display all the ideas for this combination of texts
15 ideas
| 3048 | Stoics say that God the creator is the perfection of all animals [Chrysippus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say that God is an animal immortal, rational, perfect, and intellectual in his happiness, unsusceptible of any kind of evil, having a foreknowledge of the world; however, he is not the figure of a man, and is the creator of the universe. | |
| From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.1.72 |
| 20773 | The origin of justice can only be in Zeus, and in nature [Chrysippus] |
| Full Idea: One can find no other starting point or origin for justice except the one derived from Zeus and that derived from the common nature; for everything like this must have that starting point, if we are going to say anything at all about good and bad things. | |
| From: Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]), quoted by Plutarch - 70: Stoic Self-contradictions 1035c | |
| A reaction: [in lost 'On Gods' bk 3] This appears to offer two starting points, in the mind of Zeus, and in nature, though since nature is presumed to be rational the two may run together. Is Zeus the embodiment, or the unconscious source, or the maker of decrees? |
| 5633 | We don't accept duties as coming from God, but assume they are divine because they are duties [Kant] |
| Full Idea: So far as practical reason has the right to lead us, we will not hold actions to be obligatory because they are God's commands, but will rather regard them as divine commands because we are internally obligated to them. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B847/A819) | |
| A reaction: Thus Kant agrees with Plato in his response to the latter's 'Euthyphro Question' (Ideas 336 and Idea 337). |
| 5965 | The source of all justice is Zeus and the universal nature [Chrysippus] |
| Full Idea: It is not possible to discover any other beginning of justice or any source for it other than that from Zeus and from the universal nature. | |
| From: Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE], fr 326), quoted by Plutarch - 70: Stoic Self-contradictions 1035c | |
| A reaction: If the source is 'universal nature', that could agree with Plato, but if the source is Zeus, then stoicism is a religion rather than a philosophy. |
| 3042 | Stoics teach that law is identical with right reason, which is the will of Zeus [Chrysippus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics teach that common law is identical with that right reason which pervades everything, being the same with Zeus, who is the regulator and chief manager of all existing things. | |
| From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.1.53 |
| 5607 | Only three proofs of God: the physico-theological (evidence), the cosmological (existence), the ontological (a priori) [Kant] |
| Full Idea: There are three proofs of the existence of God: the physico-theological, the cosmological, and the ontological. There are no more of them, and there also cannot be any more. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B619/A591) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to deny this, though the 'physico-theological' group may be a sizeable family. The immediate difficulty may be that physical evidence supports something less than God, the cosmological is just speculation, and a priori proofs won't work. |
| 13732 | Kant never denied that 'exist' could be a predicate - only that it didn't enlarge concepts [Kant, by Fitting/Mendelsohn] |
| Full Idea: Kant denied that 'exists' was a predicate that enlarged the concept; he never denied that it was a predicate. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by M Fitting/R Mendelsohn - First-Order Modal Logic 8.4 |
| 8451 | Existence is merely derived from the word 'is' (rather than being a predicate) [Kant, by Orenstein] |
| Full Idea: For Kant, existence derives from a true affirmative subject-copula-predicate judgement; existence is not a real predicate, but is merely derivatively implied by the copula ('is'). | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Alex Orenstein - W.V. Quine Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: This is Kant's understanding of 'existence is not a predicate', prior to the later move of Brentano and Frege, which places existence claims in the quantifier, which is outside the proposition. |
| 3321 | Modern logic says (with Kant) that existence is not a predicate, because it has been reclassified as a quantifier [Benardete,JA on Kant] |
| Full Idea: Kant's famous critique of the Ontological Argument that existence is not a predicate leaves one perplexed as to what it might be, but modern logic says that existence is a quantifier, not a predicate. | |
| From: comment on Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.10 | |
| A reaction: See McGinn's criticism of this in Idea 6062. |
| 5608 | Is "This thing exists" analytic or synthetic? [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Is the proposition "This or that thing exists" an analytic or a synthetic proposition? | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B625/A597) | |
| A reaction: Quine's challenge to the analytic/synthetic distinction (e.g. Idea 1626) may spoil this question, but it seems fine ask whether we are talking about words or facts here. Once this question is asked, the Ontological Argument is in trouble. |
| 5609 | If 'this exists' is analytic, either the thing is a thought, or you have presupposed its existence [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If the proposition 'this thing exists' is analytic, ..then either the thought is the thing, or else you have presupposed the existence and then inferred it, which is just a miserable tautology. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B625/A597) | |
| A reaction: I love the phrase "miserable tautology"! A possible strategy is to treat God as a self-evident a priori axiom. This would not be a tautology, but it would make evidence irrelevant. This may be the strategy behind Kierkegaard's 'leap of faith'. |
| 5610 | If an existential proposition is synthetic, you must be able to cancel its predicate without contradiction [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If you concede that every existential proposition is synthetic, then how would you assert that the predicate of existence may not be cancelled without contradictions? | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B626/A598) | |
| A reaction: The point is that the Ontological Argument claims that "God does not exist" is a contradiction. Kant is echoing Hume here. The proposition that 'nothing exists' hardly sounds like a logical impossibility |
| 5611 | Being is not a real predicate, that adds something to a concept [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Being is obviously not a real predicate, i.e. a concept of something that could add to the concept of a thing. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B626/A598) | |
| A reaction: Kant's famous slogan against the Ontological Argument. The modern line is that existence is a quantifier, which stands outside a proposition, and says whether it applies to anything. It is worth considering the possibility that Kant is wrong. |
| 5612 | You add nothing to the concept of God or coins if you say they exist [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If I take God together with all his predicates (among which omnipotence belongs), and say 'God is', then I add no new predicate to the concept of God. ..A hundred actual thalers do not contain the least bit more than a hundred possible ones. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B627/A599) | |
| A reaction: Norman Malcolm claims that 'necessary existence' adds something to a concept. We can compare a concept with and without contingent existence, but the comparison is void if the existence is necessary. I love Kant's objection, though. |
| 5598 | If you prove God cosmologically, by a regress in the sequences of causes, you can't abandon causes at the end [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If one begins the proof cosmologically, by grounding it on the series of appearances and the regress in this series in accordance with empirical causal laws, one cannot later shift from this and go over to something which does not belong to the series | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B484/A456) | |
| A reaction: Badly expressed, but it is the idea that if you start from 'everything has a cause', you can't use it to prove the existence of an uncaused entity. Better to say: an uncaused entity is the only explanation we can imagine for a causal sequence. |