display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 7401 | Heat and colour don't exist, so cannot mislead about the external world [Galileo, by Tuck] |
| Full Idea: Galileo argued that there is no such thing as heat (and hence also as colour) in the external world, so there is no reason to conclude from colour-blindness that we cannot know the truth about the world. | |
| From: report of Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore ('The Assayer') [1623]) by Richard Tuck - Hobbes Ch.1 | |
| A reaction: This key idea, taken up by Gassendi, Descartes and Locke, seems to me to be one of the most important (and, in retrospect, rather obvious) facts ever worked out by the human mind. Why does anyone still doubt it? |
| 5454 | Tastes, odours and colours only reside in consciousness, and would disappear with creatures [Galileo] |
| Full Idea: I think tastes, odours, colours, and so on are mere names as far as the objects are concerned, and only reside in consciousness. Hence if the living creature were removed, all these qualities would be wiped away and annihilated. | |
| From: Galileo Galilei (Il Saggiatore ('The Assayer') [1623]), quoted by Brian Ellis - The Philosophy of Nature: new essentialism Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: A nice bold assertion of the primary/secondary distinction from the first great scientist. I agree, and to disagree (and hence side with Berkeley and Hume) is to head for metaphsical and epistemological confusion. |
| 7156 | Sense perceptions contain values (useful, so pleasant) [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: All sensory perceptions are entirely suffused with value judgements (useful or harmful - consequently pleasant or unpleasant). | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 02[95]) | |
| A reaction: This seems like a wonderful anticipation of modern neuroscience findings about emotion. It is a nice challenge to Hume's 'impressions' and Russell's 'logical atoms'. But knowledge is power, and we can strip off the values from the perceptions. |
| 7181 | Pain shows the value of the damage, not what has been damaged [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Intellectuality of pain: pain does not indicate what is momentarily damaged but what value the damage has with regard to the individual as a whole. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 07[48]) | |
| A reaction: An interesting claim, but rather hard to substantiate. Boiling water on the back of a hand might be very painful, but not of huge consequence in terms of damage. The palm of the hand is much more important to us than the back. |
| 7129 | Perception is unconscious, and we are only conscious of processed perceptions [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Sense-perception happens without our awareness: whatever we become conscious of is a perception that has already been processed. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Writings from Late Notebooks [1887], 34[30]) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me wonderfully perceptive for its date, and a crucial truth, because we have the delusion that we are our consciousness, whereas that is only a tiny part of what we are. |