Combining Philosophers

All the ideas for Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C, Berys Gaut and Hecato

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20 ideas

7. Existence / B. Change in Existence / 2. Processes

16554	Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: Activities can be identified spatiotemporally, and individuated by rate, duration, and types of entity and property that engage in them. They also have modes of operation, directionality, polarity, energy requirements and a range.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
	A reaction: This is their attempt at making 'activity' one of the two central concepts of ontology, along with 'entity'. A helpful analysis. It just seems to be one way of slicing the cake.

8. Modes of Existence / C. Powers and Dispositions / 2. Powers as Basic

16556	Penicillin causes nothing; the cause is what penicillin does [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: It is not the penicillin that causes the pneumonia to disappear, but what the penicillin does.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.1)
	A reaction: This is a very neat example for illustrating how we slip into 'entity' talk, when the reality we are addressing actually concerns processes. Without the 'what it does', penicillin can't participate in causation at all.

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

16562	We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: The intelligibility of a phenomenon consists in the mechanisms being portrayed in terms of a field's bottom out entities and activities.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7)
	A reaction: In other words, we understand complex things by reducing them to things we do understand. It would, though, be illuminating to see a nest of interconnected activities, even if we understood none of them.

14. Science / D. Explanation / 2. Types of Explanation / e. Lawlike explanations

16563	The explanation is not the regularity, but the activity sustaining it [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: It is not regularities that explain but the activities that sustain the regularities.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7)
	A reaction: Good, but we had better not characterise the 'activities' in terms of regularities.

14. Science / D. Explanation / 2. Types of Explanation / h. Explanations by function

16555	Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: It is common to speak of functions as properties 'had by' entities, …but they should rather be understood in terms of the activities by virtue of which entities contribute to the workings of a mechanism.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
	A reaction: I'm certainly quite passionately in favour of cutting down on describing the world almost entirely in terms of entities which have properties. An 'activity', though, is a bit of an elusive concept.

14. Science / D. Explanation / 2. Types of Explanation / i. Explanations by mechanism

16528	Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: One should not think of mechanisms as exclusively mechanical (push-pull) systems.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1)
	A reaction: The difficulty seems to be that you could broaden the concept of 'mechanism' indefinitely, so that it covered history, mathematics, populations, cultural change, and even mathematics. Where to stop?

16529	Mechanisms are systems organised to produce regular change [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular change from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1)
	A reaction: This is their initial formal definition of a mechanism. Note that a mere 'activity' can be included. Presumably the mechanism might have an outcome that was not the intended outcome. Does a random element disqualify it? Are hands mechanisms?

16530	A mechanism explains a phenomenon by showing how it was produced [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: To give a description of a mechanism for a phenomenon is to explain that phenomenon, i.e. to explain how it was produced.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1)
	A reaction: To 'show how' something happens needs a bit of precisification. It is probably analytic that 'showing how' means 'revealing the mechanism', though 'mechanism' then becomes the tricky concept.

16553	Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: We emphasise the activities in mechanisms. This is explicitly dualist. Substantivalists speak of entities with dispositions to act. Process ontologists reify activities and try to reduce entities to processes. We try to capture both intuitions.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3)
	A reaction: [A quotation of selected fragments] The problem here seems to be the raising of an 'activity' to a central role in ontology, when it doesn't seem to be primitive, and will typically be analysed in a variety of ways.

16559	Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: Nested hierachical descriptions of mechanisms typically bottom out in lowest level mechanisms. …Bottoming out is relative …the explanation comes to an end, and description of lower-level mechanisms would be irrelevant.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.1)
	A reaction: This seems to me exactly the right story about mechanism, and it is a story I am associating with essentialism. The relevance is ties to understanding. The lower level is either fully understood, or totally baffling.

14. Science / D. Explanation / 3. Best Explanation / b. Ultimate explanation

16564	There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: There are four bottom-out kinds of activities: geometrico-mechanical, electro-chemical, electro-magnetic and energetic. These are abstract means of production that can be fruitfully applied in particular cases to explain phenomena.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7)
	A reaction: I like that. It gives a nice core for a metaphysics for physicalists. I suspect that 'mechanical' can be reduced to something else, and that 'energetic' will disappear in the final story.

15. Nature of Minds / C. Capacities of Minds / 3. Abstraction by mind

16561	We can abstract by taking an exemplary case and ignoring the detail [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: Abstractions may be constructed by taking an exemplary case or instance and removing detail.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.3)
	A reaction: I love 'removing detail'. That's it. Simple. I think this process is the basis of our whole capacity to formulate abstract concepts. Forget Frege - he's just describing the results of the process. How do we decide what is 'detail'? Essentialism!

21. Aesthetics / A. Aesthetic Experience / 2. Aesthetic Attitude

22687	Maybe literary assessment is evaluating the artist as a suitable friend [Gaut]
	Full Idea: An approach in Hume (elaborated by Wayne Booth) holds that literary assessment is akin to an act of befriending, for one assesses the author of a work as a suitable friend.
	From: Berys Gaut (The Ethical Criticism of Art [1998], 'Some')
	A reaction: I like the idea that art exploits our normal range of social emotions and attitudes, so I think this has some truth, but some of the best artists are so out of my league as to not even be candidates for friendship. Dostoevsky? Webster? Caravaggio?

21. Aesthetics / B. Nature of Art / 2. Art as Form

22686	Formalists say aesthetics concerns types of beauty, or unity, complexity and intensity [Gaut]
	Full Idea: The formal objects which individuate the aesthetic attitude may be narrowly aesthetic, as beauty, and its subspecies, such as grace and elegance, or more broadly by other formalist criteria, such as Beardley's unity, complexity and intensity.
	From: Berys Gaut (The Ethical Criticism of Art [1998], 'Objections 1')
	A reaction: I'm not sure about unity or complexity, but intensity was endorsed by Henry James. Intensity doesn't sound very 'formal'. 'Beauty' doesn't seem the right word for the wonderful 'King Lear', or even for Jane Austen novels.

21. Aesthetics / C. Artistic Issues / 7. Art and Morality

22690	'Moralism' says all aesthetic merits are moral merits [Gaut]
	Full Idea: The view that the only aesthetic merit of works are ethical ones is known as 'moralism'.
	From: Berys Gaut (The Ethical Criticism of Art [1998], n 1)
	A reaction: [He says this view was demolished by R.W.Beardsmore in 1971] Gaut contrasts this with his own carefully modulated 'ethicism'. Moralism predominated in the eighteenth century, but now looks clearly wrong (or naïve).

22684	Good ethics counts towards aesthetic merit, and bad ethics counts against it [Gaut]
	Full Idea: I defend 'ethicism', which says that ethically admirable attitudes count toward the the aesthetic merit of a work, and ethically reprehensible attitudes count against its aesthetic merit.
	From: Berys Gaut (The Ethical Criticism of Art [1998], 'Ethicism')
	A reaction: He recognises that morally admirable works can explore unethical behaviour, and also that identifying the 'attitude' of a work is not simple. The ethics are not necessary. 'Triumph of the Will' is a classic test case. I disagree with Gaut.

22689	If we don't respond ethically in the way a work prescribes, that is an aesthetic failure [Gaut]
	Full Idea: Our having reason not to respond in the way prescribed (because it is unethical) is a failure of the work …so that is an aesthetic failure, which is an aesthetic defect.
	From: Berys Gaut (The Ethical Criticism of Art [1998], 'Merited')
	A reaction: A key argument for Gaut's theory of 'ethicism' about literature. If 'Triumph of the Will' gets the right response from Nazi sympathisers, that is probably all aesthetic success. Jane Austen hasn't failed if she is rejected as bourgeois.

22685	Good art does not necessarily improve people (any more than good advice does) [Gaut]
	Full Idea: Ethicism does not entail the causal thesis that good art ethically improves people, …any more than it follows that earnest ethical advice improves people.
	From: Berys Gaut (The Ethical Criticism of Art [1998], 'Ethicism')
	A reaction: How successful were sermons, in the great days of Christianity? It seems hard to disagree with Gaut's point.

23. Ethics / C. Virtue Theory / 3. Virtues / a. Virtues

6004	The cardinal virtues are theoretical (based on knowledge), and others are 'non-theoretical' [Hecato, by Dorandi]
	Full Idea: Hecato defined the cardinal virtues as 'theoretical', that is, based on knowledge, and to these he opposed those that are 'non-theoretical', for example, health, beauty, strength of spirit, and courage.
	From: report of Hecato (fragments/reports [c.70 BCE]) by Tiziano Dorandi - Hecato of Rhodes
	A reaction: Mostly these are Aristotle's external and non-external virtues, except that courage is here included among the former, implying, presumably, that it is more of a natural gift than an intellectual achievement.

26. Natural Theory / D. Laws of Nature / 11. Against Laws of Nature

16558	Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver]
	Full Idea: The traditional notion of a law of nature has few, if any, applications in neurobiology or molecular biology.
	From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.2)
	A reaction: This is a simple and self-evident fact, and bad news for anyone who want to build their entire ontology around laws of nature. I take such a notion to be fairly empty, except as a convenient heuristic device.