display all the ideas for this combination of texts
4 ideas
21495 | Theoretical and practical politics are both concerned with the best lives for individuals [Russell] |
Full Idea: Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life. The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible. | |
From: Bertrand Russell (Political Ideals [1917], 1) | |
A reaction: Russell floats between socialism and anarchism, but this foundational remark is classic liberalism. |
8078 | Modus ponens is one of five inference rules identified by the Stoics [Chrysippus, by Devlin] |
Full Idea: Modus ponens is just one of the five different inference rules identified by the Stoics. | |
From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Keith Devlin - Goodbye Descartes Ch.2 | |
A reaction: Modus ponens strikes me as being more like a definition of implication than a 'rule'. Implication is what gets you from one truth to another. All the implications of a truth must also be true. |
6023 | Every proposition is either true or false [Chrysippus, by Cicero] |
Full Idea: We hold fast to the position, defended by Chrysippus, that every proposition is either true or false. | |
From: report of Chrysippus (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - On Fate ('De fato') 38 | |
A reaction: I am intrigued to know exactly how you defend this claim. It may depend what you mean by a proposition. A badly expressed proposition may have indeterminate truth, quite apart from the vague, the undecidable etc. |
10800 | The values of variables can't determine existence, because they are just expressions [Ryle, by Quine] |
Full Idea: Ryle objected somewhere to my dictum that 'to be is to be the value of a variable', arguing that the values of variables are expressions, and hence that my dictum repudiates all things except expressions. | |
From: report of Gilbert Ryle (works [1950]) by Willard Quine - Reply to Professor Marcus p.183 | |
A reaction: I have a lot of sympathy with Ryle's view, and I associate it with the peculiar Millian view that we can somehow replace a name in a sentence with the actual physical object. Objects can't be parts of sentences - and maybe they can't be 'values'. |