display all the ideas for this combination of texts
9 ideas
| 16971 | Plato says sciences are unified around Forms; Aristotle says they're unified around substance [Aristotle, by Moravcsik] |
| Full Idea: Plato's unity of science principle states that all - legitimate - sciences are ultimately about the Forms. Aristotle's principle states that all sciences must be, ultimately, about substances, or aspects of substances. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE], 1) by Julius Moravcsik - Aristotle on Adequate Explanations 1 |
| 9661 | Induction is just reasonable methods of inferring the unobserved from the observed [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: I use the word 'induction' broadly, to cover all the methods we deem reasonable for forming beliefs about the unobserved parts of our world on the basis of experience with the observed parts. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: Good. Attempts to be precise about it seem to be hopeless and invite paradoxes. Personally I just define it as 'learning from experience', because that makes what we do continuous with the behaviour of other sensible animals. |
| 9652 | To just expect unexamined emeralds to be grue would be totally unreasonable [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Some beliefs are just unreasonable in a strong sense. Think of the man who, for no special reason, expects unexamined emeralds to be grue. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a nice converse way of seeing the point that 'grue' is such an totally artificial predicate. I still say that the most illuminating point is that grue is not a colour, so seeing a grue thing is no confirmation at all. |
| 11243 | Aristotelian explanations are facts, while modern explanations depend on human conceptions [Aristotle, by Politis] |
| Full Idea: For Aristotle things which explain (the explanantia) are facts, which should not be associated with the modern view that says explanations are dependent on how we conceive and describe the world (where causes are independent of us). | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Vassilis Politis - Aristotle and the Metaphysics 2.1 | |
| A reaction: There must be some room in modern thought for the Aristotelian view, if some sort of robust scientific realism is being maintained against the highly linguistic view of philosophy found in the twentieth century. |
| 3320 | Aristotle's standard analysis of species and genus involves specifying things in terms of something more general [Aristotle, by Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: The standard Aristotelian doctrine of species and genus in the theory of anything whatever involves specifying what the thing is in terms of something more general. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.10 |
| 9658 | An explanation tells us how an event was caused [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: An explanation, I think, is an account of etiology: it tells us something about how an event was caused. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: Will this cover mathematical explanations? Numbers would have to have causal powers. |
| 16280 | Often explanaton seeks fundamental laws, rather than causal histories [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Sometimes the pursuit of explanation is more the pursuit of unified and general fundamental laws than of information about the causal histories of events. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to disagree, given the 'sometimes'. I don't think that Newton's Law of Gravity (say), with its lovely equation, actually explained anything at all about gravity. Finding the law closes the quest for an accurate description of what happens. |
| 12000 | Aristotle regularly says that essential properties explain other significant properties [Aristotle, by Kung] |
| Full Idea: The view that essential properties are those in virtue of which other significant properties of the subjects under investigation can be explained is encountered repeatedly in Aristotle's work. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Joan Kung - Aristotle on Essence and Explanation IV | |
| A reaction: What does 'significant' mean here? I take it that the significant properties are the ones which explain the role, function and powers of the object. |
| 16274 | If the well-ordering of a pack of cards was by shuffling, the explanation would make it more surprising [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Suppose you find in a hotel room a pack of cards in exactly standard order. Not surprising - maybe it's a new deck, or someone arranged them. Not so. They got that way by being fairly shuffled. The explanation would make the explanandum more surprising. | |
| From: David Lewis (On the Plurality of Worlds [1986], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] A lovely Lewisian example, that instantly makes big trouble for the (implausible) view that a cause is something which increases the likelihood of a thing. |