Combining Texts

Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'The Scientific Image' and 'De Corpore (Elements, First Section)'

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

display all the ideas for this combination of texts

4 ideas

8. Modes of Existence / B. Properties / 8. Properties as Modes
16670 Accidents are just modes of thinking about bodies [Hobbes]
     Full Idea: An accident is a mode of conceiving a body.
     From: Thomas Hobbes (De Corpore (Elements, First Section) [1655], 2.08.02)
     A reaction: In contrast to the other thinkers who followed Suárez on modes in the early 17th century, Hobbes thinks they are just ways of 'conceiving' bodies, rather than actual features of them.
8. Modes of Existence / B. Properties / 12. Denial of Properties
16621 Accidents are not parts of bodies (like blood in a cloth); they have accidents as things have a size [Hobbes]
     Full Idea: An accident's being in a body is not to be taken as something contained in that body - as if redness were in blood like blood in a bloody cloth, as part of the whole, for then accident would be a body. It is like body having size or rest or movement.
     From: Thomas Hobbes (De Corpore (Elements, First Section) [1655], 2.08.03)
     A reaction: [compressed] Hobbes is fishing for something like the Quinean view of properties, but no one seems to be able to articulate this sceptical view very well. Pasnau says he means to talk of 'the mode of conceiving a body' (De C 8.2).
8. Modes of Existence / C. Powers and Dispositions / 3. Powers as Derived
16734 The complete power of an event is just the aggregate of the qualities that produced it [Hobbes]
     Full Idea: The power of agent and patient taken together, which may be called the complete power, is the same as the complete cause, for each consists in the aggregation together of all the accidents that are required to produce an effect in both agent and patient.
     From: Thomas Hobbes (De Corpore (Elements, First Section) [1655], 2.10.01)
     A reaction: They treat powers as macro phenomena, and don't seem to have a sense of the basic powers that build up the big picture.
8. Modes of Existence / E. Nominalism / 1. Nominalism / b. Nominalism about universals
17247 The only generalities or universals are names or signs [Hobbes]
     Full Idea: Nothing is general or universal besides names or signs.
     From: Thomas Hobbes (De Corpore (Elements, First Section) [1655], 2.08.05)
     A reaction: This is the perfect motto for nominalists, among which I am inclined to include myself. Hobbes had a fabulous gift for economy of phrasing. This website is dedicated to that ideal. Reality does not contain generalities (obviously!!).