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2 ideas
6519 | Locke's solidity is not matter, because that is impenetrability and hardness combined [Robinson,H] |
Full Idea: Notoriously, Locke's filler for Descartes's geometrical matter, solidity, will not do, for that quality collapses on examination into a composite of the dispositional-cum-relational propery of impenetrability, and the secondary quality of hardness. | |
From: Howard Robinson (Perception [1994], IX.3) | |
A reaction: I would have thought the problem was that 'matter is solidity' turns out on analysis to be a tautology. We have a handful of nearly synonymous words for matter and our experiences of it, but they boil down to some 'given' thing for which we lack words. |
4398 | An event causes another just if the second event would not have happened without the first [Lewis, by Psillos] |
Full Idea: Lewis gives an account of causation in terms of counterfactual conditionals (roughly, an event c causes an event e iff if c had not happened then e would not have happened either). | |
From: report of David Lewis (works [1973]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation Intro | |
A reaction: This feels wrong to me. It is a version of Humean constant conjunction, but counterfactuals are too much a feature of our minds, and not sufficiently a feature of the world, to do this job. Tricky. |