32 ideas
12036 | Xenophanes began the concern with knowledge [Annas] |
Full Idea: Xenophanes begins a long concern with knowledge and its grounds. | |
From: Julia Annas (Ancient Philosophy: very short introduction [2000], Intro) | |
A reaction: Having that on his cv ought to make Xenophanes more famous than he is. |
12046 | Plato was the first philosopher who was concerned to systematize his ideas [Annas] |
Full Idea: In the ancient world Plato was seen as a pivotal figure, the first philosopher who was concerned to systematize his ideas. | |
From: Julia Annas (Ancient Philosophy: very short introduction [2000], Ch.6) |
9786 | Philosophers working like teams of scientists is absurd, yet isolation is hard [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: The notion that philosophy can be done cooperatively, in the manner of scientists or engineers engaged in a research project, seems to me absurd. And yet few philosophers can survive in isolation. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Intro to 'Philosophical Essays' [1987], xxi) | |
A reaction: This why Nietzsche said that philosophers were 'rare plants'. |
9784 | A false proposition isn't truer because it is part of a coherent system [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: You do not improve the truth value of a false proposition by calling attention to a coherent system of propositions of which it is one. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Intro to 'Philosophical Essays' [1987], xi) | |
A reaction: We need to disentangle the truth-value from the justification here. If it is false, then we can safely assume that is false, but we are struggling to decide whether it is false, and we want all the evidence we can get. Falsehood tends towards incoherence. |
13941 | Are the truth-bearers sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgements, propositions or statements? [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: What is it that is susceptible of truth or falsity? The answers suggested constitute a bewildering variety: sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgments, propositions, statements. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 01) | |
A reaction: Carwright's answer is 'statements', which seem to be the same as propositions. |
13942 | Logicians take sentences to be truth-bearers for rigour, rather than for philosophical reasons [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: The current fashion among logicians of taking sentences to be the bearers of truth and falsity indicates less an agreement on philosophical theory than a desire for rigor and smoothness in calculative practice. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 01) | |
A reaction: A remark close to my heart. Propositions are rejected first because language offers hope of answers, then because they seem metaphysically odd, and finally because you can't pin them down rigorously. But the blighters won't lie down and die. |
9783 | While no two classes coincide in membership, there are distinct but coextensive attributes [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: Attributes and classes are said to be distinguished by the fact that whereas no two classes coincide in membership, there are supposed to be distinct but coextensive attributes. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Classes and Attributes [1967], §2) | |
A reaction: This spells out the standard problem of renates and cordates, that creatures with hearts and with kidneys are precisely coextensive, but that these properties are different. Cartwright then attacks the distinction. |
14962 | Bodies don't becomes scattered by losing small or minor parts [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: If a branch falls from a tree, the tree does not thereby become scattered, and a human body does not become scattered upon loss of a bit of fingernail. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Scattered Objects [1974], p.184) | |
A reaction: This sort of observation draws me towards essentialism. A body is scattered if you divide it in a major way, but not if you separate off a minor part. It isn't just a matter of size, or even function. We have broader idea of what is essential. |
14961 | Clearly a pipe can survive being taken apart [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: There is at the moment a pipe on my desk. Its stem has been removed but it remains a pipe for all that; otherwise no pipe could survive a thorough cleaning. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Scattered Objects [1974], p.175) | |
A reaction: To say that the pipe survives dismantling is not to say that it is fully a pipe during its dismantled phase. He gives a further example of a book in two volumes. |
13952 | Essentialism says some of a thing's properties are necessary, and could not be absent [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: Essentialism, as I shall understand it, is the doctrine that among the attributes of a thing some are essential, others merely accidental. Its essential attributes are those it has necessarily, those it could not have lacked. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.149) | |
A reaction: The problem with this, which Cartwright does not address, is that trivial and gerrymandered properties (such as having self-identity, or being 'such that 2+2=4') seem to be necessarily, but don't seem to constitute the essence of a thing. |
13954 | The difficulty in essentialism is deciding the grounds for rating an attribute as essential [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: I see no reason for thinking essentialism unintelligible, but a chief perplexity is the obscurity of the grounds on which ratings of attributes as essential or accidental are to be made. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.158) | |
A reaction: In that case some of us younger philosophers will have to roll up our sleeves and tease out the grounds for essentialism, starting with Aristotle and Leibniz, and ending with the successes of modern science. |
13955 | Essentialism is said to be unintelligible, because relative, if necessary truths are all analytic [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: Apparently those who think essentialism unintelligible see support for their position in the doctrine that necessary truths are all analytic. Only relative to some mode of designation does it make sense to speak of an object as necessarily this or that. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.158) | |
A reaction: He has in mind Quine and his mathematician-cyclist (Idea 8482). Personally I have no problems with the example. No one is essentially a cyclist - that isn't what essence is. Two-legged people can be cyclists. |
13953 | An act of ostension doesn't seem to need a 'sort' of thing, even of a very broad kind [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: For an ostension to be successful it is surely not necessary that I gather what sort of object it is you have indicated, such as being a horse or a zebra. I may even gather which thing you have indicated without knowing that it is a mammal or even alive. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Some Remarks on Essentialism [1968], p.157) | |
A reaction: This nicely articulates the objection I have always felt to Geach's relative identity. 'Oh my God, what the hell is THAT???' is probably going to be a successful act of verbal reference, even while explicitly denying all knowledge of sortals. |
13945 | A token isn't a unique occurrence, as the case of a word or a number shows [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: We cannot take a token of a word to be an occurrence of it. Suppose there is exactly one occurrence of the word 'etherized' in the whole of English poetry? Exactly one 'token'? This sort of occurrence is like the occurrence of a number in a sequence. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], Add 2) | |
A reaction: This remark is in an addendum to his paper, criticising his own lax use of the idea of 'token' in the actual paper. The example nicely shows that the type/token distinction isn't neat and tidy - though I consider it very useful. |
13950 | People don't assert the meaning of the words they utter [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: No one ever asserts the meaning of the words he utters. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 12) | |
A reaction: Cartwright is using this point to drive a wedge between sentence meaning and the assertion made by the utterance. Hence he defends propositions. Presumably people utilise word-meanings, rather than asserting them. Meanings (not words) are tools. |
13948 | For any statement, there is no one meaning which any sentence asserting it must have [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: It does have to be acknowledged, I think, that every statement whatever is such that there is no one meaning which any sentence used to assert it must have. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 11) | |
A reaction: This feels to me like a Gricean move - that what we are really interested in is communicating one mental state to another mental state, and there are all sorts of tools that can do that one job. |
13944 | We can pull apart assertion from utterance, and the action, the event and the subject-matter for each [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: We need to distinguish 1) what is asserted, 2) that assertion, 3) asserting something, 4) what is predicated, 5) what is uttered, 6) that utterance, 7) uttering something, 8) the utterance token, and 9) the meaning. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 05-06) | |
A reaction: [summary of his overall analysis in the paper] It is amazingly hard to offer a critical assessment of this sort of analysis, but it gives you a foot in the door for thinking about the issues with increasing clarity. |
13947 | 'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: A person who utters 'It's raining' one day does not normally make the same statement as one who utters it the next. But these variations are not accompanied by corresponding changes of meaning. The words 'It's raining' retain the same meaning throughout. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 10) | |
A reaction: This is important, because it shows that a proposition is not just the mental shadow behind a sentence, or a mental shadow awaiting a sentence. Unlike a sentence, a proposition can (and possibly must) include its own context. Very interesting! |
13943 | We can attribute 'true' and 'false' to whatever it was that was said [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: We do sometimes say of something to which we have referred that it is true (or false). Are we not ordinarily doing just this when we utter such sentences as 'That's true' and 'What he said was false'? | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 03) | |
A reaction: This supports propositions, but doesn't clinch the matter. One could interpret this phenomenon as always being (implicitly) the reference of one sentence to another. However, I remember what he said, but I can't remember how he said it. |
13946 | To assert that p, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to utter some particular words [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: In order to assert that p it is not necessary to utter exactly those words. ...Clearly, also, in order to assert that p, it is not sufficient to utter the words that were actually uttered. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 07) | |
A reaction: I take the first point to be completely obvious (you can assert one thing with various wordings), and the second seems right after a little thought (the words could be vague, ambiguous, inaccurate, contextual) |
13951 | Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false.... [Cartwright,R] |
Full Idea: Whereas what is asserted can be said to be accurate, exaggerated, unfounded, overdrawn, probable, improbable, plausible, true, or false, none of these can be said of the meaning of a sentence. | |
From: Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 12) | |
A reaction: That fairly firmly kicks into touch the idea that the assertion is the same as the meaning of the sentence. |
3546 | 'Phronesis' should translate as 'practical intelligence', not as prudence [Annas] |
Full Idea: The best translation of 'phronesis' is probably not 'prudence' (which implies a non-moral motive), or 'practical wisdom' (which makes it sound contemplative), but 'practical intelligence', or just 'intelligence'. | |
From: Julia Annas (The Morality of Happiness [1993], 2.3) |
12037 | Euripides's Medea is a key case of reason versus the passions [Annas] |
Full Idea: Euripides's Medea has remained a key case for discussion of reason and the passions. | |
From: Julia Annas (Ancient Philosophy: very short introduction [2000], Ch.1) |
3547 | Epicureans achieve pleasure through character development [Annas] |
Full Idea: Since having a virtue does not reduce to performing certain kinds of acts, the Epicurean will achieve pleasure only by aiming at being a certain kind of person. | |
From: Julia Annas (The Morality of Happiness [1993], 2.4) | |
A reaction: No Epicurean would want to merely possess virtues, without enacting them. I assume that virtues are sought as guides to finding the finest pleasures (such as friendship). |
3543 | Cyrenaics pursue pleasure, but don't equate it with happiness [Annas] |
Full Idea: Cyrenaics claimed our final good was pleasure, best achieved by seeking maximum intensity of pleasurable experiences, but they explicitly admitted that this was not happiness. | |
From: Julia Annas (The Morality of Happiness [1993], 1) |
12040 | Virtue is a kind of understanding of moral value [Annas] |
Full Idea: There is a widespread view in ancient ethics that virtue is a kind of understanding of moral value. | |
From: Julia Annas (Ancient Philosophy: very short introduction [2000], Ch.3) | |
A reaction: In Aristotle's case, this coincides with his apparent view that 'understanding' is the aim of all areas of human thought. See Idea 12038. |
3541 | Ancient ethics uses attractive notions, not imperatives [Annas] |
Full Idea: Instead of modern 'imperative' notions of ethics (involving obligation, duty and rule-following), ancient ethics uses 'attractive' notions like those of goodness and worth | |
From: Julia Annas (The Morality of Happiness [1993], Intro) |
3550 | Principles cover life as a whole, where rules just cover actions [Annas] |
Full Idea: Principles concern not just types of actions, but one's life as a whole, grasping truths about the nature of justice, and the like; they explain rules, giving the 'why' and not just the 'what'. | |
From: Julia Annas (The Morality of Happiness [1993], 2.4) |
3551 | Virtue theory tries to explain our duties in terms of our character [Annas] |
Full Idea: An ethics of virtue moves from an initial interest in what we ought to do to an interest in the kinds of people we are and hope to be, because the latter is taken to be the best way of understanding the former. | |
From: Julia Annas (The Morality of Happiness [1993], 2.5) |
3552 | If excessively good actions are admirable but not required, then duty isn't basic [Annas] |
Full Idea: Supererogatory actions are admirable and valuable, and we praise people for doing them, but they do not generate obligations to perform them, which casts doubt on obligation as the basic notion in ethics. | |
From: Julia Annas (The Morality of Happiness [1993], 2.6) |
3542 | We should do good when necessary, not maximise it [Annas] |
Full Idea: Why should I want to maximise my acting courageously? I act courageously when it is required. | |
From: Julia Annas (The Morality of Happiness [1993], 1) |
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? |