display all the ideas for this combination of texts
7 ideas
2045 | Perception is infallible, suggesting that it is knowledge [Plato] |
Full Idea: Perception is always of something that is, and it is infallible, which suggests that it is knowledge. | |
From: Plato (Theaetetus [c.368 BCE], 152c) |
2067 | Our senses could have been separate, but they converge on one mind [Plato] |
Full Idea: It would be peculiar if each of us were like a Trojan horse, with a whole bunch of senses sitting inside us, rather than that all these perceptions converge onto a single identity (mind, or whatever one ought to call it). | |
From: Plato (Theaetetus [c.368 BCE], 184d) |
2068 | With what physical faculty do we perceive pairs of opposed abstract qualities? [Plato] |
Full Idea: With what physical faculty do we perceive being and not-being, similarity and dissimilarity, identity and difference, oneness and many, odd and even and other maths, ….fineness and goodness? | |
From: Plato (Theaetetus [c.368 BCE], 185d) |
2078 | You might mistake eleven for twelve in your senses, but not in your mind [Plato] |
Full Idea: Sight or touch might make someone take eleven for twelve, but he could never form this mistaken belief about the contents of his mind. | |
From: Plato (Theaetetus [c.368 BCE], 195e) |
2069 | Thought must grasp being itself before truth becomes possible [Plato] |
Full Idea: If you can't apprehend being you can't apprehend truth, and so a thing could not be known. Therefore knowledge is not located in immediate experience but in thinking about it, since the latter makes it possible to grasp being and truth. | |
From: Plato (Theaetetus [c.368 BCE], 186c) |
8252 | Davidson believes experience is non-conceptual, and outside the space of reasons [Davidson, by McDowell] |
Full Idea: Davidson thinks that experience can be nothing but an extra-conceptual impact on sensibility. So he concludes that experience must be outside the space of reasons. | |
From: report of Donald Davidson (Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge [1983], I.6) by John McDowell - Mind and World I | |
A reaction: McDowell's challenge to the view that experience is extra-conceptual seems to be the key debate among modern empiricists. My only intuition in this area is that we should beware of all-or-nothing solutions to such problems. |
8255 | Davidson says the world influences us causally; I say it influences us rationally [McDowell on Davidson] |
Full Idea: Davidson urges that we should hold that the world exerts a merely causal influence on our thinking, but I am trying to describe a way in which the world exerts a rational influence on our thinking. | |
From: comment on Donald Davidson (Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge [1983]) by John McDowell - Mind and World II.5 | |
A reaction: McDowell seems to be fighting for the existence of 'pure' reason in a way that is hard to defend with a thoroughly materialist view of human brains. If the world is coherent, then maybe it is rational, and so has reasons to offer us? |