13 ideas
| 19695 | The devil was wise as an angel, and lost no knowledge when he rebelled [Whitcomb] |
| Full Idea: The devil is evil but nonetheless wise; he was a wise angel, and through no loss of knowledge, but, rather, through some sort of affective restructuring tried and failed to take over the throne. | |
| From: Dennis Whitcomb (Wisdom [2011], 'Argument') | |
| A reaction: ['affective restructuring' indeed! philosophers- don't you love 'em?] To fail at something you try to do suggests a flaw in the wisdom. And the new regime the devil wished to introduce doesn't look like a wise regime. Not convinced. |
| 13437 | A CAR and its major PART can become identical, yet seem to have different properties [Gallois] |
| Full Idea: At t1 there is a whole CAR, and a PART of it, which is everything except the right front wheel. At t2 the wheel is removed, leaving just PART, so that CAR is now PART. But PART was a proper part of CAR, and CAR had the front wheel. Different properties! | |
| From: André Gallois (Occasions of Identity [1998], 1.II) | |
| A reaction: [compressed summary] The problem is generated by appealing to Leibniz's Law. My immediate reaction is that this is the sort of trouble you get into if you include such temporal truths about things as 'properties'. |
| 16233 | Gallois hoped to clarify identity through time, but seems to make talk of it impossible [Hawley on Gallois] |
| Full Idea: A problem for Gallois is that he leaves us no way to talk about questions of genuine identity through time, and thus undercuts one motivation for his own position. | |
| From: comment on André Gallois (Occasions of Identity [1998]) by Katherine Hawley - How Things Persist 5.8 | |
| A reaction: Gallois seems to need a second theory of identity to support his Occasional Identity theory. Two things need an identity each, before we can say that the two identities coincide. (Time to read Gallois!) |
| 16025 | If things change they become different - but then no one thing undergoes the change! [Gallois] |
| Full Idea: If things really change, there can't literally be one thing before and after the change. However, if there isn't one thing before and after the change, then no thing has really undergone any change. | |
| From: André Gallois (Identity over Time [2011], Intro) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Copi for this way of expressing the problem of identity through change] There is an obvious simple ambiguity about 'change' in ordinary English. A change of property isn't a change of object. Painting a red ball blue isn't swapping it. |
| 16026 | 4D: time is space-like; a thing is its history; past and future are real; or things extend in time [Gallois] |
| Full Idea: We have four versions of Four-Dimensionalism: the relativistic view that time is space-like; a persisting thing is identical with its history (so objects are events); past and future are equally real; or (Lewis) things extend in time, with temporal parts. | |
| From: André Gallois (Identity over Time [2011], §2.5) | |
| A reaction: Broad proposed the second one. I prefer 3-D: at any given time a thing is wholly present. At another time it is wholly present despite having changed. It is ridiculous to think that small changes destroy identity. We acquire identity by dying?? |
| 14755 | Gallois is committed to identity with respect to times, and denial of simple identity [Gallois, by Sider] |
| Full Idea: Gallois's core claim is that the identity relation holds with respect to times, ...and he must claim that there is no such thing as the relation of identity simpliciter. | |
| From: report of André Gallois (Occasions of Identity [1998]) by Theodore Sider - Four Dimensionalism 5.5 | |
| A reaction: Gallois is essentially responding to the statue and clay problem, but it seems a bit drastic to entirely change our concept of two things being identical, such as Hesperus and Phosphorus. 'Identity' seems to have several meanings; let's sort them out. |
| 16231 | Occasional Identity: two objects can be identical at one time, and different at others [Gallois, by Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Gallois' Occasional Identity Thesis is that objects can be identical at one time without being identical at all times. | |
| From: report of André Gallois (Occasions of Identity [1998]) by Katherine Hawley - How Things Persist 5.4 | |
| A reaction: The analogy is presumably with two crossing roads being identical at one place but not at others. It is a major misunderstanding to infer from Special Relativity that time is just like space. |
| 16027 | If two things are equal, each side involves a necessity, so the equality is necessary [Gallois] |
| Full Idea: The necessity of identity: a=b; □(a=a); so something necessarily = a; so something necessarily must equal b; so □(a=b). [A summary of the argument of Marcus and Kripke] | |
| From: André Gallois (Identity over Time [2011], §3) | |
| A reaction: [Lowe 1982 offered a response] The conclusion seems reasonable. If two things are mistakenly thought to be different, but turn out to be one thing, that one thing could not possibly be two things. In no world is one thing two things! |
| 7401 | Heat and colour don't exist, so cannot mislead about the external world [Galileo, by Tuck] |
| Full Idea: Galileo argued that there is no such thing as heat (and hence also as colour) in the external world, so there is no reason to conclude from colour-blindness that we cannot know the truth about the world. | |
| From: report of Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore ('The Assayer') [1623]) by Richard Tuck - Hobbes Ch.1 | |
| A reaction: This key idea, taken up by Gassendi, Descartes and Locke, seems to me to be one of the most important (and, in retrospect, rather obvious) facts ever worked out by the human mind. Why does anyone still doubt it? |
| 5454 | Tastes, odours and colours only reside in consciousness, and would disappear with creatures [Galileo] |
| Full Idea: I think tastes, odours, colours, and so on are mere names as far as the objects are concerned, and only reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. | |
| From: Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore ('The Assayer') [1623]), quoted by Brian Ellis - The Philosophy of Nature: new essentialism Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: A nice bold assertion of the primary/secondary distinction from the first great scientist. I agree, and to disagree (and hence side with Berkeley and Hume) is to head for metaphsical and epistemological confusion. |
| 16560 | Galileo introduced geometrico-mechanical explanation, based on Archimedes [Galileo, by Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: The modern idea of explaining with mechanisms became current in the 17th century when Galileo articulated a geometrico-mechanical form of explanation based on Archimedes' simple machines. This became the 'mechanical philosophy'. | |
| From: report of Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore ('The Assayer') [1623]) by Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C - Thinking About Mechanisms 5.2 | |
| A reaction: So is Archimedes the source? I would say that mechanical explanation is just commonsense, and is predominant in all human thinking, even in tiny infants. |
| 3645 | To understand the universe mathematics is essential [Galileo] |
| Full Idea: The great book of the universe cannot be understood unless one can understand the language in which it is written - the language of mathematics. | |
| From: Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore ('The Assayer') [1623], VI.232) | |
| A reaction: Nice, though one might say that humans created the language of maths to help them discuss the patterns they perceived in nature. Maybe what is special is order, and all order can be described mathematically. |
| 19673 | Galileo mathematised movement, and revealed its invariable component - acceleration [Galileo, by Meillassoux] |
| Full Idea: Galileo conceives of movement in mathematical terms. ...In doing so, he uncovered, beyond the variations of position and speed, the mathematical invariant of movement - that is to say, acceleration. | |
| From: report of Galileo Galilei (Two Chief World Systems [1632]) by Quentin Meillassoux - After Finitude; the necessity of contingency 5 | |
| A reaction: That is a very nice advert for the mathematical physics which replaced the Aristotelian substantial forms. ...And yet, is acceleration some deep fact about nature, or a concept which is only needed if you insist on being mathematical? |