25 ideas
| 13070 | If definitions must be general, and general terms can't individuate, then Socrates can't be defined [Aquinas, by Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Socrates has no definition if definitions by their nature must be in purely general terms, and if no purely general terms can succeed in uniquely singling out this signated matter. | |
| From: report of Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], 23) by Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J - Substance and Individuation in Leibniz 1.1.2 | |
| A reaction: There seem to be two models. That general terms actually individuate the matter of Socrates, or that they cross-reference to (so to speak) define Socrates 'by elimination', as the only individual that fits. But the latter is a poor definition. |
| 11197 | The definitions expressing identity are used to sort things [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: What sorts things into their proper genus and species are the definitions that express what they are. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.92) | |
| A reaction: This is straight from Aristotle, though Aristotle's view is a little more complex, I think. If the definitions 'express what they are', then definitions seem to specify the essence. |
| 21793 | Genuine truth is the resolution of the highest contradiction [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: The highest truth, truth as such, is the resolution of the highest opposition and contradiction. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics [1826], I: 99), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 09 'Art' | |
| A reaction: Uneasy about the word 'highest', and the general Hegelian dream of 'resolving' contradictions, rather than just eliminating at least one component of them. No one else uses the word 'truth' like this. I suppose this Truth has a capital 'T'. |
| 21795 | What I hold true must also be part of my feelings and character [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Whatever I hold as true, whatever ought to be valid for me, must also be in my feeling, must belong to my being and character. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics [1826], I: 97), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 09 'Philosophy' | |
| A reaction: I can see that truths do tend to become part of our character, but not that they ought to do so. I suppose I try to live my life enmeshed in the many truths which I have personally selected from the maelstrom of possibilities that engulf us. |
| 11195 | If affirmative propositions express being, we affirm about what is absent [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: If being is what makes propositions true, then anything we can express in an affirmative proposition, however unreal, is said to be; so lacks and absences are, since we say that absences are opposed to presences, and blindness exists in an eye. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.92) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 11194 for the alternative Aristotelian approach to being, according to categories. Do absences and lacks have real essences, or causal properties? The absence of the sentry may cause the loss of the city. |
| 11201 | Properties have an incomplete essence, with definitions referring to their subject [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Incidental properties have an incomplete essence, and need to refer in their definitions to their subject, lying outside their own genus. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.93) | |
| A reaction: These are 'incidental' properties, but it is a nice question whether properties have essences. Presumably they must have if they are universals, or platonic Forms. The notion of being 'strong' can be defined without specific examples. |
| 11205 | If the form of 'human' contains 'many', Socrates isn't human; if it contains 'one', Socrates is Plato [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: If (in the Platonic view) manyness was contained in humanness it could never be one as it is in Socrates, and if oneness was part of its definition then Socrates would be Plato and the nature couldn't be realised more than once. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.100) | |
| A reaction: I suppose the reply is that since we are trying to explain one-over-many, then this unusual combination of both manyness and oneness is precisely what distinguishes forms from other ideas. |
| 13090 | The principle of diversity for corporeal substances is their matter [Aquinas, by Cover/O'Leary-Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: In the view of Aquinas, while substantial form is the ultimate ground of identity and difference of angels, it is matter that provides a principle of diversity in the case of corporeal substances. | |
| From: report of Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267]) by Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J - Substance and Individuation in Leibniz 5.2.3 | |
| A reaction: This is at least as good a proposal as their apatial location. There is more chance of reidentifying matter than of precisely reidentifying a spatial location. Two indistinguishable spheres remain the classic problem case (of Max Black, Idea 10195) |
| 11202 | It is by having essence that things exist [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: It is by having essence that things exist. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.94) | |
| A reaction: Compare Idea 11199, which gives a fuller picture. This idea seems to suggest essence as the cause of existence, which sounds wrong. Perhaps essence is a necessary condition of existence, but it is necessary that nothing indeterminate can exist? |
| 11203 | Specific individual essence is defined by material, and generic essence is defined by form [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Specific essence differs from generic essence by being demarcated: individuals are demarcated within species by dimensionally defined material, but species within genus by a defining differentiation taken from the form. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.95) | |
| A reaction: It clearly won't be enough to define an individual just to define its material and its shape. The material might also be essential to the genus, as when defining fire. Probably not very helpful. |
| 11200 | The definition of a physical object must include the material as well as the form [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Form alone cannot be a composite substance's essence. For a thing's essence is expressed by its definition, and unless the definition of a physical substance included both form and material, the definition wouldn't differ from mathematical objects. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.93) | |
| A reaction: This is the sort of thoroughly sensible remark that you only get from the greatest philosophers. Minor philosophers fall in love with things like forms, and then try to use them to explain everything. |
| 11196 | Essence is something in common between the natures which sort things into categories [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Since being as belonging to a category expresses the 'isness' of things, and belongs to all ten Aristotelian categories, essence must be something all the natures that sort different beings into genera and species have in common. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.92) | |
| A reaction: I like this because it is the essence which does the sorting, not the sorting which defines the essence (which seems to me to be a deep and widespread confusion). |
| 11208 | A simple substance is its own essence [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: A simple substance is its own essence. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.103) | |
| A reaction: Aquinas takes complex substances to have their essences in various ways, but this thought is the basis of all essence. Presumably the Greek word 'ousia' names the key ingredient. |
| 11198 | Definition of essence makes things understandable [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: It is definition of essence that makes things understandable. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.92) | |
| A reaction: The aim of philosophy is understanding, which is achieved by successful explanation. I totally agree with this Aristotelian view, so neatly summarised by Aquinas. |
| 11206 | The mind constructs complete attributions, based on the unified elements of the real world [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Attribution is something mind brings to completion by constructing propositional connections and disconnections, basing itself on real-world unity possessed by the things being attributed to one another. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.102) | |
| A reaction: This compromise story seems to me to be exactly right. I take it that we respond to the real joints of nature, but using thought and language which is riddled with convention. |
| 18549 | Nineteenth century aesthetics focused on art rather than nature (thanks to Hegel) [Hegel, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Only In the course of the nineteenth century, and in the wake of Hegel's posthumously published lectures on aesthetics, did the topic of art come to replace that of natural beauty as the core subject-matter of aesthetics. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics [1826], 5) by Roger Scruton - Beauty: a very short introduction |
| 22043 | Hegel largely ignores aesthetic pleasure, taste and beauty, and focuses on the meaning of artworks [Hegel, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Unlike his predecessors (including Kant), Hegel does not focus on aesthetic pleasure, nor on good taste, nor even on the nature and criteria for beauty. Instead he focuses on the meaning of artworks and their role in forming mankind's self-consciousness. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics [1826]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 11 | |
| A reaction: Personally I dislike over-intellectualising art. The aim of a work of art is to give a certain experience, not to generate an ensuing sequence of theorising. I doubt whether Vermeer had any 'meaning' in mind in his obsessive work. |
| 22042 | Natural beauty is unimportant, because it doesn't show human freedom [Hegel, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: Hegel thinks that natural beauty is of no real significance since it cannot display our freedom to us; nature per se is meaningless. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics [1826]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 11 | |
| A reaction: Presumably freedom is in the creation, and so creativity is what matters in aesthetics. But what are the criteria of good creativity? |
| 20413 | For Hegel the importance of art concerns the culture, not the individual [Hegel, by Eldridge] |
| Full Idea: Hegel locates the significance of art in its role in cultural life in general, not in relation to the psychological needs of individuals. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics [1826]) by Richard Eldridge - G.W.F. Hegel (aesthetics) 1 | |
| A reaction: I'm beginning to see that art is a wonderful focus and test case for political attitudes. Roughly, liberalism focuses on individual responses, but more societal views (from right and left) see it in terms of role in the community. Which are you? |
| 20394 | The purpose of art is to reveal to Spirit its own nature [Hegel, by Davies,S] |
| Full Idea: According to Hegel, the goal of art was to serve as a phase in a process by which Spirit would come to understand its own nature. | |
| From: report of Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics [1826]) by Stephen Davies - The Philosophy of Art (2nd ed) 2.7 | |
| A reaction: I try very hard to understand ideas like this. Really really hard. However, since I see little sign of 'Spirit' really understanding its own nature, I'm guessing that the project is not going well. |
| 21794 | The main purpose of art is to express the unity of human life [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Art's primary function, for Hegel, is to give expression to the unity and wholeness of life - especially human life - that the contingencies of everyday existence frequently conceal. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics [1826]), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 09 'Beauty' | |
| A reaction: I don't find the view that human life is 'unified' and 'whole' vary illuminating, and I have no objection to art which reflects the fragmentary and unstable aspects of life. I suspect Hegel would just prefer it if life were a unity. |
| 20415 | Art forms a bridge between the sensuous world and the world of pure thought [Hegel] |
| Full Idea: Spirit generates out of itself works of fine art as the first reconciling middle term between pure thought and what is merely external, sensuous and transient - between finite natural reality and the infinite freedom of conceptual thinking. | |
| From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on Aesthetics [1826], p.8), quoted by Richard Eldridge - G.W.F. Hegel (aesthetics) | |
| A reaction: This apparently says that there is necessarily an intellectual and conceptual component in art. This means little to me. Does he include portraits? Dutch domestic scenes? Would photography qualify? |
| 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 |
| 11207 | A cause can exist without its effect, but the effect cannot exist without its cause [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: When things are so related that one causes the other to exist, the cause can exist without what it causes but not vice versa. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (De Ente et Essentia (Being and Essence) [1267], p.103) | |
| A reaction: This is open to question, if causes are supposed to be sufficient for effects. Presumably Aquinas would support the view that if the cause had not been, the effect would not have happened. But the current idea indicates the priority relation. |
| 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. |