Combining Texts

Ideas for 'works', 'fragments/reports' and 'An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth'

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2 ideas

20. Action / B. Preliminaries of Action / 2. Willed Action / d. Weakness of will

22511	Some reasonings are stronger than we are [Philolaus]
	Full Idea: Some reasonings are stronger than we are.
	From: Philolaus (fragments/reports [c.425 BCE]), quoted by Aristotle - Eudemian Ethics 1225a33
	A reaction: This endorses the Aristotle view of akrasia (as opposed to the Socratic view). This isolated remark seems to imply that we are more clearly embodiments of will than of reason.

20. Action / C. Motives for Action / 3. Acting on Reason / b. Intellectualism

16478	A mother cat is paralysed if equidistant between two needy kittens [Russell]
	Full Idea: I once, to test the story of Buridan's Ass, put a cat exactly half-way between her two kittens, both too young to move: for a time she found the disjunction paralysing.
	From: Bertrand Russell (An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth [1940], 5)
	A reaction: Buridan's Ass is said to have starved between two equal piles of hay. Reason can't be the tie-breaker; reason obviously says 'choose one!', but intellectualism demands a reason for the one you choose.