Combining Texts

Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Matter and Motion Cannot Think' and 'Leviathan'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     choose another area for these texts

display all the ideas for this combination of texts


4 ideas

29. Religion / D. Religious Issues / 1. Religious Commitment / a. Religious Belief
Religion is built on ignorance and misinterpretation of what is unknown or frightening [Hobbes]
     Full Idea: In these four things - opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seed of religion.
     From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.12)
29. Religion / D. Religious Issues / 2. Immortality / a. Immortality
Belief in an afterlife is based on poorly founded gossip [Hobbes]
     Full Idea: Knowledge of man's estate after death, and its rewards, is a belief grounded upon other men's sayings that they knew it supernaturally, or they knew those, that knew those, that knew others, that knew it supernaturally.
     From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.15)
29. Religion / D. Religious Issues / 2. Immortality / b. Soul
Death can't separate soul from body, because incorporeal soul can't unite with body [Chrysippus]
     Full Idea: Death is a separation of soul from body. But nothing incorporeal can be separated from a body. For neither does anything incorporeal touch a body, and the soul touches and is separated from the body. Therefore the soul is not incorporeal.
     From: Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]), quoted by Tertullian - The Soul as an 'Astral Body' 5.3
     A reaction: This is the classic interaction difficulty for substance dualist theories of mind.
29. Religion / D. Religious Issues / 3. Problem of Evil / d. Natural Evil
There is a rationale in terrible disasters; they are useful to the whole, and make good possible [Chrysippus]
     Full Idea: The evil which occurs in terrible disasters has a rationale [logos] peculiar to itself: for in a sense it occurs in accordance with universal reason, and is not without usefulness in relation to the whole. For without it there could be no good.
     From: Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]), quoted by A.A. Long - Hellenistic Philosophy 4.4.5
     A reaction: [a quotation from Chrysippus. Plutarch, Comm Not 1065b] A nice question about any terrible disaster is whether it is in some way 'useful', if we take a broader view of things. Almost everything has a good aspect, from that perspective.