display all the ideas for this combination of texts
8 ideas
| 13310 | Wisdom does not lie in books, and unread people can also become wise [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: What grounds could I possibly have for supposing that a person who has no acquaintance with books will never be a wise man? For wisdom does not lie in books. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (Letters from a Stoic [c.60], 088) | |
| A reaction: A useful warning to the likes of me, who may have retreated from the hurly-burly of the agora (see Callicles in Plato's 'Gorgias'), under the illusion that detachment is needed for wisdom. Maybe involvement is needed for wisdom. |
| 13295 | Wise people escape necessity by willing it [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: There is nothing a wise man does reluctantly; he escapes necessity because he wills what necessity is going to force on him. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (Letters from a Stoic [c.60], 054) | |
| A reaction: He is discussing death in this letter. The difficulty here is sliding into fatalism. For instance, if you are informed that you have cancer, it is tempting to become 'wise' and will your own death, but lots of people fight it, and win. |
| 13317 | Philosophy aims at happiness [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy takes as her aim the state of happiness. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (Letters from a Stoic [c.60], 090) | |
| A reaction: A startlingly forthright view. It seems to neglect what I take to be the main aim of philosophy, which is to achieve understanding. I presume true happiness would follow from that. Seneca must now explain why soporific pleasure is wrong. |
| 13293 | What philosophy offers humanity is guidance [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: Shall I tell you what philosophy holds out for humanity? Counsel. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (Letters from a Stoic [c.60], 048) | |
| A reaction: See Quine for a flat modern denial of this claim (Idea 9764). There is a modern tendency to see ethics and political thought operating at a meta- or metameta- level. I take the main ethical theories to be very illuminating of real life. |
| 13309 | That something is a necessary condition of something else doesn't mean it caused it [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: There's no reason for you to assume that, X being something without which Y could never have come about, Y came about as a result of the assistance of X. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (Letters from a Stoic [c.60], 088) | |
| A reaction: This thought originates with Carneades, reported by Cicero. This is a clear message to the likes of Mackie, who are in danger of thinking that giving the preconditions of something is sufficient to give its causes. |
| 13313 | Even philosophers have got bogged down in analysing tiny bits of language [Seneca] |
| Full Idea: Even the philosophers have descended to the level of drawing distinctions between the uses of different syllables and discussing the proper meanings of prepositions and conjunctions. | |
| From: Seneca the Younger (Letters from a Stoic [c.60], 088) | |
| A reaction: How wonderfully prescient! The vast industry of modern philosophy of language exactly fits Seneca's description. I don't quite share his contempt, of course, and I think Seneca would have a bit of sympathy with modern analysis (just a bit!). |
| 6267 | A culture needs to admit that knowledge is more extensive than just 'science' [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The acknowledgement that the sphere of knowledge is wider than the sphere of 'science' seems to me to be a cultural necessity if we are to arrive at a sane and human view of ourselves or of science. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: A very nice remark, with which I intuitively agree, but then you are left with the problem of explaining how something can qualify as knowledge when it can't pass the stringent tests of science. How wide to we spread, and why? |
| 6272 | 'True' and 'refers' cannot be made scientically precise, but are fundamental to science [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Some non-scientific knowledge is presupposed by science; for example, I have been arguing that 'refers' and 'true' cannot be made scientifically precise; yet truth is a fundamental term in logic - a precise science. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: We might ask whether we 'know' what 'true' and 'refers' mean, as opposed to being able to use them. If their usage doesn't count as knowledge, then we could still end up with all actual knowledge being somehow 'scientific'. |