses, rather than private initiatives. |
| 23983 | We call emotions 'passions' because they are not as controlled as we would like [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: In feeling towards things the imagination tends to 'run away with you', which is partly why the emotions are 'passions'; your thoughts and feelings are not always as much under your control as you would want them to be. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 3 'Towards') | |
| A reaction: This may have the chronology wrong. 'Passion' doesn't mean uncontrolled. I take it that 'passion' was an older word for 'emotion', and became attached to the older view of emotions as dangerous and corrupting. |
| 23999 | Emotional control is hard, but we are responsible for our emotions over long time periods [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: To some extent our emotions cannot be controlled. But to say that we are not responsible for our emotions is to ignore the possibility of educating them over time, so that, ideally, our responses come to be consonant with deliberated rational choices. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 4 'Education') | |
| A reaction: So people go on anger management courses, or talk through crises with councellors. This idea describes most people correctly, but some are in the grips of passions which seem impossible to control. |
| 23994 | Emotions are not easily changed, as new knowledge makes little difference, and akrasia is possible [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: Our emotional capabilities are not fully open to be developed. …First, they are to some extent cognitively impenetrable. Secondly, they can ground certain sorts of weakness of will, or akrasia. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 4 'Education') | |
| A reaction: Education makes us more receptive to evidence. We could probably rate emotions on a scale indicating how easy they are to change. Jealousy seems tenacious. Most fears respond quickly to clear evidence. |
| 23998 | Emotional control is less concerned with emotional incidents, and more with emotional tendencies [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: It is a mistake to speak as if emotional control is always a matter of controlling a token emotional response or action; …rather, it is like reshaping the channel along which future emotions can run. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 4 'Education') | |
| A reaction: Presumably wise parents direct habitual feelings, where less wise parents respond to outbursts. The very best parents therefore presumably achieve complete brainwashing, and eliminate all initiative. Er, perhaps I've misunderstood? |
| 23995 | Akrasia can be either overruling our deliberation, or failing to deliberate [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: I call it 'last ditch' akrasia when we deliberately decide to do something, and then don't do it, and 'impetuous' akrasia when we rush into doing something which, if we had deliberated, we would not have done. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 4 'Education') | |
| A reaction: I'm not convinced that his impetuous version counts as akrasia, which seems to be vice of people who deliberate. [But he cites Aristotle 1150b19-]. |
| 24000 | Justifying reasons say you were right; excusing reasons say your act was explicable [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: A justifying reason will show that what you did, all things considered, was the right thing to do; an excusing reason will not justify, but will give some excuse to explain why you did what you did. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 6 Intro) | |
| A reaction: There are also internal reasons before the event, and explicit reasons afterwards. A mistaken justification might still be an excuse. |
| 24003 | Character traits are both possession of and lack of dispositions [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: Most traits are dispositions of a relatively stable sort, but traits need not be dispositions. A trait can be a lack of disposition. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 6 'Traits') | |
| A reaction: Presumably only the lack relatively normal dispositions will count as traits. |
| 24002 | We over-estimate the role of character traits when explaining behaviour [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: We significantly overestimate the role of character traits in explaining and predicting people's action: the so-called Fundamental Attribution error. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 6 'Traits') | |
| A reaction: I think this point is incredibly important in daily life. 'When someone shows you who they are, believe them!' is a good thought. But we must distinguish the deeply revealing moment from the transient superficial one. |
| 24004 | Psychologists suggest we are muddled about traits, and maybe they should be abandoned [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: Empirical psychologists have suggested that our practice of trait ascription is systematically prone to error. Some philosophers have concluded that the whole business of trait ascription, and of virtue ethics, should be abandoned. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 6 'Traits') | |
| A reaction: [He cites Ross and Nisbet, and Gilbert Harman as a sceptic] I suspect the problem is that character traits are not precise enough for scientific assessment. How else are we going to describe a person? What else can we say at funerals? |
| 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 |
| 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 |
| 15886 | Science rests on the principle that nature is a hierarchy of natural kinds [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The animating principle behind the material and discursive practices of science is the thesis that nature exemplifies multiple hierarchies of natural kinds. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: I agree. I take it to be a brute fact that there seem to be lots of stable natural kinds, which are worth investigating as long as they stay stable. If they are unstable, there needs to be something stable to measure that by - or we give up. |
| 15864 | Classification is just as important as laws in natural science [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Classification systems, or taxonomies, are as important a part of the natural sciences as are the laws of nature. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: This illustrates how our view of science is radically shifted if we give biology equal prominence with physics. |
| 15865 | Newton's First Law cannot be demonstrated experimentally, as that needs absence of external forces [Harré] |
| Full Idea: We can never devise an experimental situation in which there are no external forces to act on a body. It follows that Newton's First Law could never be demonstrated by means of experiment or observation. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: It can't be wholly demonstrated, but certain observations conform to it, such as the movement of low friction bodies, or the movements of planetary bodies. |
| 15862 | Laws can come from data, from theory, from imagination and concepts, or from procedures [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Boyle's Law generalises a mass of messy data culled from an apparatus; Snell's Law is an experimentally derived law deducible from theory; Newton's First Law derives from concepts and thought experiments; Mendel's Law used an experimental procedure. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: Nice examples, especially since Boyle's and Newton's laws are divided by a huge gulf, and arrived at about the same time. On p.35 Harré says these come down to two: abstraction from experiment, and derivation from deep assumptions. |
| 15870 | Are laws of nature about events, or types and universals, or dispositions, or all three? [Harré] |
| Full Idea: What is Newton's First Law about? Is it about events? Is it about types or universals? Is it about dispositions? Or is it, in some peculiar way, about all three? | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: If laws merely chart regularities, then I suppose they are about events (which exhibit the regular patterns). If laws explain, which would be nice, then they are only about universals if you are a platonist. Hence laws are about dispositions. |
| 15871 | Are laws about what has or might happen, or do they also cover all the possibilities? [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Is Newton's First Law about what has actually happened or is it about what might, or could possibly happen? Is it about the actual events and states of the world, or possible events and states? | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: I presume the first sentence distinguishes between what 'might (well)' happen, and what 'could (just) possibly happen'. I take it for granted that laws predict the actual future. The question is are they true of situations which will never occur? |
| 15876 | Maybe laws of nature are just relations between properties? [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The idea of the Dretske-Armstrong-Tooley view is very simple: the laws of nature relate properties to properties. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the relations are necessary ones. I don't see why we need to mention these wretched 'universals' in order to expound this theory. It sounds much more plausible if you just say a property is defined by the way it relates to other properties. |
| 15860 | We take it that only necessary happenings could be laws [Harré] |
| Full Idea: We do not take laws to be recordings of what happens perchance or for the most part, but specifications of what happens necessarily | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a plausible necessary condition for a law, but it may not be a sufficient one. Are trivial necessities laws? On this view if there are no necessities then there are no laws. |
| 15867 | Laws describe abstract idealisations, not the actual mess of nature [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The laws of nature are not simple descriptions of what can be seen to happen. They are descriptions of abstractions and idealisations from a somewhat messy reality. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: This view seems to have increasingly gripped modern philosophers, so that the old view of God decreeing a few simple equations to run the world has faded away. |
| 15872 | Must laws of nature be universal, or could they be local? [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Is a law of nature about everything in the universe or just about a restricted group of things? | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: I presume the answer is that while a law may only refer to a small group of things, the law would still have to apply if that group moved or spread or enlarged, so it would have to be universals. A laws confined to one time or place? Maybe. |
| 15892 | Laws of nature state necessary connections of things, events and properties, based on models of mechanisms [Harré] |
| Full Idea: A law of nature tells us what kinds of things, events and properties (all else being equal) go along with what. The 'must' of natural necessity has its place here because it is bound up with a model or analogy representing generative mechanisms. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is Harré's final page summary of laws. I agree with it. I would say that the laws are therefore descriptive, of the patterns of behaviour that arise when generative mechanisms meet. Maybe laws concern 'transformations'. |
| 15875 | In counterfactuals we keep substances constant, and imagine new situations for them [Harré] |
| Full Idea: In drawing 'countefactual' conclusions we can be thought imaginatively to vary the conditions under which the substance, set-up etc. is manipulated or stimulated, while maintaining constant our conception of the nature of the being in question. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: Presumably you could vary the substance and keep the situation fixed, but then the counterfactual seems to be 'about' something different. Either that or the 'situation' is a actually a set of substances to be tested. |
| 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 |
| 23993 | Our capabilities did not all evolve during the hunter gathering period [Goldie] |
| Full Idea: It is an unwarranted assumption that the only relevant evolutionary period in which our capabilities for emotions evolved is the period in which our ancestors were hunting and gathering. | |
| From: Peter Goldie (The Emotions [2000], 4 'Education') | |
| A reaction: Goldie says that the evolution of emotions could well extend to much earlier times. Presumably this also applies to other traits, notably those not obviously needed for hunting. Gathering needs long term planning. |