display all the ideas for this combination of texts
9 ideas
| 8546 | Powers are part of our idea of substances [Locke] |
| Full Idea: Powers make a great part of our complex ideas of substances. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.23.08) | |
| A reaction: This is quoted by Shoemaker, and is very important in modern thinking about properties and causation. I think it is a crucial idea, which got relegated into obscurity by Hume's unnecessarily ruthless empiricism. |
| 1196 | We can conceive of three sorts of substance: God, finite intelligence, and bodies [Locke] |
| Full Idea: We have the ideas but of three sorts of substance; 1. God. 2. Finite intelligence. 3. Bodies. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.27.02) | |
| A reaction: Given Locke's scepticism about our ability to know of substances, this seems a bold claim, and can only really be a report of contemporary culture and language. |
| 12536 | We sort and name substances by nominal and not by real essence [Locke] |
| Full Idea: We sort and name substances by their nominal and not by their real essences. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 3.06.26) |
| 7945 | We think of substance as experienced qualities plus a presumed substratum of support [Locke] |
| Full Idea: Everyone upon inquiry into his thoughts, will find that he has no other idea of any substance, but what he has barely of those sensible qualities, with a supposition of such a substratum as give support to those qualities, which he observes exist united. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.23.06) | |
| A reaction: This is the orginal of the 'substratum' view of substances. The whole problem is captured here, because this is an empiricist trying not to extend his ontology beyond experience, but trying to explain unity, identity and continuity. |
| 12485 | We don't know what substance is, and only vaguely know what it does [Locke] |
| Full Idea: Of substance, we have no idea of what it is, but only a confused obscure one of what it does. | |
| From: John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.13.19) | |
| A reaction: Locke seems to identityf 'substance' with 'real essence', about which he makes similar remarks. He was deeply pessimistic about our ability to unravel how the physical world works. Note that he isn't denying the existence of substance. |
| 16078 | Clay is intrinsically and atomically the same as statue (and that lacks 'modal properties') [Rudder Baker] |
| Full Idea: Arguments for statue being the clay are: that the clay is intrinsically like the statue, that the clay has the same atoms as the statue', that objects don't have modal properties such as being necessarily F, and the reference of 'property' changes. | |
| From: Lynne Rudder Baker (Why Constitution is not Identity [1997], II) | |
| A reaction: [my summary of the arguments she identifies - see text for details] Rudder Baker attempts to refute all four of these arguments, in defence of constitution as different from identity. |
| 16077 | The clay is not a statue - it borrows that property from the statue it constitutes [Rudder Baker] |
| Full Idea: I argue that a lump of clay borrows the property of being a statue from the statue. The lump is a statue because, and only because, there is something that the lump constitutes that is a statue. | |
| From: Lynne Rudder Baker (Why Constitution is not Identity [1997], n9) | |
| A reaction: It is skating on very thin metaphysical ice to introduce the concept of 'borrowing' a property. I've spent the last ten minutes trying to 'borrow' some properties, but without luck. |
| 16796 | Locke may accept coinciding material substances, such as body, man and person [Locke, by Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The most popular reading of Locke is that he endorses multiple, coinciding, material substances. In a human being, for example, there would be a body, a man and a person. | |
| From: report of John Locke (Essay Conc Human Understanding (2nd Ed) [1694], 2.27) by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 30.4 | |
| A reaction: Since he says that substances can only coincide if they are of different types then this may be a misreading, as Pasnau implies. |
| 16080 | Is it possible for two things that are identical to become two separate things? [Rudder Baker] |
| Full Idea: A strong intuition shared by many philosophers is that some things that are in fact identical might not have been identical. | |
| From: Lynne Rudder Baker (Why Constitution is not Identity [1997], IV) | |
| A reaction: This flies in the face of the Kripkean view that if Hesperus=Phosphorus then the identity is necessary. I don't think I have an intuition that some given thing might have been two things - indeed the thought seems totally weird. Amoeba? Statue/clay? |