8 ideas
| 21336 | Crates lived in poverty, and treated his whole life as a joke [Crates of Thebes, by Plutarch] |
| Full Idea: Crates, with his bag and threadbare cloak, spent his whole life laughing and joking as though he were on holiday. | |
| From: report of Crates (Theb) (fragments/reports [c.325 BCE]) by Plutarch - 30: Quiet of Mind 266e | |
| A reaction: Crates sounds a little less alarming than Diogenes, while living a similar life. Was Crates the first ancestor of post-modernism? |
| 1767 | Everyone should study philosophy until they see all people in the same light [Crates of Thebes, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: A man should study philosophy up to the point of looking on generals and donkey-drivers in the same light. | |
| From: report of Crates (Theb) (fragments/reports [c.325 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 06.Cr.9 | |
| A reaction: This seems to reject Aristote's idea that some people are clearly superior to others. |
| 12801 | Coherentists seek relations among beliefs that are simple, conservative and explanatory [Foley] |
| Full Idea: Coherentists try to provide an explication of epistemic rationality in terms of a set of deductive and probabilistic relations among beliefs and properties such as simplicity, conservativeness, and explanatory power. | |
| From: Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.317) | |
| A reaction: I have always like the coherentist view of justification, and now I see that this has led me to the question of explanation, which in turn has led me to essentialism. It's all coming together. Watch this space. 'Explanatory' is the key to everything! |
| 12800 | Externalists want to understand knowledge, Internalists want to understand justification [Foley] |
| Full Idea: Externalists are principally interested in understanding what knowledge is, ..while internalists, by contrast, are principally interested in explicating a sense of justification ..from one's own perspective. | |
| From: Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.314) | |
| A reaction: I find this very helpful, since I have a strong bias towards internalism (with a social dimension), and I see now that it is because I am more interested in what a (good) justification is than what some entity in reality called 'knowledge' consists of. |
| 12802 | We aren't directly pragmatic about belief, but pragmatic about the deliberation which precedes it [Foley] |
| Full Idea: It is rare for pragmatic considerations to influence the rationality of our beliefs in the crass, direct way that Pascal's Wager envisions. Instead, they determine the direction and shape of our investigative and deliberative projects and practices. | |
| From: Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.320) | |
| A reaction: [See Idea 6684 for Pascal's Wager] Foley is evidently a full-blown pragmatist (which is bad), but this is nicely put. We can't deny the importance of the amount of effort put into an enquiry. Maybe it is an epistemic duty, rather than a means to an end. |
| 12803 | Justification comes from acceptable procedures, given practical constraints [Foley] |
| Full Idea: One justifiably believes a proposition if one has an epistemically rational belief that one's procedures with respect to it have been acceptable, given practical limitations, and one's goals. | |
| From: Richard Foley (Justified Belief as Responsible Belief [2005], p.322) | |
| A reaction: I quite like this, except that it is too individualistic. My goals, and my standards of acceptability decree whether I know? I don't see the relevance of goals; only a pragmatist would mention such a thing. Standards of acceptability are social. |
| 1748 | Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless [Archelaus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.3 |
| 5989 | Archelaus said life began in a primeval slime [Archelaus, by Schofield] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus wrote that life on Earth began in a primeval slime. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Malcolm Schofield - Archelaus | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a fairly clearcut assertion of the production of life by evolution. Darwin's contribution was to propose the mechanism for achieving it. We should honour the name of Archelaus for this idea. |