19 ideas
| 10365 | We might use 'facta' to refer to the truth-makers for facts [Mellor, by Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: Mellor offers a distinction between 'facts' and 'facta' (the latter being the truth-makers for facts). | |
| From: report of D.H. Mellor (The Facts of Causation [1995]) by Jonathan Schaffer - The Metaphysics of Causation 1.1 | |
| A reaction: The idea is that 'facta' can do the work in causation, because 'facts' are not part of the world. This seems a very helpful terminology, which should be encouraged, since 'fact' is plainly ambiguous in current usage. |
| 20752 | For man, being is not what he is, but what he is going to be [Ortega y Gassett] |
| Full Idea: Being consists not in what it is already, but in what it is not yet, a being that consists in not-yet-being. Everything else in the world is what it is….Man is the entity that makes himself….He has to determine what he is going to be. | |
| From: José Ortega y Gassett (Toward a Philosophy of History [1941], p.112,201-2), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 4 'Problem' | |
| A reaction: [p.112 and 201-2] This seems to be Ortega y Gasset's spin on Heidegger's concept, by adding a temporal dimension to it. |
| 8568 | A property is merely a constituent of laws of nature; temperature is just part of thermodynamics [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: Being a constituent of probabilistic laws of nature is all there is to being a property. There is no more to temperature than the thermodynamics and other laws they occur in. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: How could thermodynamics be worked out without a prior concept of temperature? I think it is at least plausible to deny that there are any 'laws' of nature. But even Quine can't deny that some things are too hot to touch. |
| 8564 | There is obviously a possible predicate for every property [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: To every property there obviously corresponds a possible predicate applying to all and only those particulars with that property. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: This doesn't strike me as at all obvious. If nature dictates the properties, there may be vastly more than any human language could cope with. It is daft to say that a property can only exist if humanity can come up with a predicate for it. |
| 8566 | We need universals for causation and laws of nature; the latter give them their identity [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: I take the main reason for believing in contingent universals to be the roles they play in causation and in laws of nature, and those laws are what I take to give those universals their identity. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: He agrees with Armstrong. Sounds a bit circular - laws are built on universals, and universals are identified by laws. It resembles a functionalist account of mental events. I think it is wrong. A different account of laws will be needed... |
| 8565 | If properties were just the meanings of predicates, they couldn't give predicates their meaning [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: One reason for denying that properties just are the meanings of our predicates is that, if they were, they could not give our predicates their meanings. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: Neither way round sounds quite right to me. Predicate nominalism is wrong, but what is meant by a property 'giving' a predicate its meaning? It doesn't seem to allow room for error in our attempts to name the properties. |
| 7647 | The imagination alone perceives all objects; it is the soul, playing all its roles [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: The imagination alone perceives; it forms an idea of all objects, with the words and figures that characterise them; thus the imagination is the soul, because it plays all its roles. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.15) | |
| A reaction: This is not just a big claim for the importance of imagination, in strong opposition to Descartes's rather dismissive view (Idea 1399), but also appears to be the germ of an interesting theory about the nature of personal identity. |
| 7645 | When falling asleep, the soul becomes paralysed and weak, just like the body [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: The soul and body fall asleep together. The soul slowly becomes paralysed, together with all the body's muscles. They can no longer hold up the weight of the head, while the soul can no longer bear the burden of thought. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.6) | |
| A reaction: A very nice observation, to place alongside other evidence such as drunkenness and blushing. Personally I find it hard to see why anyone ever believed dualism. You don't need modern brain scans and brain lesion research to see the problem. |
| 23225 | The soul's faculties depend on the brain, and are simply the brain's organisation [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: All the soul's faculties depend so much on the specific organisation of the brain and of the whole body that they are clearly nothing but that organisation. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.26) | |
| A reaction: An interesting idea because it suggests that La Mettrie is a functionalist, rather than simply a reductive physicalist. |
| 7652 | Man is a machine, and there exists only one substance, diversely modified [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: Let us conclude boldly that man is a machine and that there is in the whole universe only one diversely modified substance. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.39) | |
| A reaction: What courage it must have taken to write what now seems a perfectly acceptable and normal view. One day there should be a collective monument to Hobbes, Gassendi, Spinoza, La Mettrie and Hume, who thought so boldly. |
| 7650 | All thought is feeling, and rationality is the sensitive soul contemplating reasoning [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: Thought is only a capacity to feel, and the rational soul is only the sensitive soul applied to the contemplation of ideas and to reasoning. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.33) | |
| A reaction: What a very nice idea. La Mettrie wants to bring us closer to animals. Because we can pursue a train of rational thought, it does not follow that we have a faculty called 'rationality'. A dog can follow a clever series of clues that lead to food. |
| 7651 | With wonderful new machines being made, a speaking machine no longer seems impossible [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: If wonderful machines like Huygens's planetary clock can be made, it would take even more cogs and springs to make a speaking machine, which can no longer be considered impossible, particularly at the hands of a new Prometheus. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.34) | |
| A reaction: Compare Descartes in Idea 3614. The idea of artificial intelligence does not arise with the advent of computers; it follows naturally from the materialist view of the mind, along with a bit of ambition to build complex machines. |
| 20756 | Instead of having a nature, man only has a history [Ortega y Gassett] |
| Full Idea: Man lives in view of the past. Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is history. Expressed differently: what nature is to things, history is to man. | |
| From: José Ortega y Gassett (Toward a Philosophy of History [1941], p.217), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 5 'Situated' | |
| A reaction: Makes explicit the existentialist denial of human nature. The foundation of ethics can only be total freedom, to choose both yourself and your actions. What is inescapable is the social and culture contexts. What is the role of the 'history'? |
| 7648 | The sun and rain weren't made for us; they sometimes burn us, or spoil our seeds [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: The sun was not made in order to heat the earth and all its inhabitants - whom it sometimes burns - any more than the rain was created in order to grow seeds - which it often spoils. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747]) | |
| A reaction: This denial of Aristotelian (and divine) teleology is as much part of the movement against religion, as are concerns about natural evil, and about the weakness of arguments for God's existence. These facts were obvious long before La Mettrie. |
| 4785 | Causal statements relate facts (which are whatever true propositions express) [Mellor, by Psillos] |
| Full Idea: Mellor argues that causal statements relate facts, where facts may be seen as whatever true propositions express. | |
| From: report of D.H. Mellor (The Facts of Causation [1995]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation §2.6 | |
| A reaction: Choose between 'facts', 'objects', 'conserved quantities, 'events' (the usual one) or 'processes'. I rather like processes (Salmon) as they are a better prospect as the building blocks of an ontology. |
| 8567 | Singular causation requires causes to raise the physical probability of their effects [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: Singular causation entails physical probabilities or chances. ...Causal laws require causes to raise their effects' chances, as when fires have a greater chance of occurring when explosions do. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: It seems fairly obvious that a probability can be increased without actually causing something. Just after a harmless explosion is a good moment for arsonists, especially if Mellor will be the investigating officer. |
| 8408 | Probabilistic causation says C is a cause of E if it increases the chances of E occurring [Mellor, by Tooley] |
| Full Idea: The basic idea of probabilistic causation is that a sufficient condition of C's being a cause of E is that C and E are actual, individual events, and the objective chance of E's occurring is greater given the occurrence of C than it would be without C. | |
| From: report of D.H. Mellor (The Facts of Causation [1995]) by Michael Tooley - Causation and Supervenience 5.3 | |
| A reaction: Mellor has to include objective 'chances' in his ontology to support his theory. As it stands this looks like a weak theory, since the event might not occur despite C happening, and some less likely event might turn out to be the actual cause. |
| 7646 | There is no abrupt transition from man to animal; only language has opened a gap [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: From animals to man there is no abrupt transition. What was man before he invented words and learnt languages? An animal of a particular species, with much less natural instinct than the others. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747], p.13) | |
| A reaction: This shows how strongly the evolutionary idea was in the air, a century before Darwin proposed a mechanism for it. This thought is the beginning of a very new view of man, and also of a very new view of animals. |
| 7649 | There is no clear idea of the soul, which should only refer to our thinking part [La Mettrie] |
| Full Idea: The soul is merely a vain term of which we have no idea and which a good mind should use only to refer to that part of us which thinks. | |
| From: Julien Offray de La Mettrie (Machine Man [1747]) | |
| A reaction: I have always found the concept of the soul particularly baffling. It seems that it is only believed in to make immortality possible, with no other purpose to the belief, let alone evidence. I suspect that Descartes agreed with La Mettrie on this. |