19 ideas
| 2666 | Carneades' pinnacles of philosophy are the basis of knowledge (the criterion of truth) and the end of appetite (good) [Carneades, by Cicero] |
| Full Idea: Carneades said the two greatest things in philosophy were the criterion of truth and the end of goods, and no man could be a sage who was ignorant of the existence of either a beginning of the process of knowledge or an end of appetition. | |
| From: report of Carneades (fragments/reports [c.174 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - Academica II.09.29 | |
| A reaction: Nice, but I would want to emphasise the distinction between truth and its criterion. Admittedly we would have no truth without a good criterion, but the truth itself should be held in higher esteem than our miserable human means of grasping it. |
| 21390 | Future events are true if one day we will say 'this event is happening now' [Carneades] |
| Full Idea: We call those past events true of which at an earlier time this proposition was true: 'They are present now'; similarly, we shall call those future events true of which at some future time this proposition will be true: 'They are present now'. | |
| From: Carneades (fragments/reports [c.174 BCE]), quoted by M. Tullius Cicero - On Fate ('De fato') 9.23-8 | |
| A reaction: This is a very nice way of paraphrasing statements about the necessity of true future contingent events. It still relies, of course, on the veracity of a tensed assertion |
| 21672 | We say future things are true that will possess actuality at some following time [Carneades, by Cicero] |
| Full Idea: Just as we speak of past things as true that possessed true actuality at some former time, so we speak of future things as true that will possess true actuality at some following time. | |
| From: report of Carneades (fragments/reports [c.174 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - On Fate ('De fato') 11.27 | |
| A reaction: This ducks the Aristotle problem of where it is true NOW when you say there will be a sea-fight tomorrow, and it turns out to be true. Carneades seems to be affirming a truth when it does not yet have a truthmaker. |
| 16065 | Constitution is identity (being in the same place), or it isn't (having different possibilities) [Wasserman] |
| Full Idea: Some insist that constitution is identity, on the grounds that distinct material objects cannot occupy the same place at the same time. Others argue that constitution is not identity, since the statue and its material differ in important respects. | |
| From: Ryan Wasserman (Material Constitution [2009], Intro) | |
| A reaction: The 'important respects' seem to concern possibilities rather than actualities, which is suspicious. It is misleading to think we are dealing with two things and their relation here. Objects must have constitutions; constitutions make objects. |
| 16067 | Constitution is not identity, because it is an asymmetric dependence relation [Wasserman] |
| Full Idea: For those for whom 'constitution is not identity' (the 'constitution view'), constitution is said to be an asymmetric relation, and also a dependence relation (unlike identity). | |
| From: Ryan Wasserman (Material Constitution [2009], 2) | |
| A reaction: It seems obvious that constitution is not identity, because there is more to a thing's identity than its mere constitution. But this idea makes it sound as if constitution has nothing to do with identity (chalk and cheese), and that can't be right. |
| 16069 | There are three main objections to seeing constitution as different from identity [Wasserman] |
| Full Idea: The three most common objections to the constitution view are the Impenetrability Objection (two things in one place?), the Extensionality Objection (mereology says wholes are just their parts), and the Grounding Objection (their ground is the same). | |
| From: Ryan Wasserman (Material Constitution [2009], 2) | |
| A reaction: [summary] He adds a fourth, that if two things can be in one place, why stop at two? [Among defenders of the Constitution View he lists Baker, Fine, Forbes, Koslicki, Kripke, Lowe, Oderberg, N.Salmon, Shoemaker, Simons and Yablo.] |
| 16068 | The weight of a wall is not the weight of its parts, since that would involve double-counting [Wasserman] |
| Full Idea: We do not calculate the weight of something by summing the weights of all its parts - weigh bricks and the molecules of a wall and you will get the wrong result, since you have weighed some parts more than once. | |
| From: Ryan Wasserman (Material Constitution [2009], 2) | |
| A reaction: In fact the complete inventory of the parts of a thing is irrelevant to almost anything we would like to know about the thing. The parts must be counted at some 'level' of division into parts. An element can belong to many different sets. |
| 16074 | Relative identity may reject transitivity, but that suggests that it isn't about 'identity' [Wasserman] |
| Full Idea: If the relative identity theorist denies transitivity (to deal with the Ship of Theseus, for example), this would make us suspect that relativised identity relations are not identity relations, since transitivity seems central to identity. | |
| From: Ryan Wasserman (Material Constitution [2009], 6) | |
| A reaction: The problem here, I think, focuses on the meaning of the word 'same'. One change of plank leaves you with the same ship, but that is not transitive. If 'identical' is too pure to give the meaning of 'the same' it's not much use in discussing the world. |
| 15825 | Carneades denied the transitivity of identity [Carneades, by Chisholm] |
| Full Idea: Carneades denied the principle of the transitivity of identity. | |
| From: report of Carneades (fragments/reports [c.174 BCE], fr 41-42) by Roderick Chisholm - Person and Object 3.1 | |
| A reaction: Chisholm calls this 'extreme', but I assume Carneades wouldn't deny the principle in mathematics. I'm guessing that he just means that nothing ever stays quite the same. |
| 21389 | Carneades distinguished logical from causal necessity, when talking of future events [Long on Carneades] |
| Full Idea: From 'E will take place is true' it follows that E must take place. But 'must' here is logical not causal necessity. It is a considerable achievement of Carneades to have distinguished these two senses of necessity. | |
| From: comment on Carneades (fragments/reports [c.174 BCE]) by A.A. Long - Hellenistic Philosophy 3 | |
| A reaction: Personally I am inclined to think 'necessity' is univocal, and does not have two senses. What Carneades has nicely done is distinguish the two different grounds for the necessities. |
| 3914 | Language arranges sensory experience to form a world-order [Whorf] |
| Full Idea: Language first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain world-order. | |
| From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (Punctual and segmentive Hopi verbs [1936], p.55) | |
| A reaction: This is only true to a limited degree. See Davidson's 'On the very idea of a conceptual scheme'. All humans share a world-order, to some extent. |
| 3916 | Hopi consistently prefers verbs and events to nouns and things [Whorf] |
| Full Idea: Hopi, with its preference for verbs, as contrasted to our own liking for nouns, perpetually turns our propositions about things into propositions about events. | |
| From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.63) | |
| A reaction: This should provoke careful thought about ontology - without concluding that it is entirely relative to language. |
| 3917 | Scientific thought is essentially a specialised part of Indo-European languages [Whorf] |
| Full Idea: What we call "scientific thought" is a specialisation of the western Indo-European type of language. | |
| From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.246) | |
| A reaction: This is the beginnings of an absurd extreme relativist view of science, based on a confusion about meaning and thought. |
| 21671 | Voluntary motion is intrinsically within our power, and this power is its cause [Carneades, by Cicero] |
| Full Idea: Voluntary motion possesses the intrinsic property of being in our power and of obeying us, and its obedience is not uncaused, for its nature is itself the cause of this. | |
| From: report of Carneades (fragments/reports [c.174 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - On Fate ('De fato') 11.25 | |
| A reaction: To say that actions arise from our 'intrinsic power' is not much of an explanation, but it is still informative - that you should study the intrinsic powers of humans if you want to explain it. |
| 21391 | Some actions are within our power; determinism needs prior causes for everything - so it is false [Carneades, by Cicero] |
| Full Idea: Now something is in our power; but if everything happens as a result of destiny all things happen as a result of antecedent causes; therefore what happens does not happen as a result of destiny. | |
| From: report of Carneades (fragments/reports [c.174 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - On Fate ('De fato') 14.31 | |
| A reaction: This invites the question of whether some things really are 'in our power'. Carneades (as expressed by Cicero) takes that for granted. Our 'power' may be antecedent causes in disguise. |
| 21674 | Even Apollo can only foretell the future when it is naturally necessary [Carneades, by Cicero] |
| Full Idea: Carneades used to say that not even Apollo could tell any future events except those whose causes were so held together that they must necessarily happen. | |
| From: report of Carneades (fragments/reports [c.174 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - On Fate ('De fato') 14.32 | |
| A reaction: Carneades is opposing the usual belief in divination, where even priests can foretell contingent future events to some extent. Careneades, of course, was defending free will. |
| 7398 | Carneades said that after a shipwreck a wise man would seize the only plank by force [Carneades, by Tuck] |
| Full Idea: Carneades argued forcefully that in the event of a shipwreck, the wise man would be prepared to seize the only plank capable of bearing him to shore, even if that meant pushing another person off it. | |
| From: report of Carneades (fragments/reports [c.174 BCE]) by Richard Tuck - Hobbes Ch.1 | |
| A reaction: [source for this?] This thought seems to have provoked great discussion in the sixteenth century (mostly sympathetic). I can't help thinking the right answer depends on assessing your rival. Die for a hero, drown a nasty fool. |
| 21392 | People change laws for advantage; either there is no justice, or it is a form of self-injury [Carneades, by Lactantius] |
| Full Idea: The same people often changed laws according to circumstances; there is no natural law. There is no such thing as justice or, if there is, it is the height of folly, since a man injures himself in taking thought for the advantage of others. | |
| From: report of Carneades (fragments/reports [c.174 BCE]) by Lactantius - Institutiones Divinae 5.16.4 | |
| A reaction: [An argument used by Carneades on his notorious 156BCE visit to Rome, where he argued both for and against justice] This is probably the right wing view of justice. Why give other people what they want, if it is at our expense? |
| 3915 | The Hopi have no concept of time as something flowing from past to future [Whorf] |
| Full Idea: A Hopi has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past. | |
| From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.57) | |
| A reaction: If true, this would not so much support relativism of language as the view that that conception of time is actually false. |