Combining Texts

Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Quantification and Descriptions' and 'Notebooks 1914-1916'

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2 ideas

2. Reason / B. Laws of Thought / 2. Sufficient Reason
Chrysippus said the uncaused is non-existent [Chrysippus, by Plutarch]
     Full Idea: Chrysippus said that the uncaused is altogether non-existent.
     From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Plutarch - 70: Stoic Self-contradictions 1045c
     A reaction: The difficulty is to see what empirical basis there can be for such a claim, or what argument of any kind other than an intuition. Induction is the obvious answer, but Hume teaches us scepticism about any claim that 'there can be no exceptions'.
2. Reason / D. Definition / 7. Contextual Definition
Contextual definitions eliminate descriptions from contexts [Linsky,B]
     Full Idea: A 'contextual' definition shows how to eliminate a description from a context.
     From: Bernard Linsky (Quantification and Descriptions [2014], 2)
     A reaction: I'm trying to think of an example, but what I come up with are better described as 'paraphrases' than as 'definitions'.