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Single Idea 16227

[filed under theme 1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 7. Despair over Philosophy ]

Full Idea

Philosophers are skilled at resisting even the most inviting thoughts.

Gist of Idea

Philosophers are good at denying the obvious

Source

Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5)

Book Ref

Hawley,Katherine: 'How Things Persist' [OUP 2004], p.141

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.

The 39 ideas from 'How Things Persist'

16191 Perdurance needs an atemporal perspective, to say that the object 'has' different temporal parts [Hawley]
16192 Endurance theory can relate properties to times, or timed instantiations to properties [Hawley]
16193 'Adverbialism' explains change by saying an object has-at-some-time a given property [Hawley]
16195 Presentism solves the change problem: the green banana ceases, so can't 'relate' to the yellow one [Hawley]
16196 Endurance is a sophisticated theory, covering properties, instantiation and time [Hawley]
16197 How does perdurance theory explain our concern for our own future selves? [Hawley]
16199 If an object is the sum of all of its temporal parts, its mass is staggeringly large! [Hawley]
16200 Are sortals spatially maximal - so no cat part is allowed to be a cat? [Hawley]
16201 Perdurance says things are sums of stages; Stage Theory says each stage is the thing [Hawley]
16202 The problem of change arises if there must be 'identity' of a thing over time [Hawley]
16205 The stages of Stage Theory seem too thin to populate the world, or to be referred to [Hawley]
16203 Stage Theory seems to miss out the link between stages of the same object [Hawley]
16204 Stage Theory says every stage is a distinct object, which gives too many objects [Hawley]
16206 Stages must be as fine-grained in length as change itself, so any change is a new stage [Hawley]
16207 Time could be discrete (like integers) or dense (rationals) or continuous (reals) [Hawley]
16208 Supervaluation refers to one vaguely specified thing, through satisfaction by everything in some range [Hawley]
16211 A homogeneous rotating disc should be undetectable according to Humean supervenience [Hawley]
16212 An isolated stage can't be a banana (which involves suitable relations to other stages) [Hawley]
16213 Stages of one thing are related by extrinsic counterfactual and causal relations [Hawley]
16215 Causation is nothing more than the counterfactuals it grounds? [Hawley]
16216 Part of the sense of a proper name is a criterion of the thing's identity [Hawley]
16218 On any theory of self, it is hard to explain why we should care about our future selves [Hawley]
16220 Vagueness is either in our knowledge, in our talk, or in reality [Hawley]
16219 Non-linguistic things cannot be indeterminate, because they don't have truth-values at all [Hawley]
16221 Supervaluationism takes what the truth-value would have been if indecision was resolved [Hawley]
16226 Epistemic vagueness seems right in the case of persons [Hawley]
16222 Indeterminacy in objects and in properties are not distinct cases [Hawley]
16223 Maybe for the world to be vague, it must be vague in its foundations? [Hawley]
16225 If two things might be identical, there can't be something true of one and false of the other [Hawley]
16227 Philosophers are good at denying the obvious [Hawley]
16228 The constitution theory is endurantism plus more than one object in a place [Hawley]
16229 Constitution theory needs sortal properties like 'being a sweater' to distinguish it from its thread [Hawley]
16230 Maybe the only properties are basic ones like charge, mass and spin [Hawley]
16232 An object is 'natural' if its stages are linked by certain non-supervenient relations [Hawley]
14492 If the constitution view says thread and sweater are two things, why do we talk of one thing? [Hawley]
16237 The modal features of statue and lump are disputed; when does it stop being that statue? [Hawley]
16240 If a life is essentially the sum of its temporal parts, it couldn't be shorter or longer than it was? [Hawley]
16239 To decide whether something is a counterpart, we need to specify a relevant sortal concept [Hawley]
16238 Perdurantists can adopt counterpart theory, to explain modal differences of identical part-sums [Hawley]