18 ideas
| 23269 | Philosophy must start from clearly observed facts [Galen] |
| Full Idea: True philosophers concern themselves first and foremost to take clearly observed facts as their point of departure. | |
| From: Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170], Kiv.11.817) | |
| A reaction: I love this one, especially the desire that the facts be 'clearly observed'. That, thank goodness, eliminates quantum mechanics. If you don't love history and the physical sciences, you are not a philosopher. Oh, and reliable gossip. |
| 8460 | Philosophers have given precise senses to deduction, probability, computability etc [Quine/Ullian] |
| Full Idea: Successful explications (giving a precise sense to a term) have been found for the concepts of deduction, probability and computability, to name just three. | |
| From: W Quine / J Ullian (The Web of Belief [1970], 65), quoted by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: Quine also cites the concept of an 'ordered pair'. Orenstein adds Tarski's definition of truth, Russell's definite descriptions, and the explication of existence in terms of quantifications. Cf. Idea 2958. |
| 23248 | Early empiricists said reason was just a useless concept introduced by philosophers [Galen, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: The so-called Empiricists in Hellenistic times [as cited by Galen] denied the existence of reason, treating it as a useless theoretical postulate introduced by some philosophers | |
| From: report of Galen (An Outline of Empiricism [c.170], 87.4-9.28ff) by Michael Frede - Intro to 'Rationality in Greek Thought' p.3 | |
| A reaction: I think 'be sensible' is understood by everyone, but 'use your reason' is far from obvious. The main role of reason seems to be as an identifier for human exceptionalism. Animals obviously make good judgements. Frede thinks the empiricists were right. |
| 18270 | Choice suggests that intensions are not needed to ensure classes [Coffa] |
| Full Idea: The axiom of choice was an assumption that implicitly questioned the necessity of intensions to guarantee the presence of classes. | |
| From: J. Alberto Coffa (The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap [1991], 7 'Log') | |
| A reaction: The point is that Choice just picks out members for no particular reason. So classes, it seems, don't need a reason to exist. |
| 18263 | The semantic tradition aimed to explain the a priori semantically, not by Kantian intuition [Coffa] |
| Full Idea: The semantic tradition's problem was the a priori; its enemy, Kantian pure intuition; its purpose, to develop a conception of the a priori in which pure intuition played no role; its strategy, to base that theory on a development of semantics. | |
| From: J. Alberto Coffa (The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap [1991], 2 Intro) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me that intuition, in the modern sense, has been unnecessarily demonised. I would define it as 'rational insights which cannot be fully articulated'. Sherlock Holmes embodies it. |
| 18272 | Platonism defines the a priori in a way that makes it unknowable [Coffa] |
| Full Idea: The trouble with Platonism had always been its inability to define a priori knowledge in a way that made it possible for human beings to have it. | |
| From: J. Alberto Coffa (The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap [1991], 7 'What') | |
| A reaction: This is the famous argument of Benacerraf 1973. |
| 23266 | The spirit in the soul wants freedom, power and honour [Galen] |
| Full Idea: The spirited part of the soul is desiderative of freedom, victory, power, authority, reputation, and honour. | |
| From: Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170], Kiv.2.772) | |
| A reaction: This is the concept of 'thumos' [spirit], taken straight from Plato's tripartite account of the soul, in 'Republic'. Note that it includes a desire for freedom (in an age of slavery). |
| 6003 | Galen showed by experiment that the brain controls the body [Galen, by Hankinson] |
| Full Idea: Galen established by experiments in neural anatomy that the brain really is, contra the Stoics and Aristotelians, the body's control centre. | |
| From: report of Galen (On Hippocrates and Plato [c.170]) by R.J. Hankinson - Galen (damaged) | |
| A reaction: And about time too. This is one of the most significant events in the development of human understanding. No one has been able to go back to the old view, even Descartes, no matter how much they may long to do so. |
| 23219 | Stopping the heart doesn't terminate activity; pressing the brain does that [Galen, by Cobb] |
| Full Idea: Even when an animals heart was stopped [by hand] it continued its muted whimpers, …but when the brain was pressed the animal stopped making a noise and became unconscious. | |
| From: report of Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170]) by Matthew Cobb - The Idea of the Brain 1 | |
| A reaction: It's not that the ancients didn't do science. It's that ancient people paid no attention to what their scientists discovered. |
| 21799 | We just use the word 'faculty' when we don't know the psychological cause [Galen] |
| Full Idea: So long as we are ignorant of the true essence of the cause which is operating, we call it a 'faculty'. | |
| From: Galen (On the Natural Faculties [c.170], I.iv), quoted by Dominik Perler - Intro to The Faculties: a History 2 | |
| A reaction: This is probably the view of most modern neuroscientists. I want to defend the idea that we need the concept of a faculty in philosophy, even if the psychologists and neuroscientists say it is too vague for their purposes. |
| 23264 | Philosophers think faculties are in substances, and invent a faculty for every activity [Galen] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers conceive of faculties as things which inhabit 'substances' much as we inhabit houses, not realising that causes of events are conceived in relational terms. We therefore attribute as many faculties to a substance as activities. | |
| From: Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170], Kiv.2.769) | |
| A reaction: This seems to demolish speculative faculties, but they were revived during the Enlightenment. I am happy to talk of 'philosophical faculties' where they are presumed to originate a type of thought, without commitment to any neuroscience. |
| 18266 | Mathematics generalises by using variables [Coffa] |
| Full Idea: The instrument of generality in mathematics is the variable. | |
| From: J. Alberto Coffa (The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap [1991], 4 'The conc') | |
| A reaction: I like the idea that there are variables in ordinary speech, pronouns being the most obvious example. 'Cats' is a variable involving quantification over a domain of lovable fluffy mammals. |
| 23220 | The brain contains memory and reason, and is the source of sensation and decision [Galen] |
| Full Idea: The brain is the principal organ of the psychical members. For within the brain is seated memory, reason and intellect, and from the brain is distributed the power, sensation and voluntary motion. | |
| From: Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170]), quoted by Matthew Cobb - The Idea of the Brain 1 | |
| A reaction: [not sure of ref] Interesting that he assigns the whole of mind to the brain, and not just some aspect of it. He had done experiments. Understanding the role of the brain was amazingly slow. Impeded by religion, I guess. |
| 23265 | The rational part of the soul is the desire for truth, understanding and recollection [Galen] |
| Full Idea: That part of the soul which we call rational is desiderative: …it desires truth, knowledge, learning, understanding, and recollection - in short, all the good things. | |
| From: Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170], Kiv.2.772) | |
| A reaction: Truth is no surprise, but recollection is. Note the separation of knowledge from understanding. This is a very good characterisation of rationality. For the Greeks it has a moral dimension, of wanting what is good. |
| 7453 | Galen's medicine followed the mean; each illness was balanced by opposite treatment [Galen, by Hacking] |
| Full Idea: Galen ran medicine on the principle of the mean; afflictions must be treated by contraries; hot diseases deserve cold medicine and moist illnesses want drying agents. (Paracelsus rebelled, treating through similarity). | |
| From: report of Galen (On Medical Experience [c.169]) by Ian Hacking - The Emergence of Probability Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: This must be inherited from Aristotle, with the aim of virtue for the body, as Aristotle wanted virtue for the psuché. In some areas Galen is probably right, that natural balance is the aim, as in bodily temperature control. |
| 6030 | Each part of the soul has its virtue - pleasure for appetite, success for competition, and rectitude for reason [Galen] |
| Full Idea: We have by nature these three appropriate relationships, corresponding to each form of the soul's parts - to pleasure because of the appetitive part, to success because of the competitive part, and to rectitude because of the rational part. | |
| From: Galen (On Hippocrates and Plato [c.170], 5.5.8) | |
| A reaction: This is a nice combination of Plato's tripartite theory of soul (in 'Republic') and Aristotle's derivation of virtues from functions. Presumably, though, reason should master the other two, and there is nothing in Galen's idea to explain this. |
| 23268 | We execute irredeemable people, to protect ourselves, as a deterrent, and ending a bad life [Galen] |
| Full Idea: We kill the irredeemably wicked, for three reasons: that they may no longer harm us; as a deterrent to others like them; and because it is actually better from their own point of view to die, when their souls are so damaged they cannot be improved. | |
| From: Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170], Kiv.11.816) | |
| A reaction: The third one sounds like a dubious rationalisation, given that the prisoner probably disagrees. Nowadays we are not so quick to judge someone as irredeemable. The first one works when they run wild, but not after their capture. |
| 18279 | Relativity is as absolutist about space-time as Newton was about space [Coffa] |
| Full Idea: If the theory of relativity might be thought to support an idealist construal of space and time, it is no less absolutistic about space-time than Newton's theory was about space. | |
| From: J. Alberto Coffa (The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap [1991]) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Minkowski, Weyl and Cartan for this conclusion] Coffa is clearly a bit cross about philosophers who draw naive idealist and relativist conclusions from relativity. |