Combining Texts

Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'The Concept of Logical Consequence' and 'Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power'

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3 ideas

20. Action / B. Preliminaries of Action / 2. Willed Action / c. Agent causation
Reid said that agent causation is a unique type of causation [Reid, by Stout,R]
     Full Idea: Thomas Reid said that an agent's causing something involves a fundamentally different kind of causation from inanimate causing.
     From: report of Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788]) by Rowland Stout - Action 4 'Agent'
     A reaction: I'm afraid the great philosopher of common sense got it wrong on this one. Introducing a new type of causation into our account of nature is crazy.
20. Action / B. Preliminaries of Action / 2. Willed Action / d. Weakness of will
Passions are judgements; greed thinks money is honorable, and likewise drinking and lust [Chrysippus, by Diog. Laertius]
     Full Idea: Chrysippus says (in his On Passions) that the passions are judgements; for greed is a supposition that money is honorable, and similarly for drunkennes and wantonness and others.
     From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.111
     A reaction: This is an endorsement of Socrates's intellectualist reading of weakness of will, as against Aristotle's assigning it to overpowering passions.
20. Action / C. Motives for Action / 5. Action Dilemmas / c. Omissions
The highest degree of morality performs all that is appropriate, omitting nothing [Chrysippus]
     Full Idea: He who makes moral progress to the highest degree performs all the appropriate actions in all circumstances, and omits none.
     From: Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]), quoted by Sophocles - Sophocles' Electra 4.39.22
     A reaction: Hence concerns about omission as well as commission in the practice of ethics can be seen in the light of character and virtue. The world is fully of nice people who act well, but don't do so well on omissions. Car drivers, for example.