6 ideas
| 21354 | It may be that internal relations like proportion exist, because we directly perceive it [MacBride] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers maintain that we literally perceive proportions and other internal relations. These relations must exist, otherwise we couldn't perceive them. | |
| From: Fraser MacBride (Relations [2016], 3) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Mulligan 1991, and Hochberg 2013:232] This seems a rather good point. You can't perceive the differing heights of two people, yet fail to perceive that one is taller. You also perceive 'below', which is external. |
| 21353 | Internal relations are fixed by existences, or characters, or supervenience on characters [MacBride] |
| Full Idea: Internal relations are determined either by the mere existence of the things they relate, or by their intrinsic characters, or they supervene on the intrinsic characters of the things they relate. | |
| From: Fraser MacBride (Relations [2016], 3) | |
| A reaction: Suggesting that they 'supervene' doesn't explain anything (and supervenience never explains anything). I vote for the middle one - the intrinsic character. It has to be something about the existence, and not the mere fact of existence. |
| 21352 | 'Multigrade' relations are those lacking a fixed number of relata [MacBride] |
| Full Idea: A 'unigrade' relation R has a definite degree or adicity: R is binary, or ternary....or n-ary (for some unique n). By contrast a relation is 'multigrade' if it fails to be unigrade. Causation appears to be multigrade. | |
| From: Fraser MacBride (Relations [2016], 1) | |
| A reaction: He also cites entailment, which may have any number of premises. |
| 12185 | Logical necessity is epistemic necessity, which is the old notion of a priori [Edgington, by McFetridge] |
| Full Idea: Edgington's position is that logical necessity is an epistemic notion: epistemic necessity which, she claims, is the old notion of the a priori. Like Kripke, she thinks this is two-way independent of metaphysical necessity. | |
| From: report of Dorothy Edgington (Epistemic and Metaphysical Possibility [1985]) by Ian McFetridge - Logical Necessity: Some Issues §1 | |
| A reaction: [her paper was unpublished] She hence thinks an argument can be logically valid, while metaphysically its conclusion may not follow. Dubious, though I think I favour the view that logical necessity is underwritten by metaphysical necessity. |
| 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. |