Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Wittgenstein', 'Comments on a Certain Broadsheet' and 'The Rationalists'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     choose another area for these texts

display all the ideas for this combination of texts


2 ideas

18. Thought / D. Concepts / 2. Origin of Concepts / c. Nativist concepts
The mind's innate ideas are part of its capacity for thought [Descartes]
     Full Idea: I have never written or taken the view that the mind requires innate ideas which are something distinct from its own faculty of thinking.
     From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365)
Qualia must be innate, because physical motions do not contain them [Descartes]
     Full Idea: The ideas of pains, colours, sounds etc. must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions.
     From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365)
     A reaction: Simple and brilliant! We know perfectly well that there is no redness zooming through the air from a tomato (or the air would be pink!). Redness occurs when the light arrives, so we add the redness, so it is innate.