22 ideas
| 1542 | Diogenes of Apollonia was the last natural scientist [Diogenes of Apollonia, by Simplicius] |
| Full Idea: Diogenes of Apollonia was more or less the last of those who made a study of natural science. | |
| From: report of Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], A05) by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 9.25.1 | |
| A reaction: He quotes Theophrastus |
| 2516 | Most of philosophy begins where science leaves off [Katz] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy, or at least one large part of it, is subsequent to science; it begins where science leaves off. | |
| From: Jerrold J. Katz (Realistic Rationalism [2000], Int.xxi) | |
| A reaction: In some sense this has to be true. Without metaphysics there couldn't be any science. Rationalists should not forget, though, the huge impact which Darwin's science has (or should have) on fairly abstract philosophy (e.g. epistemology). |
| 2510 | Traditionally philosophy is an a priori enquiry into general truths about reality [Katz] |
| Full Idea: The traditional conception of philosophy is that it is an a priori enquiry into the most general facts about reality. | |
| From: Jerrold J. Katz (Realistic Rationalism [2000], Int.xi) | |
| A reaction: I think this still defines philosophy, though it also highlights the weakness of the subject, which is over-confidence about asserting necessary truths. How could the most god-like areas of human thought be about anything else? |
| 2521 | 'Real' maths objects have no causal role, no determinate reference, and no abstract/concrete distinction [Katz] |
| Full Idea: Three objections to realism in philosophy of mathematics: mathematical objects have no space/time location, and so no causal role; that such objects are determinate, but reference to numbers aren't; and that there is no abstract/concrete distinction. | |
| From: Jerrold J. Katz (Realistic Rationalism [2000], Int.xxix) |
| 489 | Each thing must be in some way unique [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
| Full Idea: No one thing among things subject to change can possibly be exactly like any other thing, without becoming the same thing. | |
| From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B05), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 153.8 | |
| A reaction: This is said to be the first ever formulation of the principle of identity of indiscernible. |
| 483 | Start a thesis with something undisputable [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
| Full Idea: In starting any thesis, it seems to me, one should put forward as one's point of departure something incontrovertible. | |
| From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B01), quoted by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 09.57 |
| 2513 | We don't have a clear enough sense of meaning to pronounce some sentences meaningless or just analytic [Katz] |
| Full Idea: Linguistic meaning is not rich enough to show either that all metaphysical sentences are meaningless or that all alleged synthetic a priori propositions are just analytic a priori propositions. | |
| From: Jerrold J. Katz (Realistic Rationalism [2000], Int.xx) |
| 1544 | Perception must be an internal matter, because we can fail to perceive when we are preoccupied [Diogenes of Apollonia, by Theophrastus] |
| Full Idea: That it is the inner air that perceives, as being a fragment of the god, is shown by the fact that often when our minds are preoccupied with other matters we fail to see or hear. | |
| From: report of Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], A19) by Theophrastus - On the Senses 42 |
| 2522 | Experience cannot teach us why maths and logic are necessary [Katz] |
| Full Idea: The Leibniz-Kant criticism of empiricism is that experience cannot teach us why mathematical and logical facts couldn't be otherwise than they are. | |
| From: Jerrold J. Katz (Realistic Rationalism [2000], Int.xxxi) |
| 24042 | The older Diogenes said the soul is air, made of the smallest particles [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
| Full Idea: Diogenes [of Apollonia] took the soul to be air, thnking that of all things air is composed of the smallest particles and is a starting point. | |
| From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], DK 64), quoted by Aristotle - De Anima 405a21 | |
| A reaction: This suggests that Diogenes of Apollonia was an atomist, if the soul is made of particles. See also Met 984a5, which says Anaxagoras had the same view. |
| 2517 | Structuralists see meaning behaviouristically, and Chomsky says nothing about it [Katz] |
| Full Idea: In linguistics there are two schools of thought: Bloomfieldian structuralism (favoured by Quine) conceives of sentences acoustically and meanings behaviouristically; and Chomskian generative grammar (which is silent about semantics). | |
| From: Jerrold J. Katz (Realistic Rationalism [2000], Int.xxiv) | |
| A reaction: They both appear to be wrong, so there is (or was) something rotten in the state of linguistics. Are the only options for meaning either behaviourist or eliminativist? |
| 2519 | It is generally accepted that sense is defined as the determiner of reference [Katz] |
| Full Idea: There is virtually universal acceptance of Frege's definition of sense as the determiner of reference. | |
| From: Jerrold J. Katz (Realistic Rationalism [2000], Int.xxvi) | |
| A reaction: Not any more, since Kripke and Putnam. It is one thing to say sense determines reference, and quite another to say that this is the definition of sense. |
| 2520 | Sense determines meaning and synonymy, not referential properties like denotation and truth [Katz] |
| Full Idea: Pace Frege, sense determines sense properties and relations, like meaningfulness and synonymy, rather than determining referential properties, like denotation and truth. | |
| From: Jerrold J. Katz (Realistic Rationalism [2000], Int.xxvi) | |
| A reaction: This leaves room for Fregean 'sense', after Kripke has demolished the idea that sense determines reference. |
| 2518 | Sentences are abstract types (like musical scores), not individual tokens [Katz] |
| Full Idea: Sentences are types, not utterance tokens or mental/neural tokens, and hence sentences are abstract objects (like musical scores). | |
| From: Jerrold J. Katz (Realistic Rationalism [2000], Int.xxvi) | |
| A reaction: If sentences are abstract types, then two verbally indistinguishable sentences are the same sentence. But if I say 'I am happy', that isn't the same as you saying it. |
| 5995 | Diogenes of Apollonia offered the first teleological account of cosmology [Diogenes of Apollonia, by Robinson,TM] |
| Full Idea: Credit for the first clear assertion of teleological explanation in cosmology goes to Diogenes of Apollonia, for whom air is the divine and intelligent ground of the real and disposes things in the best possible way. | |
| From: report of Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE]) by T.M. Robinson - Classical Cosmology (frags) | |
| A reaction: The first teleological explanation seems to be based on a conscious mind. There also emerges the possibility of some sort of non-conscious teleology, closer to the laws of physics than to God. |
| 488 | Air is divine, because it is in and around everything, and arranges everything [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
| Full Idea: Air in itself seems to me to be God and to reach everywhere and to arrange everything and to be in everything. | |
| From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B05), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 152.22- | |
| A reaction: So water and fire and air have been offered as the ultimate explanans, though no one seems to offer earth, which is too grubby and miserable (and was denied a Form by Plato). 'Air is God' could ground a nice modern religious sect. |
| 484 | Everything is ultimately a variation of one underlying thing [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
| Full Idea: It seems to me that all existing things are created by the alteration of the same thing, and are the same thing. | |
| From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B02), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 151.31- |
| 486 | Plants and animals can only come into existence if something fixes their species [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
| Full Idea: No plant could grow out of the earth, and no animal or any other thing could come into being, unless it were so compounded as to be the same. | |
| From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B02), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 151.31- |
| 485 | Things must retain their essential nature during change, or mixing would be impossible [Diogenes of Apollonia] |
| Full Idea: If any existing thing were different in its own essential nature, and were not the same thing which was transformed in many ways and changed, in no way could things mix with one another. | |
| From: Diogenes (Apoll) (fragments/reports [c.440 BCE], B02), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 151.31- |
| 21236 | Instead of gravitational force, we now have a pervasive gravitational field [Farmelo] |
| Full Idea: Physics replaced the notion that bodies exert gravitational force on each other by the more effective picture that the bodies in the universe give rise to a pervasive gravitational field which exerts a force on each particle. | |
| From: Graham Farmelo (The Strangest Man [2009], 08) | |
| A reaction: This still uses the word 'force'. I sometimes get the impression that gravity is the curvature of space, but gravity needs more. Which direction along the curvature are particles attracted? The bottom line is the power of the bodies. |
| 21235 | The Schrödinger waves are just the maths of transforming energy values to positions [Farmelo] |
| Full Idea: Dirac showed that the Schrödinger waves were simply the mathematical quantities involved in transforming the description of a quantum based on its energy values to one based on possible values of its position. | |
| From: Graham Farmelo (The Strangest Man [2009], 08) | |
| A reaction: Does this eliminate actual physical 'waves' from the theory? |
| 21234 | Experiments show that fundamental particles of one type are identical [Farmelo] |
| Full Idea: It is an established experimental fact ...that every single fundamental particle in the universe is the same and identical to all other particles of the same type. | |
| From: Graham Farmelo (The Strangest Man [2009], 07) | |
| A reaction: A loud groan is heard from the tomb of Leibniz. I'm unclear how experiments can establish this. If electrons have internal structure (which is not ruled out) then uniformity is highly unlikely. |