Combining Philosophers

All the ideas for Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM, Bryan van Norden and Timothy Smiley

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8 ideas

1. Philosophy / B. History of Ideas / 2. Ancient Thought

23392	The Dao (Way) first means the road, and comes to mean the right way to live [Norden]
	Full Idea: The 'Dao' (tr 'Way) has five meanings: 1) path or road, 2) mode of doing something, 3) account of how to do something, 4) the right way to live, and 5) the ultimate metaphysical entity responsible for nature, and how it should be.
	From: Bryan van Norden (Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy [2011], 1.III)
	A reaction: [compressed] So it is essentially metaphorical, just like the English 'way to do a thing'. Number 5 seems a rather large leap from the others, and most discussion seems to centre on number 4. The Chinese hoped for consensus on the Dao.

1. Philosophy / H. Continental Philosophy / 3. Hermeneutics

23408	The hermeneutic circle is either within the text, or between text and biased reader [Norden]
	Full Idea: The first type of hermeneutic circle operates inside the text, studying relationships between sentences. …The second type is between the text and the reader, …who brings assumptions about what it means.
	From: Bryan van Norden (Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy [2011], App A.I)
	A reaction: The first kind is an essential aspect of reading well. Readers are biased, but I get very tired of those who do nothing but search for bias, and ignore the truth a text has to offer. If everything is bias, intellectual life is dead.

23407	Heremeneutics is either 'faith' (examining truth) or 'suspicion' (looking for hidden motives) [Norden]
	Full Idea: A 'hermeneutics of faith' treat a text as a candidate for truth. ….A 'hermeneutics of suspicion' looks not for truth but for explanations of why someone makes certain claims, …particularly to serve their ulterior interests.
	From: Bryan van Norden (Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy [2011], App I.1)
	A reaction: As far as I can see, the suspicious approach was a legitimate development in sociology, which studies the sources of ideas, but is absurdly offered by some philosophers as a total replacement of the faith approach.

7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 3. Levels of Reality

16062	A necessary relation between fact-levels seems to be a further irreducible fact [Lynch/Glasgow]
	Full Idea: It seems unavoidable that the facts about logically necessary relations between levels of facts are themselves logically distinct further facts, irreducible to the microphysical facts.
	From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C)
	A reaction: I'm beginning to think that rejecting every theory of reality that is proposed by carefully exposing some infinite regress hidden in it is a rather lazy way to do philosophy. Almost as bad as rejecting anything if it can't be defined.

7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 5. Supervenience / c. Significance of supervenience

16061	If some facts 'logically supervene' on some others, they just redescribe them, adding nothing [Lynch/Glasgow]
	Full Idea: Logical supervenience, restricted to individuals, seems to imply strong reduction. It is said that where the B-facts logically supervene on the A-facts, the B-facts simply re-describe what the A-facts describe, and the B-facts come along 'for free'.
	From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], C)
	A reaction: This seems to be taking 'logically' to mean 'analytically'. Presumably an entailment is logically supervenient on its premisses, and may therefore be very revealing, even if some people think such things are analytic.

7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 6. Physicalism

16060	Nonreductive materialism says upper 'levels' depend on lower, but don't 'reduce' [Lynch/Glasgow]
	Full Idea: The root intuition behind nonreductive materialism is that reality is composed of ontologically distinct layers or levels. …The upper levels depend on the physical without reducing to it.
	From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], B)
	A reaction: A nice clear statement of a view which I take to be false. This relationship is the sort of thing that drives people fishing for an account of it to use the word 'supervenience', which just says two things seem to hang out together. Fluffy materialism.

16064	The hallmark of physicalism is that each causal power has a base causal power under it [Lynch/Glasgow]
	Full Idea: Jessica Wilson (1999) says what makes physicalist accounts different from emergentism etc. is that each individual causal power associated with a supervenient property is numerically identical with a causal power associated with its base property.
	From: Lynch,MP/Glasgow,JM (The Impossibility of Superdupervenience [2003], n 11)
	A reaction: Hence the key thought in so-called (serious, rather than self-evident) 'emergentism' is so-called 'downward causation', which I take to be an idle daydream.

11. Knowledge Aims / A. Knowledge / 2. Understanding

18810	Aristotle's proofs give understanding, so it can't be otherwise, so consequence is necessary [Smiley, by Rumfitt]
	Full Idea: The ingredient of necessity [in Aristotle's account of consequence] is required by his demand that proof should produce 'understanding' [episteme], coupled with his claim that understanding something involves seeing that it cannot be otherwise.
	From: report of Timothy Smiley (Conceptions of Consequence [1998], p.599) by Ian Rumfitt - The Boundary Stones of Thought 3.2
	A reaction: An intriguing reverse of the normal order. Not 'necessity in logic delivers understanding', but 'reaching understanding shows the logic was necessary'.