more from this thinker | more from this text
Full Idea
No beginnings of souls can be found on earth; there is no combination in souls that could be born from earth, nothing that partakes of moist or airy or fiery; for in those elements there is nothing to possess the power of memory, thought, or reflection.
Clarification
Cicero believed the elements were earth, air, fire and water
Gist of Idea
Souls contain no properties of elements, and elements contain no properties of souls
Source
M. Tullius Cicero (Tusculan Disputations [c.44 BCE], I.xxvi.66)
Book Ref
Cicero: 'Tusculan Disputations', ed/tr. King,J.E. [Harvard Loeb 1927], p.77
A Reaction
Interesting, but I think magnetism is an instructive analogy, which has weird properties which we never perceive in elements (though it is there, buried deep - suggesting panpsychism). Cicero would be disconcerted to find that fire isn't an element.
| 1909 | How can pleasure or judgement occur in a heap of atoms? [Sext.Empiricus on Epicurus] |
| 5885 | Souls contain no properties of elements, and elements contain no properties of souls [Cicero] |
| 5951 | If atoms have no qualities, they cannot possibly produce a mind [Plutarch] |
| 6229 | Sense is fixed in the material form, and so can't grasp abstract universals [Cudworth] |
| 6382 | The 'grain problem' says physical objects are granular, where sensations appear not to be [Sellars, by Polger] |
| 5796 | If tree rings contain information about age, then age contains information about rings [Searle] |
| 2308 | Identity theory was overthrown by multiple realisations and causal anomalies [Kim] |
| 3002 | If mind is just physical, how can it follow the rules required for intelligent thought? [Fodor] |
| 6122 | No defences of physicalism can deprive psychology of the ontological authority of other sciences [Mellor/Crane] |
| 3150 | Can identity explain reason, free will, non-extension, intentionality, subjectivity, experience? [Rey] |
| 3129 | Physicalism offers something called "complexity" instead of mental substance [Rey] |
| 4072 | The completeness of physics must be an essential component of any physicalist view of mind [Crane] |
| 4598 | Functionalists emphasise that mental processes are not to be reduced to what realises them [Heil] |
| 3448 | Do new ideas increase the weight of the brain? [Dance] |