63 ideas
| 16227 | Philosophers are good at denying the obvious [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers are skilled at resisting even the most inviting thoughts. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5) | |
| A reaction: Not exactly 'despair', but it does show how far philosophers are able to stray from common sense. Monads, real possible worlds, real sets… Thomas Reid, the philosopher of common sense, might be the antidote. |
| 16216 | Part of the sense of a proper name is a criterion of the thing's identity [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A Fregean dictum is that part of the sense of proper name is a criterion of identity for the thing in question. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.8) | |
| A reaction: [She quotes Dummett 1981:545] We are asked to choose between this and the Kripke rigid/dubbing/causal account, with effectively no content. |
| 21382 | Things get smaller without end [Anaxagoras] |
| Full Idea: Of the small there is no smallest, but always a smaller. | |
| From: Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B03), quoted by Gregory Vlastos - The Physical Theory of Anaxagoras II | |
| A reaction: Anaxagoras seems to be speaking of the physical world (and probably writing prior to the emergence of atomism, which could have been a rebellion against he current idea). |
| 481 | Nothing is created or destroyed; there is only mixing and separation [Anaxagoras] |
| Full Idea: No thing comes into being or passes away, but it is mixed together or separated from existing things. Thus it would be correct if coming into being was called 'mixing', and passing away 'separation-off''. | |
| From: Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B17), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 163.20 | |
| A reaction: I take this to be the first axiom of the new subject of chemistry. Our world is just patterns of Being. The bigger puzzle is - why those patterns? |
| 21822 | Anaxagoras's concept of supreme Mind has a simple First and a multiple One [Anaxagoras, by Plotinus] |
| Full Idea: Anaxagoras, in his assertion of a Mind pure and unmixed, affirms a simplex First and a sundered One, though writing long ago he failed in precision. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by Plotinus - The Enneads 5.1.09 | |
| A reaction: The crunch question is whether the supreme One or Mind is part of Being, or is above and beyond Being. Plotinus claims that Anaxagoras was on his side (with Plato, against Parmenides). |
| 16211 | A homogeneous rotating disc should be undetectable according to Humean supervenience [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Imagine a perfectly homogeneous non-atomistic disc. A record of all the non-relational information about the world at that moment will not reveal whether the disc is rotating about a vertical axis through. This tells against Humean supervenience. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: [Armstrong 1980 originated this, and it is famously discussed by Kripke in lectures] There will, of course, be dispositions present because of the rotation, but Lewis excludes any such modal truths. |
| 17995 | Basic is the potentially perceptible, then comes the contrary qualities, and finally the 'elements' [Anaxagoras] |
| Full Idea: We must recognise three 'originative sources': first that which is potentially perceptible body, secondly the contrarities (e.g hot and cold), and thirdly Fire, Water, and the like. Only thirdly, however, for these bodies change into one another. | |
| From: Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]), quoted by Aristotle - The History of Animals 529a34 | |
| A reaction: The 'potentially perceptible' seems to be matter. The surprise here is that the contraries are more basic than the elements, rather than being properties of them. Reality is modes of matter, it seems. |
| 16219 | Non-linguistic things cannot be indeterminate, because they don't have truth-values at all [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Non-linguistic objects, properties, and states of affairs cannot be indeterminate because they cannot have determinate truth-values either. No cloud is indeterminate, just as no cloud is either determinately true or determinately false. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: If vagueness must be linguistic, this means animals can never experience it, which I doubt. Presumably 'this is a cloud' is only made vague by the vagueness of the object, rather than by the vagueness of the sentence? |
| 16223 | Maybe for the world to be vague, it must be vague in its foundations? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There is a question of whether there must be 'vagueness all the way down' for the world to be vague. One view is that if there is a base level of precisely describably facts, upon which all the others supervene, then the world is not really vague. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: My understanding of the physics is that it is non-vague all the way down, and then you get to the base level which is hopelessly vague! |
| 16226 | Epistemic vagueness seems right in the case of persons [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The epistemic account of vagueness is particularly attractive where persons are concerned. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.14) | |
| A reaction: You'll have to see her text for details. Interesting that there might be different views of what vagueness is for different cases. Or putting it another way, absolutely everything (said, thought, existing or done) might be vague in some way! |
| 16208 | Supervaluation refers to one vaguely specified thing, through satisfaction by everything in some range [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Supervaluationists take a present-tense predication as concerning a single, but vaguely specified, moment. …It is indeterminate which of a range of moments enters into the truth conditions, but it is true if satisfied by every member of the range. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: She is discussing stage theory, but this is a helpful clarification of the idea of supervaluation. Something can be satisfied by a whole bunch of values, even though you are not sure which one. |
| 16221 | Supervaluationism takes what the truth-value would have been if indecision was resolved [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A supervaluationist approach involves consideration of what the truth value of the utterance would have been if semantic indecision had been resolved in this way or that. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: At last, a lovely account of supervaluation in plain English that anyone can understand! Why don't they all do that? Well, done Katherine Hawley! ['semantic indecision' is uncertainty about what your words mean!] |
| 16230 | Maybe the only properties are basic ones like charge, mass and spin [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers suspect that properties are few and far between, that there are only properties like charge, mass, spin, and so on. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: I think properties are very sparse, and mainly consist of physical powers, but I am not sure what I think of this. It may be 'mere semantics'. Complex properties still seem to be properties. Powers combine to make properties, I suggest. |
| 16232 | An object is 'natural' if its stages are linked by certain non-supervenient relations [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that our distinction between natural and unnatural (gerrymandered) objects corresponds to a distinction between series of stages which are and are not linked by certain non-supervenient relations. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 16213 for the nature of these 'relations'. I don't understand how an abstraction (as I take it) like a relation can unify a physical object. A trout-turkey is unified by a relation of some sort. Hawley defends Stage Theory. |
| 16200 | Are sortals spatially maximal - so no cat part is allowed to be a cat? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Many philosophers believe that sortal predicates are spatially maximal - for example, that no cat can be a proper spatial part of a cat. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This sounds reasonable until you cut the tail off a cat. Presumably what remains is a cat? So presumably that smaller part was always a cat? Only essentialism can make sense of this! You can't just invent rules for sortals. |
| 16237 | The modal features of statue and lump are disputed; when does it stop being that statue? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: It is difficult to establish a consensus about the modal features of the statue and the lump. Could that statue be made of a different lump? Could that statue of Goliath have been spherical? Not a realistic statue of Goliath, but still the same statue? | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6) | |
| A reaction: The problem is with a wild wacky sculptor, who might say it is a statue of Goliath no matter what shape the lump takes. 'Goliath had a spherical character'. Sometimes we will say (pace Evans) it is 'roughly identical' to the original statue. |
| 16238 | Perdurantists can adopt counterpart theory, to explain modal differences of identical part-sums [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Perdurance theory claims that lumps and statues differ modally whilst always being made of the same parts. A natural way to make this less mysterious is for perdurantists to adopt counterpart theory, where objects in different worlds are never identical. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: This, of course, is exactly the system created by David Lewis. Personally I rather like counterparts, but perdurance seems a tad crazy. |
| 16220 | Vagueness is either in our knowledge, in our talk, or in reality [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There are three main views of vagueness: the Epistemic view says we talk precisely, but don't know what we talk precisely about; the Semantic view is that it is loose talk, or semantic indecision; the Ontic view says it is part of how the world is. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: [My summary of two paragraphs] She associates Williamson with the first view, Lewis with the second, and Van Inwagen with the third. |
| 16222 | Indeterminacy in objects and in properties are not distinct cases [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There is no important distinction to be drawn between cases where indeterminacy is due to the object involved and cases where indeterminacy is due to the property involved. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: You could always paraphrase the object's situation propertywise, or the property's situation objectwise. 'His baldness is indeterminate'; 'where does the mountainous terrain end?' |
| 16228 | The constitution theory is endurantism plus more than one object in a place [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Constitution theorists are endurance theorists who believe that there can be more than one object exactly occupying a spatial region at a certain moment. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: I increasingly think that this is a ridiculous view. The constitution of an object isn't a further object. A constitution is a necessary requirement for a physical object. Hylomorphism! Constitutions can't be separate - they must constitute something! |
| 16229 | Constitution theory needs sortal properties like 'being a sweater' to distinguish it from its thread [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Constitution theorists need to posit sortal properties of 'being a thread' or 'being a sweater', as grounds for the differences betwween the sweater and the thread that constitutes it. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: This is further grounds for thinking the constitution view ridiculous, because there are no such properties. 'Being a sweater' is a category, which something belongs in if it has all the properties of a sweater. The final property triggers sweaterhood. |
| 14492 | If the constitution view says thread and sweater are two things, why do we talk of one thing? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The constitution theorists, who claim that the sweater and the thread are different things, should offer some explanation of why we tend to say that there is just one thing there. They must simply claim that we 'do not count by identity'. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.8) | |
| A reaction: Her example is a sweater knitted from a single piece of thread. Presumably we could count by sortal identity, so there is one thread here, and there is one sweater here. We just can't add the two together. No ontological arithmetic. |
| 16193 | 'Adverbialism' explains change by saying an object has-at-some-time a given property [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Another strategy for the problem of change says that instantiation - the having of properties - is time-indexed, or relative to times, although properties themselves are not. This 'adverbialism' says that object has-at-t some property. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Johnson, Lowe and Haslanger for this] Promising. The question is whether the time index is attached to the object, to the property, or to the instantiation. The middle one is wrong. There aren't two properties - green-at-t1 and green-at-t2. |
| 16195 | Presentism solves the change problem: the green banana ceases, so can't 'relate' to the yellow one [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Adopting presentism solves the problem of change, since it means that, once the banana is yellow, there just is no green banana, and the question of the relationship between yesterday's green banana and today's yellow one therefore does not arise. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: Change remains kind of odd, but it is no longer the puzzlement of two things being the same when they are admitted to be different. There is only ever one thing. This is my preferred account, I think. I certainly hope past bananas don't exist. |
| 16202 | The problem of change arises if there must be 'identity' of a thing over time [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: It is the insistence on identity between objects wholly present at different times which gives rise to the problem of change. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: My solution is to say things are the 'same', in a slightly loose non-transitive way, rather than formally identical, which is a concept from maths, not from reality. |
| 16192 | Endurance theory can relate properties to times, or timed instantiations to properties [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Endurance theory might claim a banana stands (atemporally) in different relations to different times (being-green-at to Monday), ..or has different instantiation relations to different properties (instantiates-on-Monday to being green). | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: She suggests that the first approach is more plausible for endurantists. I think she is right (assuming these are the only two options). Monday awaits a banana, but yellow doesn't. |
| 16196 | Endurance is a sophisticated theory, covering properties, instantiation and time [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Endurance theory is not just a default 'no-theory' theory, for it must incorporate a sophisticated account of properties and instantiation, and requires a certain view of time if it is even to be formulable. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: A bit odd to claim it is a sophisticated theory when it is held (at least in our culture) by absolutely everyone apart from a few philosophers and physicists. The sophistication may come with trying to describe it using current metaphysical vocabulary. |
| 16197 | How does perdurance theory explain our concern for our own future selves? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A question for perdurance theory is whether it can account for the special concern we feel for our own future selves. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: That is one of those questions that begins to look very mysterious whatever your theory. I favour endurantism, but me next year looks a very remote person for me to be concerned about, in comparison with the people around me now. |
| 16191 | Perdurance needs an atemporal perspective, to say that the object 'has' different temporal parts [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Perdurance relies on our having an 'atemporal' perspective from which we can truly say a banana has both yellow and green parts, where this 'has' is not in the present tense. ..Perdurance theory cannot be expressed straightforwardly in the present tense. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to require the tenseless B-series view of time. It seems to need a tenseless view of the past, but what does it have to say about the future? |
| 16199 | If an object is the sum of all of its temporal parts, its mass is staggeringly large! [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The mass of an object is the sum of its nonoverlapping parts. Analogy would suggest that a persisting banana has, atemporally speaking, a mass that is the sum of all the masses of the 100g temporal parts, a worryingly large figure. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This is an objection to the Perdurance view that an object is the sum of all of its temporal parts. Their duration tends towards instantaneous, so the aggregate mass tends towards infinity. She says they should deny atemporal mass. |
| 16201 | Perdurance says things are sums of stages; Stage Theory says each stage is the thing [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: According to Perdurance Theory, it is long-lived sums of stages which are tennis balls, whereas according to Stage Theory, it is the stages themselves which are tennis balls. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: These seem to be the two options if you are a four-dimensionalist, though Fine says you could be a weird three-dimensionalist and choose stage theory. |
| 16240 | If a life is essentially the sum of its temporal parts, it couldn't be shorter or longer than it was? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: It seems that perdurance theory should identify Descartes with the sum of his temporal parts, but that means Descartes essentially lived for 54 years, which seems absurd, as he could have lived longer or less long than he in fact did. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6.10) | |
| A reaction: [She credits Van Inwagen with this] I'm not clear why a counterpart of Descartes could not have a shorter or longer sum of parts, and still be Descartes. If the sum is rigidly designated, that is a problem for endurance too. |
| 16206 | Stages must be as fine-grained in length as change itself, so any change is a new stage [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: To account for change, stages and temporal parts must be as fine-grained as change: a material thing must have as many stages or parts as it is in incompatible states during its lifetime. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.4) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be a dilemma for stages here, of being so fat that they are divisible and change, or so thin that they barely exist. Lose-lose, I'd say. |
| 16203 | Stage Theory seems to miss out the link between stages of the same object [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The first worry for Stage Theory is that many present stages are bananas, and many stages tomorrow are bananas, but this seems to omit the important fact that some of those stages are intimately linked, that certain stages are the same banana. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: Hawley has a theory to do with external relations, which I didn't find very persuasive. Just to say stages have a 'relation' seems too abstract. Stages of disparate things can also have 'relations', but presumably the wrong sort. |
| 16204 | Stage Theory says every stage is a distinct object, which gives too many objects [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The second worry for Stage Theory is that there are far too many bananas in the world on this account. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: The point is that each (instantaneous) stage is considered to be a whole banana (as opposed to one sum of all the stages of the banana, in the Perdurance view). A pretty serious problem, which she tries to deal with. |
| 16212 | An isolated stage can't be a banana (which involves suitable relations to other stages) [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A single isolated stage could not be a banana, because in order to be a banana a stage must be suitably related to other stages with appropriate properties. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.4.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems at odds with the claim that each stage is the whole thing (rather than the long temporal 'worm' of perdurance theory). Isolated stages are instantaneous, so can't be anything, really. Her 'relations' seem hand-wavy to me. Connections? |
| 16213 | Stages of one thing are related by extrinsic counterfactual and causal relations [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: I claim that there are relations between the distinct stages of a persisting object which are not determined by the intrinsic properties of those stages. …The later stages depend, counterfactually and causally, upon the earlier stages. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: This is the heart of her theory. How can there be a causal link between two stages which is not the result of intrinsic properties of the stages? This begins to sound like Malebranche's Occasionalism. |
| 16205 | The stages of Stage Theory seem too thin to populate the world, or to be referred to [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A third worry for Stage Theory is that the momentary stages themselves are just too thin to populate the world, and too thin to be the objects of reference. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: Her three objections to her own theory add up to sufficient to refute it, in my view, though a large chunk of her book is spent trying to refute the objections. |
| 16225 | If two things might be identical, there can't be something true of one and false of the other [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: We can call the 'transference principle' the claim that if it is indeterminate whether two objects are identical, then nothing determinately true of one can be determinately false of the other. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.9) | |
| A reaction: The point is that Leibniz's Law could immediately be invoked to show there is no possibility of their identity. |
| 16239 | To decide whether something is a counterpart, we need to specify a relevant sortal concept [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: When asked whether a possible object is a counterpart of something, we need to specify which sortal we are interested in. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: The compares this to the 'respect' in which two things are similar. For example, what would count as a counterpart of the current British Prime Minister? De re or de dicto reference? |
| 20802 | Snow is not white, and doesn't even appear white, because it is made of black water [Anaxagoras, by Cicero] |
| Full Idea: Anaxagoras not only denied that snow was white, but because he knew that the water from which it was composed was black, even denied that it appeared white to himself. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - Academica II.100 | |
| A reaction: Not ridiculous. Can you deny that red and yellow balls look orange from a distance? A failure of discrimination on your part. It sounds okay to say 'what I am really perceiving is red and yellow'. [see 'Anaxagoras' poem by D.H.Lawrence!] |
| 13257 | The senses are too feeble to determine the truth [Anaxagoras] |
| Full Idea: Owing to the feebleness of the sense, we are not able to determine the truth. | |
| From: Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B21), quoted by Patricia Curd - Anaxagoras 5.1 | |
| A reaction: Anaxagoras offers a corresponding elevation of the power of mind (Idea 13256), so I now realise that he is, along with Pythagoras and Parmenides, one of the fathers of rationalism in philosophy. They probably overrate reason. |
| 22761 | We reveal unreliability in the senses when we cannot discriminate a slow change of colour [Anaxagoras, by Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: Our lack of sureness in the senses is shown if we take two colours, back and white, and pour one into the other drop by drop, we are unable to distinguish the gradual alterations although they subsist as actual facts. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by Sextus Empiricus - Against the Logicians (two books) I.090 | |
| A reaction: [Sextus calls Anaxagoras 'the greatest of the physicists'] I'm not sure what this proves. People with bad eyesight can distinguish very little, but that doesn't prove scepticism. And there are things too small for anyone to see. |
| 13256 | Nous is unlimited, self-ruling and pure; it is the finest thing, with great discernment and strength [Anaxagoras] |
| Full Idea: Nous is unlimited and self-ruling and has been mixed with no thing, but is alone itself by itself. ...For it is the finest of all things and the purest, and indeed it maintains all discernment about everything and has the greatest strength. | |
| From: Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B12), quoted by Patricia Curd - Anaxagoras 3.3 | |
| A reaction: Anaxagoras seems to have been a pioneer in elevating the status of the mind, which is a prop to the rationalist view, and encourages dualism. More naturalistic accounts are, in my view, much healthier. |
| 13784 | Mind is self-ruling, pure, ordering and ubiquitous [Anaxagoras, by Plato] |
| Full Idea: Anaxagoras says that mind is self-ruling, mixes with nothing else, orders the things that are, and travels through everything. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by Plato - Cratylus 413c | |
| A reaction: This elevation of the mind in the natural scheme of things by Anaxagoras looks increasingly significant in western culture to me. Without this line of thought, Descartes and Kant are inconceivable. |
| 16218 | On any theory of self, it is hard to explain why we should care about our future selves [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: It is rather difficult to say why one should care about one's future self, even on an endurance theory account of the self. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.9) | |
| A reaction: A nice passing remark, that strikes me forcibly as one of those basic mysteries of experience that philosophers can only gawp at, and have no theory to offer. |
| 5118 | Anaxagoras says mind remains pure, and so is not affected by what it changes [Anaxagoras, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Anaxagoras says that intellect (which is a cause of change) is not affected by or mixed in with anything else; for this is the only way in which it can cause change, while being itself changeless, and control things without mixing with them. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by Aristotle - Physics 256b24 | |
| A reaction: I suggest that this is the germ of the original concept of freewill - of the mind as somehow outside the causal processes of the world, so that it can initiate change without itself being affected by other causes. Aristotle says he's right; I disagree. |
| 18231 | Anaxagoras said a person would choose to be born to contemplate the ordered heavens [Anaxagoras] |
| Full Idea: When Anaxagoras was asked what it was for which a person would choose to be born rather than not, he said it would be to apprehend the heavens and the order in the whole universe. | |
| From: Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], 1216), quoted by Aristotle - Eudemian Ethics 8 'Finality' | |
| A reaction: [Anaxagoras, quoted by Aristotle, quoted by Korsgaard, quoted by me, and then quoted by you, perhaps] |
| 631 | For Anaxagoras the Good Mind has no opposite, and causes all movement, for a higher reason [Anaxagoras, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Anaxagoras says the good is a principle as the source of movement, in the form of Mind. However it does it for the sake of something else, which is a further factor. And he allows no opposite to the good Mind. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 1075b |
| 22727 | Mind creates the world from a mixture of pure substances [Anaxagoras, by ] |
| Full Idea: Anaxagoras assumed that Mind, which is God, is the efficient principle, and the multi-mixture of homoeomeries is the material principle. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by - I.6 | |
| A reaction: The choice of homoeomeries as basic is a good one. They are much better candidates than materials which are made of parts of a quite different kind, where the parts are a better candidate than the whole. |
| 550 | Anaxagoras said that the number of principles was infinite [Anaxagoras, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Anaxagoras said that the number of principles was infinite. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 984a |
| 21383 | The ultimate constituents of reality are the homoeomeries [Anaxagoras, by Vlastos] |
| Full Idea: Anaxagoras contrasts with other thinkers in the formula that his 'elements' were not the air of Anaximenes or the fire of Heraclitus or the roots of Empedocles or the atoms of Leucippus, but the infinite variety of homoiomereia. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by Gregory Vlastos - The Physical Theory of Anaxagoras III | |
| A reaction: Not sure about the 'roots' of Empedocles. Anaxagoras is particularly thinking of the basic stuffs that make up the body, such as hair, bone and blood. It is plausible to reduce everything to stuffs that seem to have no further structure. |
| 13208 | Anaxagoreans regard the homoeomeries as elements, which compose earth, air, fire and water [Anaxagoras, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: The followers of Anaxagoras regard the 'homoeomeries' as 'simple' and elements, whilst they affirm that Earth, Fire, Water and Air are composite; for each of these is (according to them) a 'common seminary' of all the homoeomeries. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by Aristotle - Coming-to-be and Passing-away (Gen/Corr) 314a28 | |
| A reaction: Compare Idea 13207. Aristotle is amused that the followers of Empedocles and of Anaxagoras have precisely opposite views on this subject. |
| 367 | Anaxagoras says mind produces order and causes everything [Anaxagoras, by Plato] |
| Full Idea: Anaxagoras asserted that it is mind that produces order and is the cause of everything. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by Plato - Phaedo 097d |
| 16215 | Causation is nothing more than the counterfactuals it grounds? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Counterfactual accounts of causation say that a causal connection is exhausted by the counterfactuals it appears to ground. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: I am bewildered as to how this became a respectable view in philosophy. I quite understand that this might exhaust the 'logic' of causal relations. Presumably you can have counterfactuals in mathematics which are not causal? |
| 16207 | Time could be discrete (like integers) or dense (rationals) or continuous (reals) [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There seem to be three possible ways for time to be fine-grained. The ordering of instants could be discrete (like the integers), dense (like the rational numbers) or continuous (like the real numbers). | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: She seems to assume that time must be 'grained', but I would take the continuous view to imply that there is no grain at all (which is bad news for her version of stage theory). |
| 21381 | Germs contain microscopic organs, which become visible as they grow [Anaxagoras] |
| Full Idea: In the germ there are hair, nails, arteries, sinews, bones, which are not manifest because of the smallness of their parts, but become distinct little by little as they grow. For how could hair come from not-hair, or flesh from non-flesh. | |
| From: Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B10), quoted by Gregory Vlastos - The Physical Theory of Anaxagoras I | |
| A reaction: Compare Aristotle's apparent view that the physical world has no microscopic structure, and Democritus's view that hair can come from not-hair by the organisation of atoms. Is this the first suggestion that we need to know what is microscopic? |
| 22726 | When things were unified, Mind set them in order [Anaxagoras] |
| Full Idea: All things were together, and Mind came and set them in order. | |
| From: Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) | |
| A reaction: This is presumably the source for the passionate belief of Plato in the importance of order. Existence seems like chaos, with order residing beneath it, but we can wonder whether if we go even deeper it is chaos again. |
| 2629 | Anaxagoras was the first to say that the universe is directed by an intelligence [Anaxagoras, by Cicero] |
| Full Idea: Anaxagoras, pupil of Anaximenes, was the first to maintain that the form and motion of the universe was determined and directed by the power and purpose of an infinite intelligence. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - On the Nature of the Gods ('De natura deorum') I.26 |
| 480 | Past, present and future, and the movements of the heavens, were arranged by Mind [Anaxagoras] |
| Full Idea: Whatever was then in existence which is not now, and all things that now exist, and whatever shall exist - all were arranged by Mind, as also the revolution followed now by the stars, the sun and the moon. | |
| From: Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B12), quoted by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Physics' 164.24 |
| 7902 | The Buddha made flowers float in the air, to impress people, and make them listen [Mahavastu] |
| Full Idea: When the young Brahmin threw her two lotuses, they stood suspended in the air. This was one of the miracles by which the Buddhas impress people, to make them listen to the truth. | |
| From: Mahavastu (The Great Event [c.200], I.231-9) | |
| A reaction: Presumably this is the reason that Jesus did miracles. It is hard to spot the truth among the myriad of lies, if there is no supporting miracle to give authority to the speaker. |
| 5956 | Anaxagoras was charged with impiety for calling the sun a lump of stone [Anaxagoras, by Plutarch] |
| Full Idea: Anaxagoras was charged with impiety because he called the sun a lump of stone. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by Plutarch - 14: Superstition §9 | |
| A reaction: The point is that he was supposed to say that the sun is a god. |
| 7488 | Anaxagoras was the first recorded atheist [Anaxagoras, by Watson] |
| Full Idea: Anaxagoras was the first recorded atheist. | |
| From: report of Anaxagoras (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE]) by Peter Watson - Ideas Ch.25 | |
| A reaction: He was a very lively character, right in the middle of the Athenian golden age. |