display all the ideas for this combination of texts
5 ideas
| 17305 | I take what is fundamental to be the whole spatiotemporal manifold and its fields [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: I myself would prefer to speak of what is fundamental in terms of the whole spatiotemporal manifold and the fields that permeate it, with parts counting as derivative of the whole. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (Grounding, Transitivity and Contrastivity [2012], 4.1.1) | |
| A reaction: Not quite the Parmenidean One, since it has parts, but a nice try at updating the great man. Note the reference to 'fields', suggesting that this view is grounded in the physics rather than metaphysics. How many fields has it got? |
| 17307 | Nowadays causation is usually understood in terms of equations and variable ranges [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: The leading treatments of causation work within 'structural equation models', with events represented via variables each of which is allotted a range of permitted values, which constitute a 'contrast space'. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (Grounding, Transitivity and Contrastivity [2012], 4.3.1) | |
| A reaction: Like Woodward's idea that causation is a graph, this seems to be a matter of plotting or formalising correlations between activities, which is a very Humean approach to causation. |
| 11856 | Qualities should be predictable from the nature of the subject [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Whenever we find some quality in a subject, we ought to believe that if we understood the nature of both the subject and the quality we would conceive how the quality could arise from it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref 66) | |
| A reaction: This is the idea that powers are prior to properties, which seems right to me. I take essence to be something like the best explanation of qualities. |
| 12994 | Gold has a real essence, unknown to us, which produces its properties [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The complex idea of gold includes its being something which has a real essence whose detailed constitution is unknown to us, except for the fact that such qualities as malleability depend upon it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.10) | |
| A reaction: This is precisely the view of modern scientific essentialism. The underlying idea I take to be the conception of essence as the thing which explains the properties. |
| 12808 | Part of our idea of gold is its real essence, which is not known to us in detail [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is very true that it is part of the complex idea of gold that it is a thing which has a real essence, the constitution of which is not otherwise known to us in detail. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 6.6.345), quoted by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz and Locke on Essences p.201 | |
| A reaction: See also Idea 12807. This is the clearest possible statement of Leibniz's clear-cut scientific essentialism, here presented in opposition to Locke (thought I take the latter to be only bothered by our inability to know the hidden constitution). |