Combining Texts

Ideas for 'works', 'Hermeneutics: a very short introduction' and 'Knowing One's Own Mind'

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2 ideas

18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 3. Emotions / g. Controlling emotions
Plato wanted to somehow control and purify the passions [Vlastos on Plato]
     Full Idea: Plato put high on his agenda a project which did not figure in Socrates' programme at all: the hygienic conditioning of the passions. This cannot be an intellectual process, as argument cannot touch them.
     From: comment on Plato (works [c.375 BCE]) by Gregory Vlastos - Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher p.88
     A reaction: This is the standard traditional view of any thinker who exaggerates the importance and potential of reason in our lives.
18. Thought / C. Content / 6. Broad Content
External identification doesn't mean external location, as with sunburn [Davidson, by Rowlands]
     Full Idea: Davidson observes that the inference from a thought being identified by a relation to something outside the head does not entail that the thought is not wholly in the head, just as sunburn is identified by external factors, but is still in the skin.
     From: report of Donald Davidson (Knowing One's Own Mind [1987]) by Mark Rowlands - Externalism Ch.8
     A reaction: Rowlands (an externalist) agrees, and this strikes me as correct, and it needs to be one of the fixed points in any assessment of externalism.