3 ideas
| 23123 | Basic to human culture are binary oppositions, such as eating raw or cooked [Levi-Strauss, by Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: Lévi-Strauss made canonic to French structuralism the idea that human culture could be understood through a series of binary oppositionsn - the difference between what could be eaten raw and what cooked being one of the most fundamental. | |
| From: report of Claude Lévi-Strauss (works [1950]) by T.H. Green - Prolegomena to Ethics 1 | |
| A reaction: My guess is that such oppositions can often be illuminating, but will always be eventually judged as too simplistic. |
| 10670 | A 'singulariser' converts a plural like 'number of' to a syntactically neutral form [Cartwright,H, by Hossack] |
| Full Idea: Helen Cartwright calls 'a number of' a 'singulariser', an expression whose linguistic function is to convert to a syntactically neutral form an expression whose semantic value remains plural. It is a great convenience grammatically. | |
| From: report of Helen Cartwright (On Plural Reference and Set Theory [1993]) by Keith Hossack - Plurals and Complexes 2 | |
| A reaction: Compare Hofweber's Idea 10004, suggesting it is a crucial psychological convenience for reasoning, as well as a 'grammatical' convenience. |
| 6005 | Animals are dangerous and nourishing, and can't form contracts of justice [Hermarchus, by Sedley] |
| Full Idea: Hermarchus said that animal killing is justified by considerations of human safety and nourishment and by animals' inability to form contractual relations of justice with us. | |
| From: report of Hermarchus (fragments/reports [c.270 BCE]) by David A. Sedley - Hermarchus | |
| A reaction: Could the last argument be used to justify torturing animals? Or could we eat a human who was too brain-damaged to form contracts? |