display all the ideas for this combination of texts
18 ideas
| 14028 | Nothing comes to be from what doesn't exist [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: Nothing comes into being from what is not. | |
| From: Epicurus (Letter to Herodotus [c.293 BCE], 38) | |
| A reaction: King Lear puts it better: Nothing will come of nothing [1.i]. There seems to be an underlying assumption that coming into being out of nothing is much weirder than just existing, but I am not convinced about that. It's all equally weird. |
| 14029 | If disappearing things went to nothingness, nothing could return, and it would all be gone by now [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: If that which disappears were destroyed into what is not, all things would have been destroyed, since that into which they were dissolved does not exist. | |
| From: Epicurus (Letter to Herodotus [c.293 BCE], 39) | |
| A reaction: This follows on from Idea 14028. Theologians will immediately spot that this is the underlying principle cited by Aquinas in his Third Way for proving God's existence (Idea 1431). |
| 4475 | Saying a thing 'is' adds nothing to it - otherwise if my concept exists, it isn't the same as my concept [Kant] |
| Full Idea: We do not make the least addition to a thing when we declare the thing 'is'. Otherwise it would not be exactly the same thing that exists, but something more than we had thought in the concept, so we could not say the exact object of my concept exists. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B628/A600) | |
| A reaction: This still strikes me as a wonderful objection to the ontological argument for God. It raises the question of what 'is' does mean. Is it a 'quantifier'? What is the ontological status of a quantifier? |
| 14948 | To be is to be a real pattern [Ladyman/Ross] |
| Full Idea: To be is to be a real pattern. ....Real patterns carry information about other real patterns. ...It's patterns all the way down. | |
| From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 4.4) | |
| A reaction: I've plucked these bleeding from context, but they are obviously intended as slogans. Is there pattern 'inside' an electron? Are electrons all exterior? |
| 14942 | Only admit into ontology what is explanatory and predictive [Ladyman/Ross] |
| Full Idea: We reject any grounds other than explanatory and predictive utility for admitting something into our ontology. | |
| From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 3.7.3) | |
| A reaction: Now you are talking. This is something like my thesis (which I take to be Aristotelian) - that without the drive for explanation we wouldn't even think of metaphysics, and so metaphysics should be understood in that light. |
| 14030 | The totality is complete, so there is no room for it to change, and nothing extraneous to change it [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: The totality of things has always been just like it is now and always will be. For there is nothing for it to change into. For there exists nothing in addition to the totality, which could enter into it and produce the change. | |
| From: Epicurus (Letter to Herodotus [c.293 BCE], 39) | |
| A reaction: This smacks of the sort of dubious arguments that the medieval theologians fell in love with. I never thought I'd say this, but I think Epicurus needs a comprehensive course in set theory before he makes remarks like this. |
| 14947 | Any process can be described as transfer of measurable information [Ladyman/Ross] |
| Full Idea: Reference to transfer of some (in principle) quantitatively measurable information is a highly general way of describing any process. | |
| From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 4.3) | |
| A reaction: That does not, of course, mean that that is what a process is. A waterfall is an archetypal process, but it is a bit more than a bunch of information. Actually its complexity may place its information beyond measurement. |
| 14941 | We say there is no fundamental level to ontology, and reality is just patterns [Ladyman/Ross] |
| Full Idea: The tentative metaphysical hypothesis of this book, which is open to empirical falsification, is that there is no fundamental level, that the real patterns criterion of reality is the last word in ontology. | |
| From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 3.7.3) | |
| A reaction: I wouldn't hold your breath waiting for the empirical falsification to arrive (or vanish). Their commitment to real patterns (or structures) leaves me a bit baffled. |
| 10493 | If concrete is spatio-temporal and causal, and abstract isn't, the distinction doesn't suit physics [Ladyman/Ross] |
| Full Idea: It is said that concrete objects have causal powers while abstract ones do not, or that concrete objects exist in space and time while abstract ones do not, but these categories seem crude and inappropriate for modern physics. | |
| From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 3.6) | |
| A reaction: I don't find this convincing. He gives example of peculiar causation, but I don't believe modern physics proposes any entities which are totally acausal and non-spatiotemporal. Maybe the distinction needs a defence. |
| 14934 | Concrete and abstract are too crude for modern physics [Ladyman/Ross] |
| Full Idea: The categories of concrete and abstract seem crude and inappropriate for modern physics. | |
| From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 3.6) | |
| A reaction: They don't persuade me of this idea. At some point physicists need to decide the ontological status of the basic stuffs they are investigating. I'll give them a thousand years, and then I want an answer. Do they only deal in 'ideal' entities? |
| 7416 | Kant is read as the phenomena being 'contrained' by the noumenon, or 'free-floating' [Talbot on Kant] |
| Full Idea: The two readings of Kant depend on whether the world of phenomena is 'constrained' by the noumenon, or whether it is 'free-floating'. | |
| From: comment on Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Marianne Talbot - talk | |
| A reaction: The free-floating reading leads to idealism, since the noumenon then becomes a quite irrelevant part of Kant's theory, and can be dropped (since its existence means nothing if it has no causal role). On the first reading, constraint becomes interesting. |
| 19386 | Without the subject or the senses, space and time vanish, as their appearances disappear [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If we remove our own subject or even ....the senses in general, then all the constitution, all relations of objects in space and time, indeed space and time themselves would disappear, and as appearances they cannot exist in themselves, but only in us. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B059/A42) | |
| A reaction: This is as clear a statement of anti-realist idealism as I have ever found in Kant. You can interpret him as a thorough scientific realist, but you have to put a tricky spin on passages like this. Or maybe only the 'appearances' of space and time vanish? |
| 21445 | Even the most perfect intuition gets no closer to things in themselves [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Even if we could bring this intuition of ours to the highest degree of distinctiveness we would not thereby come any closer to the constitution of objects in themselves. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B060/A43) | |
| A reaction: Either slightly ridiculous anti-realism, or a self-evident platitude. Personally I think I know the reality of trees pretty well, but to totally embrace their constitution I would have to become a tree (an Ent). My experience of me is only partial. |
| 14048 | Astronomical movements are blessed, but they don't need the help of the gods [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: Movements, turnings, risings, settings, and related phenomena occur without any god helping out and ordaining or being about to ordain things, and at the same time have complete blessedness and indestructibility. | |
| From: Epicurus (Letter to Herodotus [c.293 BCE], 76) | |
| A reaction: Epicurus is sometimes accused of atheism for remarks like these, but he is always trying to show piety in his attitudes. We might now call this attitude 'deism' (see alphabetical themes). |
| 14909 | Physicalism is 'part-whole' (all parts are physical), or 'supervenience/levels' (dependence on physical) [Ladyman/Ross] |
| Full Idea: There is part-whole physicalism, that everything is exhausted by basic constituents that are themselves physical, or supervenience or levels physicalism, that the putatively non-physical is dependent on the physical. | |
| From: J Ladyman / D Ross (Every Thing Must Go [2007], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: The cite Hüttemann and Papineau 2005. I am not convinced by this distinction. Ladyman and Ross oppose the first one. I'm thinking the second one either collapses into the first one, or it isn't physicalism. Higher levels are abstractions. |
| 21448 | Categories are general concepts of objects, which determine the way in which they are experienced [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The categories are the concepts of an object in general, by means of which its intuition is regarded as determined with regard to one of the logical functions of government. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B128/A95) | |
| A reaction: These are Kant's 'transcendental' categories. I'm wondering what he made of our more normal categories, such as animal species, genera etc. |
| 5554 | Categories are necessary, so can't be implanted in us to agree with natural laws [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If one proposed a middle way, that categories are subjective predispositions for thinking, implanted in us so that their use would agree exactly with the laws of nature,..then the categories would lack the necessity which is essential to their concept. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781], B167) | |
| A reaction: Kant might want to rethink this once he got the hang of the theory of evolution. If we have innate categories, they must have some survival value. I don't understand Kant's claim that the categories are necessary. They just reflect nature. |
| 6160 | Does Kant say the mind imposes categories, or that it restricts us to them? [Rowlands on Kant] |
| Full Idea: It is unclear whether Kant says the mind imposes space and time and categories, such as substance and cause and effect, on empirical objects, or whether our mind restricts our cognition to such features of noumenal objects. Imposition, say the majority. | |
| From: comment on Immanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason [1781]) by Mark Rowlands - Externalism Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: Rowlands says, rightly, that Kant probably thought the mind imposed categories, but that he should have said that it restricts us to them. The imposition view leads to idealism, anti-realism and madness; restriction is common sense, really. |