display all the ideas for this combination of texts
15 ideas
| 11239 | The notion of a priori truth is absent in Aristotle [Aristotle, by Politis] |
| Full Idea: The notion of a priori truth is conspicuously absent in Aristotle. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Vassilis Politis - Aristotle and the Metaphysics 1.5 | |
| A reaction: Cf. Idea 11240. |
| 21253 | Descartes needs to demonstrate how other people can attain his clear and distinct conceptions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is not sufficient for Descartes to claim that he perceives something in himself clearly and distinctly, for this is to not complete the demonstration, unless he shows the method through which others can attain the same experience. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], App X) | |
| A reaction: For the simplest rational insight this seems a rather tough requirement. If you say A>B, and B>C, so A>C, then once you have grasped the concept of 'greater than' I'm not sure there is a further possible demonstration. |
| 12933 | Arithmetic and geometry are implicitly innate, awaiting revelation [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I would name the propositions of arithmetic and geometry as innate. ...The actual knowledge of them is not innate. What is innate is what might be called the implicit knowledge of them, as the veins of marble outline a shape for the sculptor. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: This seems to walk straight into the empiricist guns. The marble example shows the problem, because the 'veins' will hardly outline David in the block. Locke's challenge is to show that merely 'implicit' ideas have demonstrable reality. |
| 12991 | Children learn language fast, with little instruction and few definitions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I have sometimes been amazed that children can learn languages so early, ...considering how little trouble is taken to instruct children in their native tongue, and how little thought adults give to getting sharp definitions. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.10) | |
| A reaction: A striking anticipation of the key observation on which Chomsky built his theories, from a philosopher who was equally concerned to defend innate ideas and innate knowledge. |
| 12929 | All of our thoughts come from within the soul, and not from the senses [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I always accepted the innate idea of God, but my new system says all the thoughts and actions of the soul come from its own depths and could not be given to it by the senses. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to adjudicate on this one. The counterexamples would be associations. I see a face in the crowd and think of my friend. But Leibniz could be right even about that. Who cares? Externalism is designed to bypass this problem. |
| 12940 | What is left of the 'blank page' if you remove the ideas? [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Those who hold forth about the 'blank page' cannot say what is left of it once the ideas have been taken away. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: This is a decisive criticism of the total tabula rasa idea, but empiricists responded by developing associationism - that what remains is principles of association for incoming experience. Brain mechanisms, we might say. |
| 19358 | Colour and pain must express the nature of their stimuli, without exact resemblance [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Ideas such as those of colour and pain are not arbitrary. ...That is not God's way ...I would say there is a resemblance of a kind, not a perfect one, but a resemblance in which one thing expresses another through some orderly relationship between them. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.08) | |
| A reaction: The main point of Locke's idea of 'secondary' qualities is that (unlike the 'primary' ones) they bear no resemblance to their stimuli. It's not much of an argument from Leibniz, to say that is not God's way, but he has a vast system to support his claim. |
| 12948 | A pain doesn't resemble the movement of a pin, but it resembles the bodily movement pins cause [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is true that pain does not resemble the movement of a pin; but it might thoroughly resemble the motions which the pin causes in our body, and it might resemble them in the soul; and I have not the least doubt that it does. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.08) | |
| A reaction: He may not have the least doubt, but the rest of us do, I should think. Try as I will, I cannot see any resemblance between pain and a motion. What feeling does a pendulum resemble? |
| 13005 | Truth arises among sensations from grounding reasons and from regularities [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The truth of sensible things is established by the links amongst them; these depend upon intellectual truths, grounded in reason, and upon observations of regularities among sensible things themselves, even when the reasons are not apparent. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.11) | |
| A reaction: It's not clear why regularities would establish truths, given that most hallucinations have regularities in them. I'm thinking that Leibniz is not sufficiently rationalist here, and that it is the rational coherence of experience which validates it. |
| 23312 | Aristotle is a rationalist, but reason is slowly acquired through perception and experience [Aristotle, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle is a rationalist …but reason for him is a disposition which we only acquire over time. Its acquisition is made possible primarily by perception and experience. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Michael Frede - Aristotle's Rationalism p.173 | |
| A reaction: I would describe this process as the gradual acquisition of the skill of objectivity, which needs the right knowledge and concepts to evaluate new experiences. |
| 4302 | You may experience a universal truth, but only reason can tell you that it is always true [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: However often one experiences instances of a universal truth, one could never know inductively that it would always hold unless one knew through reason that it was necessary. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: The problem, though, is that as soon as we go beyond experience we are not very reliable, and are liable to arrogance, error and lack of imagination. |
| 12947 | We only believe in sensible things when reason helps the senses [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The senses could not convince us of the existence of sensible things without help from reason. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.07) | |
| A reaction: This nicely pinpoints the big difficulty which keeps besetting orthodox empiricism. I've been educated as an empiricist, but I prefer Leibniz to Berkeley or Hume, and even to the more sensible Locke. |
| 12930 | The senses are confused, and necessities come from distinct intellectual ideas [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Intellectual ideas, from which necessary truths arise, do not come from the senses. ...The ideas that come from the senses are confused; and so too, at least in part, are the truths which depend on them, whereas intellectual ideas are distinct. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: One might compare Descartes' example of the chiliagon, which is only grasped clearly by the intellect. However, the problem of vagueness seems to intrude as much into intellectual ideas as it does into the senses. He was a mathematician... |
| 13001 | Our sensation of green is a confused idea, like objects blurred by movement [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The sensory idea of green (made of blue and yellow) is a confused idea, like the swift rotation of a cog-wheel which makes us perceive an artificial transparency, and we are not able to discern the cause, the idea of the teeth on the wheel. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.06) | |
| A reaction: This is one of Leibniz's less well-known objections to empiricism. He always says that intellectual ideas are capable of a clarity which is never found in sensory experience. |
| 16111 | Aristotle wants to fit common intuitions, and therefore uses language as a guide [Aristotle, by Gill,ML] |
| Full Idea: Since Aristotle generally prefers a metaphysical theory that accords with common intuitions, he frequently relies on facts about language to guide his metaphysical claims. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Mary Louise Gill - Aristotle on Substance Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: I approve of his procedure. I take intuition to be largely rational justifications too complex for us to enunciate fully, and language embodies folk intuitions in its concepts (especially if the concepts occur in many languages). |