8 ideas
| 15575 | Knowledge is not a static set of correct propositions, but a continuing search for better interpretations [Polt] |
| Full Idea: Thanks to Heidegger, hermeneutics has gained wider acceptance - that knowledge is not a static set of correct propositions, but a continuing search for better interpretations. | |
| From: Richard Polt (Heidegger: an introduction [1999], 3.§7) | |
| A reaction: I am not sure if I understand the notion of a search that has a refusal to actually find anything as one of its basic principles. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 15568 | When we consider possibilities, there must be something we are considering [Polt] |
| Full Idea: We would hardly want to say that a possibility is nothing, since surely we are considering something when we consider possibilities. | |
| From: Richard Polt (Heidegger: an introduction [1999], 1) | |
| A reaction: A nice contribution to the issue of whether modality is a feature of actuality. I would prefer to say that we can self-evidently utter truths and falsehoods about what is or is not possible, in nature, in logic, and maybe in metaphysics. |
| 22745 | Pherecydes said the first principle and element is earth [Pherecydes, by Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: Pherecydes of Syros said that the principle and element of all things is earth. | |
| From: report of Pherecydes (fragments/reports [c.600 BCE]) by Sextus Empiricus - Against the Physicists (two books) I.360 | |
| A reaction: Sextus is giving the history, and mentions it before saying that Thales thought it was water. Earth seems a sensible starting point, and I am guessing that Thales was trying to think a bit more deeply than Pherecydes about it. |
| 5883 | Pherecydes was the first to say that the soul is eternal [Pherecydes, by Cicero] |
| Full Idea: As far as the literature tells us, Pherecydes of Syros was the first who pronounced the souls of men to be eternal. | |
| From: report of Pherecydes (fragments/reports [c.600 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - Tusculan Disputations I.xvi.38 | |
| A reaction: Presumably before that it was the physical person who arrived in the Underworld. The Hindu tradition seems to require the soul to be very long-lived, if not eternal. Why did Pherecydes come up with this idea? |