display all the ideas for this combination of texts
7 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 |
| 17324 | 'Because' can signal an inference rather than an explanation [Liggins] |
| Full Idea: 'Because' can signal an inference rather than an explanation. | |
| From: David Liggins (Truth-makers and dependence [2012], 10.5) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle starts from words like 'why?', but it can be a deceptive approach to explanation. |
| 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 |
| 17321 | Value, constitution and realisation are non-causal dependences that explain [Liggins] |
| Full Idea: 'It is wrong because it produces pain for fun', and 'these constitute a table because they are arranged tablewise', and 'tea is poisonous because it contains arsenic' are clearly non-causal uses of 'because', and neither are they conceptual. | |
| From: David Liggins (Truth-makers and dependence [2012], 10.4) | |
| A reaction: The general line seems to be that any form of determination will underwrite an explanation. He talks later of the 'wrongmaker' and 'poisonmaker' relationships to add to the 'truthmaker'. The table example is the 'object-maker' dependence relation. |
| 17323 | If explanations track dependence, then 'determinative' explanations seem to exist [Liggins] |
| Full Idea: If explanation often tracks dependence, then we have a theoretical reason to expect such explanations to exist. Let us call such explanations 'determinative'. | |
| From: David Liggins (Truth-makers and dependence [2012], 10.4) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be an emerging understanding that this 'determination' relation is central to all of explanation - with causal explanations, for example, being a particular instance of it. I like it. These are real, not conventional, explanations. |
| 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. |