display all the ideas for this combination of texts
2 ideas
| 8648 | Ideas are not spatial, and don't have distances between them [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Spatial predicates are not applicable to ideas; an idea is neither to the right nor to the left of another idea; we cannot give the distances between ideas in millimetres. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations) [1884], §61) | |
| A reaction: This Fregean thought should be music to the ears of Cartesians, though it does not seem intended as support for dualism. This is the logicians' view of reality, where true inferences are what matter, and brains and souls are irrelevant. |
| 1875 | Dogs show reason in decisions made by elimination [Chrysippus, by Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: A dog makes use of the fifth complex indemonstrable syllogism when, arriving at a spot where three ways meet, after smelling at two roads by which the quarry did not pass, he rushes off at once by the third without pausing to smell. | |
| From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Sextus Empiricus - Outlines of Pyrrhonism I.69 | |
| A reaction: As we might say: either A or B or C; not A; not B; therefore C. I wouldn't want to trust this observation without a lot of analysis of slow-motion photography of dogs as crossroads. Even so, it is a nice challenge to Descartes' view of animals. |