95 ideas
| 22659 | It is wisdom to believe what you desire, because belief is needed to achieve it [James] |
| Full Idea: Clearly it is often the part of wisdom to believe what one desires; for the belief is one of indispensable preliminary conditions of the realisation of its object. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.43) | |
| A reaction: Roughly, action is impossible without optimism about possible success. This may count as instinct, rather than 'wisdom'. |
| 8013 | In the Reformation, morality became unconditional but irrational, individually autonomous, and secular [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Three concepts about morality emerge from the Reformation period: that moral rules are unconditional demands that lack rational justification; that moral agents are sovereign in choices; and that secular powers have their own norms and justifications. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: I get the impression that a rather frank admission of the role of self-interest emerged at that time as well. It is only in the late seventeenth century that the possibility of a secular altruism begins to be investigated. But there's Shakespeare... |
| 8021 | The Levellers and the Diggers mark a turning point in the history of morality [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The Levellers and the Diggers mark a turning point in the history of morality. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: John Lilburne, the Leveller, 'Free-Born John', was the most important of them. They mainly fought for rights of religious conscience, but it quickly escalated into a demand for economic and social rights. It spread to France and the United States. |
| 8060 | In the 17th-18th centuries morality offered a cure for egoism, through altruism [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: It was in the seventeenth and eighteenth century that morality came generally to be understood as offering a solution to the problems posed by human egoism and that the content of morality came to be largely equated with altruism. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch.16) | |
| A reaction: It was the elevation of altruism that caused Nietzsche's rebellion. The sixteenth century certainly looks striking cynical to modern eyes. The development was an attempt to secularise Jesus. Altruism has a paradox: it needs victims. |
| 8053 | Twentieth century social life is re-enacting eighteenth century philosophy [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Twentieth century social life turns out in key part to be the concrete and dramatic re-enactment of eighteenth-century philosophy. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: This suggest a two hundred year lag between the philosophy and its impact on the culture. One might note the Victorian insistence on 'duty' (e.g. in George Eliot), alongside Mill's view that the Kantian account of it didn't work (Idea 3768). |
| 22657 | All good philosophers start from a dumb conviction about which truths can be revealed [James] |
| Full Idea: Every philosopher whose initiative counts for anything in the evolution of thought has taken his stand on a sort of dumb conviction that the truth must lie in one direction rather than another, and a preliminary assurance that this can be made to work. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.40) | |
| A reaction: I would refer to this as 'intuition', which I think of as reasons (probably good reasons) which cannot yet be articulated. Hence I like this idea very much, except for the word 'dumb'. It is more like a rational vision, yet to be filled in. |
| 8047 | Philosophy has been marginalised by its failure in the Enlightenment to replace religion [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The failure, in the Enlightenment, of philosophy to provide what religion could no longer furnish was an important cause of philosophy losing its central cultural role and becoming a marginal, narrowly academic subject. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 4) | |
| A reaction: A strange way of presenting the situation. Philosophy has never aspired to furnish beliefs for the masses. Plato offered them myths. The refutation of religion was difficult and complex. There is no returning from there to a new folk simplicity. |
| 22647 | A complete system is just a classification of the whole world's ingredients [James] |
| Full Idea: A completed theoretic philosophy can never be anything more than a completed classification of the world's ingredients. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.23) | |
| A reaction: I assume this is not just the physical ingredients, but must also include our conceptual scheme - but then we must first decide which is the best conceptual scheme to classify, and that's where the real action is. [He scorns such classifation later]. |
| 22648 | A single explanation must have a single point of view [James] |
| Full Idea: A single explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point of view. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.23) | |
| A reaction: I take this to imply that multiple viewpoints lead us towards objectivity. The single viewpoint of an expert is of much greater value than that of a novice, on the whole. |
| 8062 | Proof is a barren idea in philosophy, and the best philosophy never involves proof [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Arguments in philosophy rarely take the form of proofs; and the most successful arguments on topics central to philosophy never do. (The ideal of proof is a relatively barren one in philosophy). | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch.18) | |
| A reaction: He seems proud of this, but he must settle for something which is less than proof, which has to be vindicated to the mathematicians and scientists. I agree, though. Plato is the model, and the best philosophy builds a broad persuasive picture. |
| 22642 | Man has an intense natural interest in the consistency of his own thinking [James] |
| Full Idea: After man's interest in breathing freely, the greatest of all his interests (because it never fluctuates or remits….) is his interest in consistency, in feeling that what he now thinks goes with what he thinks on other occasions. | |
| From: William James (The Pragmatist Account of Truth [1908], 'Seventh') | |
| A reaction: People notoriously contradict themselves all the time, but I suspect that it is when they get out of their depth in complexities such as politics. They probably achieve great consistency within their own expertise, and in common knowledge. |
| 22644 | Our greatest pleasure is the economy of reducing chaotic facts to one single fact [James] |
| Full Idea: Our pleasure at finding that a chaos of facts is the expression of single underlying fact is like a musician's relief at discovering harmony. …The passion for economy of means in thought is the philosophic passion par excellence. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.21) | |
| A reaction: We do, though, possess an inner klaxon warning against stupid simplistic reductions. Reducing all the miseries of life to the workings of the Devil is not satisfactory, even it it is economical. Simplicities are dangerously tempting. |
| 6710 | You can only define a statement that something is 'true' by referring to its functional possibilities [James] |
| Full Idea: Pragmatism insists that statements and beliefs are inertly and statically true only by courtesy: they practically pass for true; but you cannot define what you mean by calling them true without referring to their functional possibilities. | |
| From: William James (The Meaning of the Word "Truth" [1907], p.2) | |
| A reaction: I think this clarifies an objection to pragmatism, because all functional definitions (e.g. of the mind, or of moral behaviour) are preceded by the question of WHY this thing is able to function in this way. What special quality makes this possible? |
| 18986 | Truth is just a name for verification-processes [James] |
| Full Idea: Truth for us is simply a collective name for verification-processes, just as 'health' is a name for other processes in life. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 6) | |
| A reaction: So the slogan is 'truth is success in belief'? Suicide and racist genocide can be 'successful'. I would have thought that truth was the end of a process, rather than the process itself. |
| 18983 | In many cases there is no obvious way in which ideas can agree with their object [James] |
| Full Idea: When you speak of the 'time-keeping function' of a clock, it is hard to see exactly what your ideas can copy. ...Where our ideas cannot copy definitely their object, what does agreement with that object mean? | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 6) | |
| A reaction: This is a very good criticism of the correspondence theory of truth. It looks a lovely theory when you can map components of a sentence (like 'the pen is in the drawer') onto components of reality - but it has to cover the hard cases. |
| 18972 | Ideas are true in so far as they co-ordinate our experiences [James] |
| Full Idea: Pragmatists say that ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just in so far as they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other parts of our experience. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 2) | |
| A reaction: I'm struck by the close similarity (at least in James) of the pragmatic view of truth and the coherence theory of truth (associated later with Blanshard). Perhaps the coherence theory is one version of the pragmatic account |
| 18973 | New opinions count as 'true' if they are assimilated to an individual's current beliefs [James] |
| Full Idea: A new opinion counts as 'true' just in proportion as it gratifies the individual's desire to assimilate the novel in his experience to his beliefs in stock. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 2) | |
| A reaction: Note the tell-tale locution 'counts as' true, rather than 'is' true. The obvious problem is that someone with a big stock of foolish beliefs will 'count as' true some bad interpretation which is gratifyingly assimilated to their current confusions. |
| 22305 | If the hypothesis of God is widely successful, it is true [James] |
| Full Idea: On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. | |
| From: William James (The Meaning of the Word "Truth" [1907], p.299), quoted by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 35 'Prag' | |
| A reaction: How you get from 'widely satisfactory' to 'true' is beyond my comprehension. This is dangerous nonsense. This view of truth seems to be a commonplace in American culture. Peirce hurray! James boo! James accepted verification, where possible. |
| 18984 | True ideas are those we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify (and false otherwise) [James] |
| Full Idea: True ideas are those that we can assimilate, validate, corroborate and verify. False ideas are those that we cannot. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 6) | |
| A reaction: The immediate question is why you should label something as 'false' simply on the grounds that you can't corroborate it. Proving the falsity is a stronger position than the ignorance James seems happy with. 'Assimilate' implies coherence. |
| 13931 | By using aporiai as his start, Aristotle can defer to the wise, as well as to the many [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: The Aristotelian method of working form aporia allows one to use as starting points not only what is said by 'the many', but also what is said by 'the wise', including philosophers. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 1 n2) | |
| A reaction: [She mentions Nussbaum 1986:ch 7 for the opposing view] I like this thought a lot. Aristotle's democratic respect for widespread views can be a bit puzzling sometimes. |
| 13925 | Ontology disputes rest on more basic explanation disputes [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: Disputes over ontology derive from more fundamental disputes over forms of explanation. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 1) | |
| A reaction: It immediately strikes me that Haslanger has stolen my master idea, but unfortunately the dating suggests that she has priority. The tricky part is to combine this view with realism. |
| 22641 | Realities just are, and beliefs are true of them [James] |
| Full Idea: Realities are not true, they are; and beliefs are true of them. | |
| From: William James (The Pragmatist Account of Truth [1908], 'Fourth') | |
| A reaction: At last, a remark by James about truth which I really like. For 'realities' I would use the word 'facts'. |
| 22649 | Classification can only ever be for a particular purpose [James] |
| Full Idea: Every way of classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular purpose. Conceptions, 'kinds', are teleological instruments. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.24) | |
| A reaction: Could there not be ways of classifying which suit all of our purposes? If there were a naturally correct way to classifying things, then any pragmatist would probably welcome that. (I don't say there is such a way). |
| 18987 | A 'thing' is simply carved out of reality for human purposes [James] |
| Full Idea: What shall we call a 'thing' anyhow? It seems quite arbitrary, for we carve out everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 7) | |
| A reaction: James wrote just before the discovery of galaxies, which are much more obviously 'things' than constellations like the Plough are! This idea suggests a connection between pragmatism and the nihilist view of objects of Van Inwagen and co. |
| 18981 | 'Substance' is just a word for groupings and structures in experience [James] |
| Full Idea: 'Substance' appears now only as another name for the fact that phenomena as they come are actually grouped and given in coherent forms. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 4) | |
| A reaction: This is the strongly empirical strain in James's empiricism. This sounds like a David Lewis comment on the Humean mosaic of experience. We Aristotelians at least believe that the groups run much deeper than the surface of experience. |
| 13930 | Persistence makes change and its products intelligible [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: Persistence offers intelligibility: the possibility of understanding a change, and of understanding the products of it. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 8) | |
| A reaction: I think this is exactly right, and it is a powerful idea with wide implications for metaphysics. Haslanger claims that an understanding of 'substance' is needed, which leads towards my defence of essentialism. |
| 13924 | The persistence of objects seems to be needed if the past is to explain the present [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: The notion that things persist through change is deeply embedded in ideas we have about explanation, and in particular, in the idea that the present is constrained by the past. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 1) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be both an important and an attractive idea. Deniers of persistence (4D-ists) will presumably have some ability to explain the present, but it is the idea of the present being 'constrained' by the past which is a challenge. |
| 13927 | We must explain change amongst 'momentary entities', or else the world is inexplicable [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: If the world of time-slices is to be explicable, then it must be possible to provide explanations of change understood as a continual generation and destruction of these 'momentary entities'. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 7) | |
| A reaction: While fans of time-slices can offer some sort of explanation, in the process of explaining a 'worm', there don't seem to be the sort of causal chains that we traditionally rely on. Maybe there are no explanations of anything? |
| 13928 | If the things which exist prior to now are totally distinct, they need not have existed [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: How is the case in which A exists prior to B, but is distinct from B, different (especially from B's point of view) from the case in which nothing exists prior to B? | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 7) | |
| A reaction: I sympathise with her view, but this isn't persuasive. For A substitute 'Sally's mother' and for B substitute 'Sally'. A 4D-ist could bite the bullet and say that, indeed, previous parts of my 'worm' need not have existed. |
| 18974 | Truth is a species of good, being whatever proves itself good in the way of belief [James] |
| Full Idea: Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category distinct from good, and co-ordinate with it. The true is whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite, assignable reasons. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 2) | |
| A reaction: The trouble is that false optimism can often often be what is 'good in the way of belief'. That said, I think quite a good way to specify 'truth' is 'success in belief', but I mean intrinsically successful, not pragmatically successful. |
| 18989 | Pragmatism accepts any hypothesis which has useful consequences [James] |
| Full Idea: On pragmatic principles we cannot reject any hypothesis if consequences useful to life flow from it. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 8) | |
| A reaction: Most governments seem to find lies more useful than the truth. Maybe most children are better off not knowing the truth about their parents. It might be disastrous to know the truth about what other people are thinking. Is 'useful but false' meaningful? |
| 8052 | To find empiricism and science in the same culture is surprising, as they are really incompatible [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: There is something extraordinary in the coexistence of empiricism and natural science in the same culture, for they represent radically different and incompatible ways of approaching the world. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 7) | |
| A reaction: I would say that science is commitment to an ontology, and empiricism is a commitment to epistemology. It is a very nice point, given the usual assumption that science is an empirical activity. See Idea 7621. Strict empiricism distorts science. |
| 22640 | We find satisfaction in consistency of all of our beliefs, perceptions and mental connections [James] |
| Full Idea: We find satisfaction in consistency between the present idea and the entire rest of our mental equipment, including the whole order of our sensations, and that of our intuitions of likeness and difference, and our whole stock previously acquired truths. | |
| From: William James (The Pragmatist Account of Truth [1908], 'Fourth') | |
| A reaction: I like this, apart from the idea that the criterion of good coherence seems to be subjective 'satisfaction'. We should ask why some large set of beliefs is coherent. I assume nature is coherent, and truth is the best explanation of our coherence about it. |
| 10356 | Relativism can be seen as about the rationality of different cultural traditions [MacIntyre, by Kusch] |
| Full Idea: MacIntyre formulates relativism in terms of rationality rather than truth or objectivity. Things are rational relative to some particular tradition, but not rational as such. | |
| From: report of Alasdair MacIntyre (Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [1988], p.352) by Martin Kusch - Knowledge by Agreement Ch.19 | |
| A reaction: Personally I had always taken it to be about truth, and I expect any account of rationality to be founded on a notion of truth. There can clearly be cultural traditions of evidence, and possibly even of logic (though I doubt it). |
| 22655 | Scientific genius extracts more than other people from the same evidence [James] |
| Full Idea: What is the use of being a genius, unless with the same scientific evidence as other men, one can reach more truth than they? | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.40) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at Clifford's famous principle. He isn't actually contraverting the principle, but it is a nice point about evidence. Simple empiricists think detectives only have to stare at the evidence and the solution creates itself. |
| 8057 | Unpredictability doesn't entail inexplicability, and predictability doesn't entail explicability [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Just as unpredictability does not entail inexplicability, so predictability does not entail explicability. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: The second half is not quite as obvious as the first. The location of lightning strikes is an example of the first. He gives examples of the second, but they all seem to be very complex cases which might be explained, if only we knew enough. |
| 22658 | Experimenters assume the theory is true, and stick to it as long as result don't disappoint [James] |
| Full Idea: Each tester of the truth of a theory …acts as if it were true, and expects the result to disappoint him if his assumption is false. The longer disappointment is delayed, the stronger grows his faith in his theory. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.42) | |
| A reaction: This is almost exactly Popper's falsificationist proposal for science, which interestingly shows the close relationship of his view to pragmatism. Believe it as long as it is still working. |
| 8054 | Social sciences discover no law-like generalisations, and tend to ignore counterexamples [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Social sciences have discovered no law-like generalisations whatsoever, ...and for the most part they adopt a very tolerant attitude to counter-examples. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: I suspect that this is as much to do with a narrow and rigid view of what 'science' is supposed to be, as a failure of the social sciences. Have such sciences explained anything? I suspect that they have explained a lot, often after the facts. |
| 18971 | Theories are practical tools for progress, not answers to enigmas [James] |
| Full Idea: Theories are instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don't lie back upon them, we move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid. Pragmatism unstiffens all our theories, limbers them up and sets each one to work. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 2) | |
| A reaction: This follows his criticism of the quest for 'solving names' - big words that give bogus solutions to problems. James's view is not the same as 'instrumentalism', though he would probably sympathise with that view. The defines theories badly. |
| 18985 | True thoughts are just valuable instruments of action [James] |
| Full Idea: The possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 6) | |
| A reaction: It looks to me like we should distinguish 'active' and 'passive' instrumentalism. The passive version says there is no more to theories and truth than what instruments record. James's active version says truth is an instrument for doing things well. |
| 18982 | Pragmatism says all theories are instrumental - that is, mental modes of adaptation to reality [James] |
| Full Idea: The pragmatist view is that all our theories are instrumental, are mental modes of adaptation to reality, rather than revelations or gnostic answers to some divinely instituted world enigma. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 5) | |
| A reaction: This treats instrumentalism as the pragmatic idea of theories as what works (and nothing more), with, presumably, no interest in grasping something called 'reality'. Presumably instrumentalism might have other motivations - such as fun. |
| 22654 | We can't know if the laws of nature are stable, but we must postulate it or assume it [James] |
| Full Idea: That nature will follow tomorrow the same laws that she follows today is a truth which no man can know; but in the interests of cognition as well as of action we must postulate or assume it. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.39) | |
| A reaction: The stability of nature is something to be assessed, not something taken for granted. If you arrive in a new city and it all seems quiet, you keep your fingers crossed and treat it as stable. But revolution or coup could be just round the corner. |
| 22656 | Trying to assess probabilities by mere calculation is absurd and impossible [James] |
| Full Idea: The absurd abstraction of an intellect verbally formulating all its evidence and carefully estimating the probability thereof solely by the size of a vulgar fraction, is as ideally inept as it is practically impossible. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.40) | |
| A reaction: James probably didn't know about Bayes, but this is directed at the Bayesian approach. My view is that full rational assessment of coherence is a much better bet than a Bayesian calculation. Factors must be weighted. |
| 13929 | Natural explanations give the causal interconnections [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: Natural explanations work by showing the systematic causal interconnections between things. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 7) | |
| A reaction: On the whole I love this sort of idea, but I am wondering if this one prevents mathematical or logical explanations from being natural. |
| 13926 | Best explanations, especially natural ones, need grounding, notably by persistent objects [Haslanger] |
| Full Idea: I am not resting my ontology on a simple 'argument to the best explanation'. ..What I want to say is that there are general demands on a kind of explanation, in particular, natural explanation, which require that there are persisting things. | |
| From: Sally Haslanger (Persistence, Change and Explanation [1989], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is a really nice idea - that best explanation is not just about specific cases, but also about best foundations for explanations in general, which brings in our metaphysics. I defend the role of essences in these best explanations. |
| 22646 | We have a passion for knowing the parts of something, rather than the whole [James] |
| Full Idea: Alongside the passion for simplification …is the passion for distinguishing; it is the passion to be acquainted with the parts rather than to comprehend the whole. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.22) | |
| A reaction: As I child I dismantled almost every toy I was given. This seems to be the motivation for a lot of analytic philosophy, but Aristotle also tended to think that way. |
| 22652 | The mind has evolved entirely for practical interests, seen in our reflex actions [James] |
| Full Idea: It is far too little recognised how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests. The theory of evolution is beginning to do very good service by its reduction of all mentality to the type of reflex action. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.34) | |
| A reaction: Hands evolved for manipulating tools end up playing the piano. Minds evolved for action can be afflicted with boredom. He's not wrong, but he is risking the etymological fallacy (origin = purpose). I take navigation to be the original purpose of mind. |
| 8006 | When Aristotle speaks of soul he means something like personality [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: When Aristotle speaks of the soul we could very often retain his meaning by speaking of personality. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch. 7) | |
| A reaction: MacIntyre contrasts this strongly with Plato's dualist view. Famously Aristotle thinks the soul is the 'form' of the body, but this implies that he also includes the higher-level functions of the body. Soul is character? |
| 22651 | Dogs' curiosity only concerns what will happen next [James] |
| Full Idea: A dog's curiosity about the movements of his master or a strange object only extends as far as the point of what is going to happen next. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.31) | |
| A reaction: Good. A nice corrective to people like myself who are tempted to inflate animal rationality, in order to emphasise human evolutionary continuity with them. It is hard to disagree with his observation. But dogs do make judgements! True/false! |
| 9286 | Consciousness is not a stuff, but is explained by the relations between experiences [James] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness connotes a kind of external relation, and not a special stuff or way of being. The peculiarity of our experiences, that they not only are, but are known, is best explained by their relations to one another, the relations being experiences. | |
| From: William James (Does Consciousness Exist? [1904], §3) | |
| A reaction: This view has suddenly caught people's interest. It might be better than the higher/lower relationship, which seems to leave the basic problem untouched. Does a whole network of relations between experiences gradually 'add up' to consciousness? |
| 21050 | I can only make decisions if I see myself as part of a story [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: I can only answer the question 'What am I to do?' if I can answer the prior question 'Of what story or stories do I find myself a part?'. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], p.201), quoted by Michael J. Sandel - Justice: What's the right thing to do? 09 | |
| A reaction: MacIntyre is a great champion of the narrative view of the Self. Does this mean that if you had total amnesia, but retained other faculties, you could make no decisions? Can you start a new story whenever you like? |
| 9285 | 'Consciousness' is a nonentity, a mere echo of the disappearing 'soul' [James] |
| Full Idea: 'Consciousness' is the name of a nonentity. ..Those who cling to it are clinging to a mere echo, the faint rumour left behind by the disappearing 'soul' upon the air of philosophy. ..I deny that it stands for an entity, but it does stand for a function. | |
| From: William James (Does Consciousness Exist? [1904], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This kind of view is often treated as being preposterous, but I think it is correct. No one is denying the phenomenology, but it is the ontology which is at stake. Either you are a substance dualist, or mind must be eliminated as an 'entity'. |
| 23981 | Rage is inconceivable without bodily responses; so there are no disembodied emotions [James] |
| Full Idea: Can one fancy a state of rage and picture no flushing of the face, no dilation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action? …A purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity. | |
| From: William James (What is an Emotion? [1884], p.194), quoted by Peter Goldie - The Emotions 3 'Bodily' | |
| A reaction: Plausible for rage, but less so for irritation or admiration. Goldie thinks James is wrong. James says if intellectual feelings don't become bodily then they don't qualify as emotions. No True Scotsman! |
| 22650 | How can the ground of rationality be itself rational? [James] |
| Full Idea: Can that which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly called rational? | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.25) | |
| A reaction: This is the perennial problem in deciding grounds, and in deciding what to treat as primitive. The stoics see the whole of nature as rational. Cf how can the ground of what is physical be itself physical? |
| 22643 | It seems that we feel rational when we detect no irrationality [James] |
| Full Idea: I think there are very good grounds for upholding the view that the feeling of rationality is constituted merely by the absence of any feelings of irrationality. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.20) | |
| A reaction: A very interesting proposal. Nothing is more basic to logic (well, plausible versions of logic) than the principle of non-contradiction - perhaps because it is the foundation of our natural intellectual equipment. |
| 8056 | AI can't predict innovation, or consequences, or external relations, or external events [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: AI machines have four types of unpredictability: they can't predict radical innovation or future maths proofs; they couldn't predict the outcome of their own decisions; their relations with other computers would be a game-theory tangle; and power failure. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: This isn't an assertion that they lack 'free will', just a very accurate observation of how the super new machines would face exactly the same problems that we ourselves face. |
| 18975 | We return to experience with concepts, where they show us differences [James] |
| Full Idea: Concepts for the pragmatist are things to come back into experience with, things to make us look for differences. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 3) | |
| A reaction: That's good. I like both halves of this. Experience gives us the concepts, but then we 'come back' into experience equipped with them. Presumably animals can look for differences, but concepts enhance that hugely. Know the names of the flowers. |
| 8059 | The good life for man is the life spent seeking the good life for man [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch.15) | |
| A reaction: This contains a self-evident paradox - that success would be failure. The proposal suits philosophers more than it would suit the folk. Less seeking and more getting on with it seems good, if the activity is a 'flourishing' one. |
| 8034 | We still have the appearance and language of morality, but we no longer understand it [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: We possess simulacra of morality, we continue to use many of the key expressions. But we have - very largely, if not entirely - lost our comprehension, both theoretical and practical, of morality. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 1) | |
| A reaction: MacIntyre's famous (or notorious) assault on modern ethics. We obviously can't prove him wrong by spouting moral talk. Are we actually more wicked than our ancestors? There is, I think, a relativism problem in the 20th centurty, but that is different. |
| 8036 | Unlike expressions of personal preference, evaluative expressions do not depend on context [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: There are good reasons for distinguishing between expressions of personal preference and evaluative expressions, as the first depend on who utters them to whom, while the second are not dependent for reason-giving force on the context of utterance. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: The sceptics will simply say that in the second type of expression the speaker tries to adopt a tone of impersonal authority, but it is merely an unjustified attempt to elevate personal preferences. "Blue just IS the best colour". |
| 8049 | Moral judgements now are anachronisms from a theistic age [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Moral judgements are linguistic survivals from the practices of classical theism which have lost the context provided by these practices. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 5) | |
| A reaction: He is sort of right. Richard Taylor is less dramatic and more plausible on this (Ideas 5065, 5066, 5077). Big claims about 'duty' have become rather hollow, but the rights and wrongs of (e.g.) mistreating children don't seem to need theism. |
| 8045 | The failure of Enlightenment attempts to justify morality will explain our own culture [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: A central thesis of this book is that the breakdown of the project (of 1630 to 1850) of an independent rational justification of morality provided the historical background against which the predicaments of our own culture can become intelligible. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 4) | |
| A reaction: Possibly the most important question of our times is whether the Enlightenment failed. MacIntyre's claim is followed by an appeal for a return to Aristotelian/Thomist virtues. Continentals seem to have responded by sliding into relativism. |
| 8051 | Mention of 'intuition' in morality means something has gone wrong with the argument [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The introduction of the word 'intuition' by a moral philosopher is always a signal that something has gone badly wrong with an argument. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: For the alternative view, see Kripke (Idea 4948). If Kripke is right about logic, I don't see why the same view should have some force in morality. At the bottom of all morality is an intuition that life is worth the struggle. How do you prove that? |
| 22660 | Evolution suggests prevailing or survival as a new criterion of right and wrong [James] |
| Full Idea: The philosophy of evolution offers us today a new criterion, which is objective and fixed, as an ethical test between right and wrong: That is to be called good which is destined to prevail or survive. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.44) | |
| A reaction: Perceptive for its time. Herbert Spencer may have suggested the idea. James dismisses it, because it implies a sort of fatalism, whereas genuine moral choices are involved in what survives. |
| 8048 | When 'man' is thought of individually, apart from all roles, it ceases to be a functional concept [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: It is only when man is thought of as an individual prior to and apart from all roles that 'man' ceases to be a functional concept. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 5) | |
| A reaction: This is the one key idea at the heart of the revival of virtue ethics in modern times. It pinpoints what may be the single biggest disaster in intellectual history - the isolation of the individual. Yet it led to freedom, rights, and lots of good things. |
| 8035 | In trying to explain the type of approval involved, emotivists are either silent, or viciously circular [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: In reply to the question of what kinds of approval are expressed by the feelings or attitudes of moral judgments, every version of emotivism either remains silent, or becomes viciously circular by identifying it as moral approval. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be an underlying assumption that moral judgements are sharply separated from other judgements, of which I am not convinced. I approve of creating a beautiful mural for an old folks home free of charge, but it must be beautiful. |
| 8037 | The expression of feeling in a sentence is in its use, not in its meaning [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Expression of feeling is not a function of the meaning of sentences, but of their use, as when a teacher shouts at a pupil "7 x 7 = 49!", where the expression of feeling or attitude has nothing whatsoever to do with its meaning. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: This point is what underlies the Frege-Geach problem for emotivism, and is a very telling point. Apart from in metaethics, no one has ever put forward a theory of meaning that says it is just emotion. ...Unless it concerns speakers' intentions? |
| 8040 | Emotivism cannot explain the logical terms in moral discourse ('therefore', 'if..then') [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Analytical moral philosophers resist emotivism because moral reasoning does occur, but there can be logical linkages between various moral judgements of a kind that emotivism could not allow for ('therefore' and 'if...then' express no moral feelings). | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: This is the 'Frege-Geach Problem', nicely expressed, and is the key reason why emotivism seems unacceptable - it is a theory about language, but it just doesn't explain moral discourse sufficiently. |
| 8042 | Nowadays most people are emotivists, and it is embodied in our culture [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: To a large degree people now think, talk and act as if emotivism was true, no matter what their avowed theoretical standpoint may be. Emotivism has become embodied in our culture. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: I suspect that it is moderately educated people who have swallowed emotivism, in the same way that they have swallowed relativism; it provides an excuse for neglectly the pursuit of beauty, goodness and truth, in favour of pleasure. |
| 8002 | Sophists don't distinguish a person outside one social order from someone outside all order [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The sophist tradition failed to distinguish the difference between the concept of a man who stands outside and is able to question the conventions of some one given social order, and the concept of a man who stands outside social life as such. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: A very nice distinction. Compare foreigners in Athens with Diogenes of Sinope, who renounced all cities. This is the germ of MacIntyre's view that morality is essentially dependent on some sort of social order. He is a reviver of virtue theory. |
| 8012 | The value/fact logical gulf is misleading, because social facts involve values [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: One reason why it is highly misleading to talk of a logical gulf between value and fact....is that we cannot characterize the social life of a tribe in their factual terms and escape their evaluations. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: Personally I like the objection that facts about functions cannot avoid the value of good functions, but this is very good. It is much better than simply trying to find a specific counterexample, such as facts about promises. Values just are facts. |
| 8005 | 'Happiness' is a bad translation of 'eudaimonia', which includes both behaving and faring well [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The name 'eudaimonia' is badly but inevitably translated by 'happiness', badly because it includes both the notion of behaving well and the notion of faring well. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch. 7) | |
| A reaction: This seems to imply that it does not include the notion of feeling good. Aristotle, however, concludes that pleasure is part of eudaimonia. I take our 'happiness' to be an internal notion, while the Greek word is an external notion. |
| 8058 | Maybe we can only understand rules if we first understand the virtues [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Maybe we need to attend to the virtues first in the first place in order to understand the function and authority of rules. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 9) | |
| A reaction: I think MacIntyre's project is exactly right. Morality is about how humans should live their lives. A bunch of robots could implement a set of moral rules, or make contracts, or maximise one another's benefits. The idea of a human community comes first. |
| 7097 | Virtue is secondary to a role-figure, defined within a culture [MacIntyre, by Statman] |
| Full Idea: MacIntyre argues that the concept of virtue is secondary to that of a role-figure, where the latter is always defined by some particular tradition and culture. | |
| From: report of Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981]) by Daniel Statman - Introduction to Virtue Ethics §3 | |
| A reaction: MacIntyre is much more of a relativist than Aristotle. There must be some attempt to deal with the problem of a rotten culture which throws up a corrupt role-model. We need a concept of a good culture and of individual flourishing. |
| 8043 | Characters are the masks worn by moral philosophies [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Characters are the masks worn by moral philosophies. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: This may be presenting character in an excessively moral way. Being lively, for example, is a very distinctive trait of character, but hardly moral. This tells us why philosophers are interested in character, but not why other people are. |
| 8061 | If morality just is emotion, there are no external criteria for judging emotions [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: If there is nothing to judgements of virtue and vice except the expression of feelings of approval and disapproval, there can be no criteria external to those feelings by appeal to which we may pass judgement upon them. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch.16) | |
| A reaction: The idea that there can be right and wrong feelings may be the key idea in virtue theory. See Idea 5217. A good person would be ashamed to have a bad feeling. Some emotional responses are intrinsically wicked, apart from actions. |
| 8001 | 'Dikaiosune' is justice, but also fairness and personal integrity [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The Greek 'dikaiosune' is inadequately translated as 'justice', but also as any other word; it combines the notion of fairness in externals with that of personal integrity in a way that no English word does. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch. 1) | |
| A reaction: 'Dikaiosune' is said to be the main topic of Plato's 'Republic'. Plato seems to have meant it to cover whatever makes a good character. Justice in behaviour presumably flows from internal justice of character (which is, roughly, inner harmony). |
| 8023 | My duties depend on my identity, which depends on my social relations [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: I cannot answer the question 'What ought I to do?' until I have answered the question 'Who am I?', and any answer to this question will specify my place in a nexus of social relationships. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.13) | |
| A reaction: This is the beginning of the modern critique of deontological ethics coming from revived virtue theory. As it stands, MacIntyre's idea sounds contractual, but I think he intends it in a more organic way. I am a fan. |
| 8038 | Since Moore thinks the right action produces the most good, he is a utilitarian [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Moore takes it that to call an action right is simply to say that of the available alternative actions it is the one which does or did as a matter of fact produce the most good. Moore is thus a utilitarian. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: Far be it from me to disagree with MacIntyre on this, but I would have thought that this made him a consequentialist, rather than a utilitarian. Moore doesn't remotely think that pure pleasure or happiness is the good. He's closer to Rashdall (Idea 6673). |
| 6570 | Imagine millions made happy on condition that one person suffers endless lonely torture [James] |
| Full Idea: Consider a case in which millions could be made permanently happy on the one simple condition that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of lonely torture. | |
| From: William James (The Will to Believe [1896], p.188), quoted by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be one of the earliest pinpointings of a key problem with utilitiarianism, which is that other values than happiness (in this case, fairness) seem to be utterly overruled. If we ignore fairness, why shouldn't we ignore happiness? |
| 8022 | I am naturally free if I am not tied to anyone by a contract [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The essence of the claim to natural rights is that no one has a right against me unless he can cite some contract, my consent to it, and his performance of his obligations under it. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.11) | |
| A reaction: This has become the foundation of western democracy, and the rebellious teenager's charter. Children have not consented to a contract with their parents. Close and loving relationships cease to be contractual. |
| 8050 | There are no natural or human rights, and belief in them is nonsense [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: There are no natural or human rights, and belief in them is one with belief in witches and in unicorns. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: His point is that the notion of 'rights' only arises out of a community. However, while you might criticise an individual for absurdly asserting all sorts of dubious rights, no one could criticise them if they asserted the right to defend their own life. |
| 23080 | Liberals debate how conservative or radical to be, but don't question their basics [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Contemporary debates within modern political systems are almost exclusively between conservative liberals, liberal liberals, and radical liberals. There is little place for the criticism of the system itself. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (Whose Justice? Which Rationality? [1988]), quoted by John Kekes - Against Liberalism 01 | |
| A reaction: [No page number given] Kekes seems to be more authoritarian, and MacIntyre is a communitarian (which can be rather authoritarian). I'm dubious about both. |
| 8031 | Fans of natural rights or laws can't agree on what the actual rights or laws are [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: It is notorious that adherents of theories about natural rights or natural laws offer lists of rights or laws which differ in substance from each other. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch.17) | |
| A reaction: There seems to have been a consensus early on that self-defence was a natural right, but divergence presumably occurs when you get bolder and more complex. There is a lot of divergence over which is Shakespeare's best play. |
| 22645 | Understanding by means of causes is useless if they are not reduced to a minimum number [James] |
| Full Idea: The knowledge of things by their causes, which is often given as a definition of rational knowledge, is useless unless the causes converge to a minimum number, while still producing the maximum number of effects. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.21) | |
| A reaction: This is certainly the psychological motivation for trying to identify 'the' cause of something, but James always tries to sell such things as subjective. 'Useless' to one person is a subjective criterion; useless to anyone is much more objective. |
| 18980 | If there is a 'greatest knower', it doesn't follow that they know absolutely everything [James] |
| Full Idea: The greatest knower of them all may yet not know the whole of everything, or even know what he does know at one single stroke: - he may be liable to forget. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 4) | |
| A reaction: And that's before you get to the problem of how the greatest knower could possibly know whether or not they knew absolutely everything, or whether there might be some fact which was irremediably hidden from them. |
| 18978 | It is hard to grasp a cosmic mind which produces such a mixture of goods and evils [James] |
| Full Idea: We can with difficulty comprehend the character of a cosmic mind whose purposes are fully revealed by the strange mixture of good and evils that we find in this actual world's particulars. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 3) | |
| A reaction: And, of course, what counts as 'goods' or 'evils' seems to have a highly relative aspect to it. To claim that really it is all good is massive hope based on flimsy evidence. |
| 8055 | If God is omniscient, he confronts no as yet unmade decisions, so decisions are impossible [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Omniscience excludes the making of decisions. If God knows everything that will occur, he confronts no as yet unmade decisions. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (After Virtue: a Study in Moral Theory [1981], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Aquinas on this] I find it very difficult to see how anyone could read the Bible (see Idea 8008) while keeping this point continually in mind, without seeing the whole book as a piece of blatant anthropomorphism. |
| 18991 | If the God hypothesis works well, then it is true [James] |
| Full Idea: On pragmatistic principles, if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 8) | |
| A reaction: The truth of God's existence certainly is a challenging test case for the pragmatic theory of truth, and James really bites the bullet here. Pragmatism may ultimately founder on the impossibility of specifying what 'works satisfactorily' means. |
| 18977 | The wonderful design of a woodpecker looks diabolical to its victims [James] |
| Full Idea: To the grub under the bark the exquisite fitness of the woodpecker's organism to extract him would certainly argue a diabolical designer. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 3) | |
| A reaction: What an elegant sentence! The huge problem for religious people who accept (probably reluctantly) evolution by natural selection is the moral nature of the divine being who could use such a ruthless method of design. |
| 18979 | Things with parts always have some structure, so they always appear to be designed [James] |
| Full Idea: The parts of things must always make some definite resultant, be it chaotic or harmonious. When we look at what has actually come, the conditions must always appear perfectly designed to ensure it. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 3) | |
| A reaction: In so far as the design argument is an analogy with human affairs, we can't deny that high levels of order suggest an organising mind, and mere chaos suggests a coincidence of unco-ordinated forces. |
| 18976 | Private experience is the main evidence for God [James] |
| Full Idea: I myself believe that the evidence for God lies primarily in inner personal experience. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 3) | |
| A reaction: There is not much you can say to someone who claims incontrovertible evidence which is utterly private to themselves. Does total absence of private religious experience count as evidence on the subject? |
| 22653 | Early Christianity says God recognises the neglected weak and tender impulses [James] |
| Full Idea: In what did the emancipating message of primitive Christianity consist but in the announcement that God recognizes those weak and tender impulses which paganism had so rudely overlooked. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.36) | |
| A reaction: Nietzsche says these are the virtues of a good slave. Previous virtues were dominated by military needs, but the new virtues are those of large cities, where communal living with strangers is the challenge. |
| 8008 | The Bible is a story about God in which humans are incidental characters [MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The Bible is a story about God in which human beings appear as incidental characters. | |
| From: Alasdair MacIntyre (A Short History of Ethics [1967], Ch. 9) | |
| A reaction: Very illuminating. He creates man, is betrayed by man, drowns him and starts again, sends a redeemer who gets murdered, and finally enlightens a small band who continue the uphill struggle to promote God's way. What next? |
| 18990 | Nirvana means safety from sense experience, and hindus and buddhists are just afraid of life [James] |
| Full Idea: Nirvana means safety from the everlasting round of adventures of which the world of sense consists. The hindoo and the buddhist for this is essentially their attitude, are simply afraid, afraid of more experience, afraid of life. | |
| From: William James (Pragmatism - eight lectures [1907], Lec 8) | |
| A reaction: Wonderfully American! From what I have seen of eastern thought, including Taoism, I agree with James, in general. There is a rejection of knowledge and of human life which I find shocking. I suspect it is a defence mechanism for downtrodden people. |