35 ideas
| 9777 | Kant was the first philosopher [Zizek] |
| Full Idea: From today's perspective it is in a way clear that Kant was the first philosopher. Pre-Kantian philosophy cannot think in his transcendental aspect. | |
| From: Slavoj Zizek (Conversations, with Glyn Daly [2004], §1) | |
| A reaction: It is probably equally plausible to say that Kant was the last philosopher. More thought-provoking than true. |
| 9778 | There is no dialogue in philosophy [Zizek] |
| Full Idea: I think I truly became a philosopher when I realised that there is no dialogue in philosophy. Plato's dialogues are clearly fakes, with one guy talking most of the time. ...Philosophy as an interdisciplinary project is the ultimate nightmare. | |
| From: Slavoj Zizek (Conversations, with Glyn Daly [2004], §1) | |
| A reaction: This goes against all my prejudices in favour of teamwork and mutual criticism (e.g. Idea 1576), but I was a bit shaken by it, and have begun to wonder whether I must just face up to the solitary nature of the enterprise. |
| 9779 | Philosophy is transcendental questioning (not supporting science or constructing ontology) [Zizek] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy can no longer play its traditional roles, giving foundations to science, or constructing general ontology. It should simply fulfil its task of transcendental questioning. | |
| From: Slavoj Zizek (Conversations, with Glyn Daly [2004], §2) | |
| A reaction: I remain unsure what is being recommended, unless it is for philosophy to start asking questions just at the point where everyone else gives up. |
| 14611 | Metaphysics should avoid talk of past, present or future [Smart] |
| Full Idea: Metaphysics should not be cosmically parochial. It should eschew tensed languages. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (The Tenseless Theory of Time [2008], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is quite an engaging reason to be an eternalist (or B-theorist) about time. Presumably we can still believe in tensed time, as long as we recognise that metaphysics itself is a timeless subject. |
| 17070 | Coherence is consilience, simplicity, analogy, and fitting into a web of belief [Smart] |
| Full Idea: I shall make use of the admittedly imprecise notions of consilience, simplicity, analogy and fitting into a web of belief, or in short of 'coherence'. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Explanation - Opening Address [1990], p.06) | |
| A reaction: Coherence sounds like a family of tests, rather than a single unified concept. I still like coherence, though. |
| 17072 | We need comprehensiveness, as well as self-coherence [Smart] |
| Full Idea: Not mere self-coherence, but comprehensiveness belongs to the notion of coherence. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Explanation - Opening Address [1990], p.07) |
| 17292 | Avoid 'in virtue of' for grounding, since it might imply a reflexive relation such as identity [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: We should not use 'in virtue of' where it might express a reflexive relation, such as identity. Since grounding is a relation of determination, and closely linked to the concept of explanation, it is irreflexive and asymmetric. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: E.g. he says someone isn't a bachelor in virtue of being an unmarried man, since a bachelor just is an unmarried man. I can't disagree. 'Determination' looks like the magic word, even if we don't know how it cashes out. |
| 17295 | Ground relations depend on the properties [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: On my view, grounding relations depend on the natures of the properties involved in them. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: I'm cautious about this if we don't find out more exactly what properties are (and they had better not just be predicates). Maybe properties are the only apparatus we have here, though I prefer 'powers' for the fundamentals. |
| 17297 | A ball's being spherical non-causally determines its power to roll [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: The fact that a given thing is spherical non-causally determines the fact that it has the power to roll. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: Quine won't accept this, because you have added something called a 'power' to the ball (intrinsically, it seems), over and above its observable sphericity. Does being a ball 'determine' that it can't be in two places at once? Order of explanation? |
| 17302 | Ground is irreflexive, asymmetric, transitive, non-monotonic etc. [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: The logical principles about grounding include irreflexivity, asymmetry, transitivity, non-monotonicity, and so forth. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.8) | |
| A reaction: [It can't ground itself, there is no mutual grounding, grounds of grounds ground, and grounding judgements are not fixed] |
| 17303 | The best critique of grounding says it is actually either identity or elimination [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: I think the most promising skeptical strategy is to insist on either identity or elimination wherever grounding is alleged to hold. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.9) | |
| A reaction: This comes after an assessment of the critiques of grounding by Oliver, Hofweber and Daly. So we don't say chemistry grounds biology, we either say biology is chemistry, or that there is no biology. Everything is just simples. Not for me. |
| 17294 | Grounding is a singular relation between worldly facts [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: On my view, grounding is a singular relation between facts. ...Facts, on this view, are obtaining states of affairs. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: He rest this claim on his 'worldly' view of facts, Idea 17293. I seem to be agreeing with him. Note that it is not between types of fact, even if there are such general truths, such as in chemistry. |
| 17300 | If grounding relates facts, properties must be included, as well as objects [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: Taking facts to be the relata of grounding has the interesting consequence that it does not relate ordinary particulars, objects, considered apart from their properties. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.4) | |
| A reaction: It will depend on what you mean by properties, and it seems to me that something like 'powers' must be invoked, to get the active character that seems to be involved in grounding. |
| 17296 | We must accept grounding, for our important explanations [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: The reason we must countenance grounding is that it is indispensible to certain important explanations. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: I like this a lot. The first given of all philosophy is the drive to exlain. However, we mustn't go inventing features of the world, simply to give us the possibility of explaining it. The objective fact seems to be the without-which-not relation. |
| 17301 | Reduction is just identity, so the two things are the same fact, so reduction isn't grounding [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: I deny that when p grounds q, q thereby reduces to p, and I deny that if q reduces to p, then p grounds q. ...On my view, reduction is nothing other than identity, so p is the same fact as q. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: Very good. I can't disagree with any of it, and it is crystal clear. Philosophical heaven. |
| 17293 | Worldly facts are obtaining states of affairs, with constituents; conceptual facts also depend on concepts [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: The 'worldly' view of facts says they are obtaining states of affairs, individuated by their constituents and their combination. On the 'conceptual' view, facts will differ if they pick out an object or property via different concepts. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: Might it be that conceptual differences between facts are supervenient on worldly differences (with the worldly facts in charge)? |
| 17073 | I simply reject evidence, if it is totally contrary to my web of belief [Smart] |
| Full Idea: The simplest way of fitting the putative observed phenomena of telepathy or clairvoyance into my web of belief is to refuse to take them at face value. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Explanation - Opening Address [1990], p.07-8) | |
| A reaction: Love it. It is very disconcerting for the sceptical naturalist to be faced with adamant claims that the paranormal has occurred, but my response is exactly the same as Smart's. I reject the reports, no matter how passionately they are asserted. |
| 17077 | The height of a flagpole could be fixed by its angle of shadow, but that would be very unusual [Smart] |
| Full Idea: You could imagine a person using the angle from a theodolite to decide a suitable spot to cut the height of the flagpole, …but since such circumstances would be very unusual we naturally say the flagpole subtends the angle because of its height. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Explanation - Opening Address [1990], p.14) | |
| A reaction: [compressed; he mentions Van Fraassen 1980:132-3 for a similar point] As a response this seems a bit lame, if the direction is fixed by what is 'usual'. I think the key point is that the direction of explanation is one way or the other, not both. |
| 17078 | Universe expansion explains the red shift, but not vice versa [Smart] |
| Full Idea: The theory of the expansion of the universe renders the red shift no longer puzzling, whereas he expansion of the universe is hardly rendered less puzzling by facts about the red shift. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Explanation - Opening Address [1990], p.15) | |
| A reaction: The direction of explanation is, I take it, made obvious by the direction of causation, with questions about what is 'puzzling' as mere side-effects. |
| 17298 | Two things being identical (like water and H2O) is not an explanation [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: If there is identity between water and H2O, we have neither the asymmetry nor the irreflexivity that explanations require. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: Once you realise it is H2O, you understand its deeper features, which will open up new explanations. He's right, though. |
| 17061 | Explanation of a fact is fitting it into a system of beliefs [Smart] |
| Full Idea: I want to characterise explanation of some fact as a matter of fitting belief in this fact into a system of beliefs. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Explanation - Opening Address [1990], p.02) | |
| A reaction: Sounds good to me. Simple facts slot straight into daily beliefs, and deep obscure facts are explained when we hook them up to things we have already grasped. Quark theory fits into prior physics of forces, properties etc. |
| 17074 | Explanations are bad by fitting badly with a web of beliefs, or fitting well into a bad web [Smart] |
| Full Idea: An explanation may be bad if it fits only into a bad web of belief. It can also be bad if it fits into a (possibly good) web of belief in a bad sort of way. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Explanation - Opening Address [1990], p.09) | |
| A reaction: Nice. If you think someone has an absurd web of beliefs, then it counts against some belief (for you) if it fits beautifully into the other person's belief system. Judgement of coherence comes in at different levels. |
| 17076 | Deducing from laws is one possible way to achieve a coherent explanation [Smart] |
| Full Idea: The Hempelian deductive-nomological model of explanation clearly fits in well with the notion of explanation in terms of coherence. One way of fitting a belief into a system is to show that it is deducible from other beliefs. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Explanation - Opening Address [1990], p.13) | |
| A reaction: Smart goes on to reject the law-based deductive approach, for familiar reasons, but at least it has something in common with the Smart view of explanation, which is the one I like. |
| 17071 | An explanation is better if it also explains phenomena from a different field [Smart] |
| Full Idea: One explanation will be a better explanation that another if it also explains a set of phenomena from a different field ('consilience'). | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Explanation - Opening Address [1990], p.07) | |
| A reaction: This would count as 'unexpected accommodation', rather than prediction. It is a nice addition to Lipton's comparison of mere accommodation versus prediction as criteria. It sounds like a strong criterion for a persuasive explanation. |
| 17062 | If scientific explanation is causal, that rules out mathematical explanation [Smart] |
| Full Idea: I class mathematical explanation with scientific explanation. This would be resisted by those who, unlike me, regard the notion of causation as essential to scientific explanation. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Explanation - Opening Address [1990], p.02-3) | |
| A reaction: I aim to champion mathematical explanation, in terms of axioms etc., so I am realising that my instinctive attraction to exclusively causal explanation won't do. What explanation needs is a direction of dependence. |
| 17299 | There are plenty of examples of non-causal explanation [Audi,P] |
| Full Idea: There are a number of explanations where it seems clear that causation is not involved at all: normative grounded in non-normative, disposition grounded in categorical, aesthetic grounded in non-aesthetic, semantic in social and psychological. | |
| From: Paul Audi (Clarification and Defense of Grounding [2012], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: Apart from dispositions, perhaps, these all seem to be experienced phenomena grounded in the physical world. 'Determination' is the preferred term for non-causal grounding. |
| 17075 | Scientific explanation tends to reduce things to the unfamiliar (not the familiar) [Smart] |
| Full Idea: The history of science suggests that most often explanation is reduction to the unfamiliar. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Explanation - Opening Address [1990], p.11) | |
| A reaction: Boyle was keen to reduce things to the familiar, but that was early days for science, and some nasty shocks were coming our way. What would Boyle make of quantum non-locality? |
| 9780 | Consciousness is a malfunction of evolution [Zizek] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is a kind of mistake, a malfunction of evolution, and out of this mistake a miracle occurred. | |
| From: Slavoj Zizek (Conversations, with Glyn Daly [2004], §2) | |
| A reaction: Rather hard to prove, but actually quite an uplifting thought. If consciousness only evolved so that we could navigate and defend ourselves, our 'higher' activities seem irrelevant. But Zizek's view means we can make them central. Nice. |
| 9781 | Tolerance and love are strategies to avoid encountering our neighbours [Zizek] |
| Full Idea: All this preaching about tolerance, love for one's neighbour and so on, are ultimately strategies to avoid encountering the neighbour. | |
| From: Slavoj Zizek (Conversations, with Glyn Daly [2004], §2) | |
| A reaction: I have begun to wonder whether some such motivation underlies the modern obsession with raising huge sums for charity. |
| 22405 | Negative utilitarianism implies that the world should be destroyed, to avoid future misery [Smart] |
| Full Idea: The doctrine of negative utilitarianism (that we should concern ourselves with the minimisation of suffering, rather than the maximisation of happiness) ...means we should support a tyrant who explodes the world, to prevent infinite future misery. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Outline of a System of Utilitarianism [1973], 5) | |
| A reaction: That only seems to imply that the negative utilitarian rule needs supplementary rules. We are too fond of looking for one single moral rule that guides everything. |
| 22404 | Any group interested in ethics must surely have a sentiment of generalised benevolence [Smart] |
| Full Idea: A utilitarian can appeal to the sentiment of generalised benevolence, which is surely present in any group with whom it is profitable to discuss ethical questions. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Outline of a System of Utilitarianism [1973], I) | |
| A reaction: But ethics is not intended only for those who are interested in ethics. If this is the basics of ethics, then we must leave the mafia to pursue its sordid activities without criticism. Their lack of sympathy seems to be their good fortune. |
| 14613 | Special relativity won't determine a preferred frame, but we can pick one externally [Smart] |
| Full Idea: Though special relativity does not determine a preferred frame of reference, it does not rule out the possibility of a frame being determined from outside the theory. Perhaps we should prefer a frame where background radiation is equal in all directions. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (The Tenseless Theory of Time [2008], 3) | |
| A reaction: Of course this is a mere philosopher offering the escape clause, and not some Nobel-winning physicist, but I start from the assumption that this idea is plausible, and I am unmoved by the contempt for presentism among relativity geeks. |
| 17063 | Unlike Newton, Einstein's general theory explains the perihelion of Mercury [Smart] |
| Full Idea: Newtonian celestial mechanics does not explain the advance of the perihelion of Mercury, while Einstein's general theory of relativity does. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (Explanation - Opening Address [1990], p.03) | |
| A reaction: A perfect example of why explanation is the central concept in science, and probably in all epistemological activity. The desire to know is the desire for an explanation. Once the explanation is obvious, we know. |
| 14615 | If time flows, then 'how fast does it flow?' is a tricky question [Smart] |
| Full Idea: If it is said that time flows, then it seems that the question 'how fast does it flow?' is a devastating one for the A-theorist. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (The Tenseless Theory of Time [2008], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is one of the basic landmarks in any debate on time. Time can't be understood by analogy with anything else (such as a river) it seems. |
| 14614 | The past, present, future and tenses of A-theory are too weird, and should be analysed indexically [Smart] |
| Full Idea: The main objections to the A-theory are due to the metaphysical mysteriousness of the A-theory ideas of past, present and future, and also tenses, and to the greater plausibility of analyzing them as indexicals. | |
| From: J.J.C. Smart (The Tenseless Theory of Time [2008], 3) | |
| A reaction: When it comes to time, every theory that has ever been though of is deeply weird, so the basic objection doesn't bother me. Analysing as indexicals just seems to be a technical way of denying reality to the present. |