Combining Texts

Ideas for 'works', 'Commentary on Sentences' and 'fragments/reports'

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6 ideas

9. Objects / A. Existence of Objects / 6. Nihilism about Objects
Everything gives way, and nothing stands fast [Heraclitus]
     Full Idea: Everything gives way, and nothing stands fast.
     From: Heraclitus (fragments/reports [c.500 BCE]), quoted by Plato - Cratylus 402a
     A reaction: This is as good a summary of the Heraclitus view of things as any, and Plato appears to present it as a verbatim quotation.
9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 3. Unity Problems / e. Vague objects
A mixed drink separates if it is not stirred [Heraclitus]
     Full Idea: The mixed drink, of wine, cheese and barley, separates if it is not stirred.
     From: Heraclitus (fragments/reports [c.500 BCE], B125)
     A reaction: Wiggins quotes this, because it seems to be Heraclitus struggling to decide what sortal his drink falls under. I take it to be a problem of vagueness, since separation and mixing occur along a continuum, like a sorites.
9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 13. Nominal Essence
If you remove the accidents from a horse and a lion, the intellect can't tell them apart [Francis of Marchia]
     Full Idea: Let all accidents be removed from a lion and a horse. Nothing remains in the intellect to distinguish them. We distinguish a lion and a horse only by analogy to the accidents proper to each. The intellect does not have an essential concept of either one.
     From: Francis of Marchia (Commentary on Sentences [1330], I.3.1), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 07.3
     A reaction: What a very nice thought experiment, and very convincing about how the mind perceives such things. But we don't believe horse and lion just consists of the surface properties of them which we experience.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 8. Continuity of Rivers
It is not possible to step twice into the same river [Heraclitus]
     Full Idea: It is not possible to step twice into the same river.
     From: Heraclitus (fragments/reports [c.500 BCE], B091), quoted by Plutarch - 24: The E at Delphi 392b10-
You can bathe in the same river twice, but not in the same river stage [Quine on Heraclitus]
     Full Idea: You can bathe in the same river twice, but not in the same river stage.
     From: comment on Heraclitus (fragments/reports [c.500 BCE]) by Willard Quine - Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis 1
     A reaction: This seems to make Quine a 'perdurantist', committed to time-slices of objects, rather than whole objects enduring through change.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 13. No Identity over Time
If flux is continuous, then lack of change can't be a property, so everything changes in every possible way [Plato on Heraclitus]
     Full Idea: According to Heracliteans, since things must be changing, and since lack of change can't be a property of anything, then everything is always undergoing change of every kind.
     From: comment on Heraclitus (fragments/reports [c.500 BCE], B030) by Plato - Theaetetus 182a