15 ideas
| 16052 | 'Superdupervenience' is supervenience that has a robustly materialistic explanation [Horgan,T] |
| Full Idea: The idea of a ontological supervenience that is robustly explainable in a materialistically explainable way I hereby dub 'superdupervenience'. | |
| From: Terence Horgan (From Supervenience to Superdupervenience [1993], §4) | |
| A reaction: [He credits William Lycan with the actual word] His assumption prior to this introduction is that mere supervenience just adds a new mystery. I take supervenience to be an observation of 'tracking', which presumably needs to be explained. |
| 16053 | 'Global' supervenience is facts tracking varying physical facts in every possible world [Horgan,T] |
| Full Idea: The idea of 'global supervenience' is standardly expressed as 'there are no two physically possible worlds which are exactly alike in all physical respects but different in some other respect'. | |
| From: Terence Horgan (From Supervenience to Superdupervenience [1993], §5) | |
| A reaction: [Jaegwon Kim is the source of this concept] The 'local' view will be that they do indeed track, but they could, in principle, come apart. A zombie might be a case of them possibly coming apart. Zombies are silly. |
| 16056 | Don't just observe supervenience - explain it! [Horgan,T] |
| Full Idea: Although the task of explaining supervenience has been little appreciated and little discussed in the philosophical literature, it is time for that to change. | |
| From: Terence Horgan (From Supervenience to Superdupervenience [1993], §8) | |
| A reaction: I would offer a strong addition to this: be absolutely sure that you are dealing with two distinct things in the supervenience relationship, before you waste time trying to explain how they relate to one another. |
| 16054 | Physicalism needs more than global supervenience on the physical [Horgan,T] |
| Full Idea: Global supervenience seems too weak to capture the physical facts determining all the facts. …There could be two spatio-temporal regions alike in all physical respects, but different in some intrinsic non-physical respect. | |
| From: Terence Horgan (From Supervenience to Superdupervenience [1993], §5) | |
| A reaction: I.e. there might be two physically identical regions, but one contains angels and the other doesn't (so the extra fact isn't tracking the physical facts). Physicalism I take to be the simple denial of the angels. Supervenience is an explanandum. |
| 16055 | Materialism requires that physics be causally complete [Horgan,T] |
| Full Idea: Any broadly materialistic metaphysical position needs to claim that physics is causally complete. | |
| From: Terence Horgan (From Supervenience to Superdupervenience [1993], §6) | |
| A reaction: Since 'physics' is a human creation, I presume he means that physical reality is causally complete. The interaction problem that faced Descartes seems crucial - how could something utterly non-physical effect a physical change? |
| 22049 | Transcendental idealism aims to explain objectivity through subjectivity [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: The aim of transcendental idealism is to give a basis for objectivity in terms of subjectivity. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 1) | |
| A reaction: Hume used subjectivity to undermine the findings of objectivity. There was then no return to naive objectivity. Kant's aim then was to thwart global scepticism. Post-Kantians feared that he had failed. |
| 22055 | The Idealists saw the same unexplained spontaneity in Kant's judgements and choices [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: The Idealist saw in Kant that knowledge, which depends on the spontaneity of judgement, and self-determined spontaneous action, can be seen as sharing the same source, which is not accessible to scientific investigation. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010]) | |
| A reaction: This is the 'spontaneity' of judgements and choices which was seen as the main idea in Kant. It inspired romantic individualism. The judgements are the rule-based application of concepts. |
| 22054 | German Idealism tried to stop oppositions of appearances/things and receptivity/spontaneity [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: A central aim of German Idealism is to overcome Kant's oppositions between appearances and thing in themselves, and between receptivity and spontaneity. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 2) | |
| A reaction: I have the impression that there were two strategies: break down the opposition within the self (Fichte), or break down the opposition in the world (Spinozism). |
| 22056 | Crucial to Idealism is the idea of continuity between receptivity and spontaneous judgement [Bowie] |
| Full Idea: A crucial idea for German Idealism (from Hamann) is that apparently passive receptivity and active spontaneity are in fact different degrees of the same 'activity, and the gap between subject and world can be closed. | |
| From: Andrew Bowie (German Philosophy: a very short introduction [2010], 3) | |
| A reaction: The 'passive' bit seems to be Hume's 'impressions', which are Kant's 'intuitions', which need 'spontaneous' interpretation to become experiences. Critics of Kant said this implied a dualism. |
| 16057 | Instrumentalism normally says some discourse is useful, but not genuinely true [Horgan,T] |
| Full Idea: Instrumentalist views typically attribute utility to the given body of discourse, but deny that it expresses genuine truths. | |
| From: Terence Horgan (From Supervenience to Superdupervenience [1993], §8) | |
| A reaction: To me it is obvious to ask why anything could have a high level of utility (especially in accounts of the external physical world) without being true. Falsehoods may sometimes (though I doubt it) be handy in human life, but useful in chemistry…? |
| 22445 | Morality shows murder is wrong, but not what counts as a murder [Foot] |
| Full Idea: While one can determine from the concept of morality that there is an objection to murder one cannot determine completely what will count as murder. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Morality and Art [1972], p.7) | |
| A reaction: She then refers to abortion, but there are military and criminal problem cases, and killings by neglect or side effect. |
| 22444 | A moral system must deal with the dangers and benefits of life [Foot] |
| Full Idea: A moral system seems necessarily to be one aimed at removing particular dangers and securing certain benefits. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Morality and Art [1972], p.6) | |
| A reaction: I thoroughly approve of this approach to morality, which anchors it in real life, rather than in ideals or principles of reason. |
| 22447 | Saying something 'just is' right or wrong creates an illusion of fact and objectivity [Foot] |
| Full Idea: When we say that something 'just is' right or wrong we want to give the impression of some kind of fact or authority standing behind our words, ...maintaining the trappings of objectivity though the substance is not there. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Morality and Art [1972], p.9) | |
| A reaction: Foot favours the idea that such a claim must depend on reasons, and that the reasons arise out of actual living. She's right. |
| 22448 | We sometimes just use the word 'should' to impose a rule of conduct on someone [Foot] |
| Full Idea: It would be more honest to recognise that the 'should' of moral judgement is sometimes merely an instrument by which we (for our own very good reasons) try to impose a rule of conduct even on the uncaring man? | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Morality and Art [1972], p.18) | |
| A reaction: This is a good example, I think, of the ordinary language tradition that Foot grew up in. We load a word like 'should' with a mystical power, but the situations in which it is actually used bring us back down to earth. |
| 22446 | In the case of something lacking independence, calling it a human being is a matter of choice [Foot] |
| Full Idea: In the problem of abortion there is a genuine choice as to whether or not to count as a human being, with the rights of a human being, what would become a human being but is not yet capable of independent life. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Morality and Art [1972], p.7) | |
| A reaction: There must be some basis for the choice. We can't call a dead person a human being. Choosing to call a tiny zygote a human being seems very implausible. Pre-viability strikes me as implausible. |