25 ideas
| 1564 | True and false statements can use exactly the same words [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: There is no difference between a true statement and a false statement, because they can use exactly the same words. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §4) |
| 17486 | Supervenience is simply modally robust property co-variance [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience is not an ontological relationship, being just modally robust property co-variance. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Ontol') | |
| A reaction: I take supervenience to be nothing more than an interesting phenomenon that requires explanation. I suppose Humean Supervenience is a priori metaphysics, since you could hardly explain it. |
| 1561 | Anything can be acceptable in some circumstances and unacceptable in others [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: Anything can be acceptable under the right circumstances, and unacceptable under the wrong circumstances. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §2) |
| 1559 | Thracians think tattooing adds to a girl's beauty, but elsewhere it is a punishment [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: Thracians think that tattooing enhances a girl's beauty, whereas for everyone else tattooing is a punishment for a crime. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §2) |
| 1560 | Lydians prostitute their daughters to raise a dowery, but no Greek would marry such a girl [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: The Lydians find it acceptable for their daughters to work as prostitutes to raise money for getting married, but no one in Greece would be prepared to marry such a girl. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §2) |
| 19594 | General statements about nature are not valid [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: General statements are not valid in the study of nature. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 17) | |
| A reaction: This is his striking obsession with the particularity and fine detail of nature. Alexander von Humbolt was exploring nature in S.America in this year. It sounds wrong about physics, but possibly right about biology. |
| 17481 | Nuclear charge (plus laws) explains electron structure and spectrum, but not vice versa [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: Given relevant laws of nature (quantum mechanics, the exclusion principle) nuclear charge determines and explains electronic structure and spectroscopic behaviour, but not vice versa. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: I argue that the first necessary condition for essentialism is a direction of explanation, and here we seem to have one. |
| 19596 | The whole body is involved in the formation of thoughts [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: In the formation of thoughts all parts of the body seem to me to be working together. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 20) | |
| A reaction: I can only think that Spinoza must be behind this thought, or La Mettrie. It seems a strikingly unusual intuition for its time, when almost everyone takes a spiritual sort of dualism for granted. |
| 1567 | How could someone who knows everything fail to act correctly? [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: If someone knows the nature of everything, how could he fail to be able also to act correctly in every case? | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §8) |
| 1563 | Every apparent crime can be right in certain circumstances [Anon (Diss), by PG] |
| Full Idea: It can be right, in certain circumstances, to steal, to break a solemn promise, to rob temples, and even (as Orestes did) to murder one's nearest and dearest. | |
| From: report of Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §3) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: Not sure about the last one! I suppose you can justify any hideousness if the fate of the universe depends on it. It must be better to die than the perform certain extreme deeds. |
| 1562 | It is right to lie to someone, to get them to take medicine they are reluctant to take [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: It is right to lie to your parents, in order to get them to take a good medicine they are reluctant to take. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §3) | |
| A reaction: I dread to think what the medicines were which convinced the writer of this. A rule such as this strikes me as dangerous. Justifiable in extreme cases. House on fire etc. |
| 1566 | The first priority in elections is to vote for people who support democracy [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: A lottery is not democratic, because every state contains people who are not democratic, and if the lottery chooses them they will destroy the democracy. People should elect those who are observed to favour democracy. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §7) |
| 1565 | We learn language, and we don't know who teaches us it [Anon (Diss)] |
| Full Idea: We learn language, and we don't know who teaches us it. | |
| From: Anon (Diss) (Dissoi Logoi - on Double Arguments [c.401 BCE], §6) |
| 19593 | Persons are shaped by a life history; splendid persons are shaped by world history [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: What is it that shapes a person if not his life history? And in the same way a splendid person is shaped by nothing other than world history. Many people live better in the past and in the future than in the present. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 15) | |
| A reaction: Clearly there is a lot to be said for splendid people who live entirely in the present (such as jazz musicians). Some people do have an awesomely wide historical perspective on their immediate lives. Palaeontology is not the master discipline though! |
| 19595 | Nature is a whole, and its individual parts cannot be wholly understood [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Nature is a whole - in which each part in itself can never be wholly understood. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 18) | |
| A reaction: This doesn't seem right when studying some item in a laboratory, but it seems undeniable when you consider the history and future of each item. |
| 19592 | The basic relations of nature are musical [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Musical relations seem to me to be actually the basic relations of nature. | |
| From: Novalis (Last Fragments [1800], 10) | |
| A reaction: Novalis shows no signs of being a pythagorean, and then suddenly comes out with this. I suppose if you love music, this thought should float into your mind at regular intervals, because the power of music is so strong. Does he mean ratios? |
| 17478 | Maybe two kinds are the same if there is no change of entropy on isothermal mixing [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: One suggestion is that any two different substance, however alike, exhibit a positive entropy change on mixing. So absence of entropy change on isothermal mixing provides a criterion of sameness of kind. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: [He cites Paul Needham 2000] This sounds nice, because at a more amateur level we can say that stuff is the same if mixing two samples of it produces no difference. I call it the Upanishads Test. |
| 17479 | The nature of an element must survive chemical change, so it is the nucleus, not the electrons [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: Whatever earns something membership of the extension of 'krypton' must be a property that can survive chemical change and, therefore, the gain and loss of electrons. Hence what makes it krypton must be a nuclear property. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: A very nice illuminating example of essentialism in chemistry. The 'nature' is what survives through change, just like what Aristotle said, innit? |
| 17484 | Maybe the nature of water is macroscopic, and not in the microstructure [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: Some deny that that microstructure is what makes it water; substance identity and difference should be determined instead by macroscopic similarities and differences. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: Very plausible. Is the essential nature of human beings to be found in the structure of our cells? |
| 17485 | Maybe water is the smallest part of it that still counts as water (which is H2O molecules) [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: If they do count as water, individual H2O molecules are the smallest items that can qualify as water on their own account. Hydroxyl ions and protons, in contrast, qualify as water only as part of a larger body. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: As Aristotle might say, this is the homoeomerous aspect of water. This is Hendry's own proposal, and seems rather good. |
| 17483 | Water continuously changes, with new groupings of molecules [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: Macroscopic bodies of water are complex and dynamic congeries of different molecular species, in which there is a constant dissociation of individual molecules, re-association of ions, and formation, growth and disassociation of oligomers. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: The point is that these activities are needed to explain the behaviour of water (such as its conductivity). |
| 17482 | Compounds can differ with the same collection of atoms, so structure matters too [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: The distinctness of the isomers ethanol (CH3CH2OH, boiling at 78.4°) and dimethyl ether (CH3OCH3, boiling at -24.9°) must lie in their different molecular structures. ...But structure has continuously varying quantities, like bond length and angle. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems to imply that what matters is an idealised abstraction of the structure (i.e. its topology), which is a reason for denying that chemistry is reducible to mere physics. |
| 17477 | Defining elements by atomic number allowed atoms of an element to have different masses [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: In 1923 elements were defined as populations of atoms with the same nuclear charge (i.e. atomic number), allowing that atoms of the same element may have different masses. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Chem') | |
| A reaction: The point is that it allowed isotopes of the same element to come under one heading. This is fine for the heavier elements, but a bit dubious for the very light ones (where an isotope makes a bigger difference). |
| 17476 | Elements survive chemical change, and are tracked to explain direction and properties [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: Elements survive chemical change, and chemical explanations track them from one composite substance to another, thereby explaining both the direction of the chemical change, and the properties of the substances they compose. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], Intro) | |
| A reaction: [The 16,000th idea of this database, entered on Guy Fawkes' Day 2013] |
| 17480 | Generally it is nuclear charge (not nuclear mass) which determines behaviour [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: In general, nuclear charge is the overwhelming determinant of an element's chemical behaviour, while nuclear mass is a negligible factor. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: The exception is the isotopes of very light elements light hydrogen. |