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2 ideas
| 13194 | God's laws would be meaningless without internal powers for following them [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To say that, in creation, God gave bodies a law for acting means nothing, unless, at the same time, he gave them something by means of which it could happen that the law is followed. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Body and Force, Against the Cartesians [1702], p.253) | |
| A reaction: This is the beginning of the modern rebellion against the medieval view of laws as imposed from outside on passive matter. Unfortunately for Leibniz, once you have postulated active internal powers, the external laws become redundant. |
| 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. |