7 ideas
| 16643 | Accidents always remain suited to a subject [Bonaventura] |
| Full Idea: An accident's aptitudinal relationship to a subject is essential, and this is never taken away from accidents….for it is true to say that they are suited to a subject. | |
| From: Bonaventura (Commentary on Sentences [1252], IV.12.1.1.1c) | |
| A reaction: This is the compromise view that allows accidents to be separated, for Transubstantiation, while acknowledging that we identify them with their subjects. |
| 16696 | Successive things reduce to permanent things [Bonaventura] |
| Full Idea: Everything successive reduces to something permanent. | |
| From: Bonaventura (Commentary on Sentences [1252], II.2.1.1.3 ad 5), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 18.2 | |
| A reaction: Avicenna first took successive entities seriously, but Bonaventure and Aquinas seem to have rejected them, or given reductive accounts of them. It resembles modern actualists versus modal realists. |
| 19525 | If the only aim is to believe truths, that justifies recklessly believing what is unsupported (if it is right) [Conee/Feldman] |
| Full Idea: If it is intellectually required that one try to believe all and only truths (as Chisholm says), ...then it is possible to believe some unsubstantiated proposition in a reckless endeavour to believe a truth, and happen to be right. | |
| From: E Conee / R Feldman (Evidentialism [1985], 'Justification') | |
| A reaction: This implies doxastic voluntarism. Sorry! I meant, this implies that we can control what we believe, when actually we believe what impinges on us as facts. |
| 19524 | We don't have the capacity to know all the logical consequences of our beliefs [Conee/Feldman] |
| Full Idea: Our limited cognitive capacities lead Goldman to deny a principle instructing people to believe all the logical consequences of their beliefs, since they are unable to have the infinite number of beliefs that following such a principle would require. | |
| From: E Conee / R Feldman (Evidentialism [1985], 'Doxastic') | |
| A reaction: This doesn't sound like much of an objection to epistemic closure, which I took to be the claim that you know the 'known' entailments of your knowledge. |
| 19518 | Evidentialism says justifications supervene on the available evidence [Conee/Feldman] |
| Full Idea: Fundamentally Evidentialism is a supervenience thesis, according to which facts about whether or not a person is justified in believing a proposition supervene on facts describing the evidence the person has. | |
| From: E Conee / R Feldman (Introduction to 'Evidentialism' [2004], p.1) | |
| A reaction: If facts 'describe', does that make them linguistic? That's not how I use 'facts'. A statement of a fact is not the same as the fact. An ugly fact can be beautifully expressed. I am, however, in favour of evidence. |
| 19519 | Rational decisions are either taken to be based on evidence, or to be explained causally [Conee/Feldman] |
| Full Idea: In decision theory, there is a view according to which the rational basis for all decisions is evidential. This kind of decision theory is typically contrasted with causal decision theory. | |
| From: E Conee / R Feldman (Introduction to 'Evidentialism' [2004], p.3) | |
| A reaction: Your Kantian presumably likes rational reflection on evidence, and your modern reductive scientist prefers causality (which doesn't really sound very rational). |
| 22237 | The Greeks had a single word meaning both 'beautiful' and 'good' [Pormann] |
| Full Idea: The later Greeks coined the term 'kalokagathia' for the fact of being both beautiful [kalos] and good [agathos], thus linking moral and physical health. | |
| From: Peter E. Pormann (Medical Conceptions of Health pre-Renaissance [2019], p.44) | |
| A reaction: In their literature good people are often handsome, and bad people ugly. Socrates was famous for being an exception. |