6 ideas
| 23395 | Mohists desire wealth, population and social order as the best consequences [Mozi, by Norden] |
| Full Idea: The consequentialist Mohists give a fairly objective characterisation of benefits as wealth, populousness, and social order, and harm as poverty, depopulation, and social chaos. | |
| From: report of Mozi (The Mozi [c.440 BCE]) by Bryan van Norden - Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy 4.I | |
| A reaction: That is a formula favoured by many authoritarian leaders in modern times. |
| 23394 | If people regarded other states as they did their own, they would never attack them [Mozi] |
| Full Idea: If people regarded other people's states in the same way that they regard their own, who then would incite their own state to attack that of another? | |
| From: Mozi (The Mozi [c.440 BCE], 16), quoted by Bryan van Norden - Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy 4.I | |
| A reaction: A nice case of the application of golden rule thinking to states, instead of to individuals. I can't see Putin (in 2022) being impressed by 'how would you like it if another country invaded Russia?'. The Golden Rule is an analogy argument. |
| 23396 | Mozi condemns partiality, which is the cause of all the great harms in the world [Mozi] |
| Full Idea: It is those who are partial in their dealings with others who are the real cause of all the great harms in the world. That is why our teacher Mozi says 'I condemn partiality'. | |
| From: Mozi (The Mozi [c.440 BCE], 16), quoted by Bryan van Norden - Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy 4.II | |
| A reaction: This is morality as the rule of law, rather than as the result of human affections. He is on the same wavelength as Kant. Mozi was criticising Confucius, who favoured family over strangers. |
| 23397 | Those who are against impartiality still prefer impartial protectors [Mozi] |
| Full Idea: Even though one may not advocate impartiality, one would certainly want to entrust one's family to the person who is impartial. | |
| From: Mozi (The Mozi [c.440 BCE], 16), quoted by Bryan van Norden - Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy 4.II | |
| A reaction: In the modern world his example would be the police, so he effectively he wants the impartiality of the law. But who wants legal impartiality within the affairs of a family? |
| 19035 | General Relativity allows substantivalism about space-time - that it has independent properties [Hoefer] |
| Full Idea: General Relativity describes space-time in a way that allows it to exist with determinate properties not reducible to the properties and relations of its material contents. Hence nearly all physicists and philosophers writing on GR are substantivalists. | |
| From: Carl Hoefer (The Metaphysics of Space-Time Substantivalism [1996], p.5), quoted by Barbara Vetter - Potentiality 7.3 | |
| A reaction: I'm encouraged by this, as I instinctly favour substantivalism. Imagine removing all the objects from space-time, one by one. What happens as you approach the end of the task? Once they are removed, can they be replaced? |
| 1513 | The Egyptians were the first to say the soul is immortal and reincarnated [Herodotus] |
| Full Idea: The Egyptians were the first to claim that the soul of a human being is immortal, and that each time the body dies the soul enters another creature just as it is being born. | |
| From: Herodotus (The Histories [c.435 BCE], 2.123.2) |