75 ideas
| 16604 | Philosophy consists of choosing between Plato, Aristotle and Democritus [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The history of philosophy consists in a series of choices between three primordial rivals: Plato, Aristotle and Democritus. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 05.1) | |
| A reaction: Pasnau's point is that the importance of Democritus is not usually appreciated. As far as I can see, Democritus may have been the greatest of all philosophers, but most of his works are lost. His fragments are the best fragments. |
| 16606 | Original philosophers invariably seek inspiration from past thinkers [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers almost never strike out on wholly new ground, without the historical inspiration of some figure or other. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 05.1) |
| 16586 | The commentaries of Averroes were the leading guide to Aristotle [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The commentaries of Averroes on virtually the whole Aristotelian corpus became by far the most important scholastic guide to the interpretation of Aristotle. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 03.1) |
| 16568 | Modernity begins in the late 12th century, with Averroes's commentaries on Aristotle [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: I tend to think of modernity as coming in the late twelfth century, with Averroes's magisterial commentaries on Aristotle. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: A rather quirky use of 'modernity', but this seems to be a huge landmark. Note that it comes from the Islamic Arab world, not from Europe. |
| 16653 | Once accidents were seen as real, 'Categories' became the major text for ontology [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Originally you count substances for ontology. Once there is the doctrine of real accidents (in the 14th cent) the list of ten categories begins to look like an inventory of the kinds of things there are, and 'Categories' looks like the fundamental text. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 12.1) | |
| A reaction: Prior to this development, 'Categories' was treated as a mere beginner's text, once the major corpus of Aristotle had been rediscovered in the 13th century. The result of this development is sortal essentialism, which I don't like. |
| 16704 | In 1347, the Church effectively stopped philosophy for the next 300 years [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The year 1347 is a great milestone in the history of philosophy, because then the route to modern philosophy was blocked by Church authorities, and effectively put on hold for almost 300 years. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 19.3) | |
| A reaction: It is interesting that it was 100 years after the Reformation before philosophy got going again, and then only thanks to one man. Islam stopped philosophy earlier. |
| 16605 | After c.1450 all of Plato was available. Before that, only the first half of 'Timaeus' was known [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: From the mid-fifteenth century forward, for the first time, the whole Platonic corpus was available in Ficino's Latin translation. Before then, only the first half of the 'Timaeus' had widely circulated in Latin. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 05.1) |
| 16607 | Renaissance Platonism is peripheral [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The fabled phenomenon of Renaissance Platonism is peripheral. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 05.3) | |
| A reaction: The point is that only a few Italians pursued the Platonic line. Pasnau suggests Cartesian dualism as a possible influence from Plato. |
| 16715 | Plato only made an impact locally in 15th century Italy [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: In certain limited circles in Italy, Plato made an impact in the fifteenth century, but his influence never came close to challenging Aristotle's. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 20.2) |
| 16610 | Philosophy could easily have died in 17th century, if it weren't for Descartes [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: As scholasticism collapsed in the 17th century, it might easily have happened is that philosophy simply died. That this did not happen is due in large part to René Descartes. …It is remarkable that this brilliant man insisted on still doing philosophy. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 05.5) | |
| A reaction: The alternative view is, of course, that you just can't stop people from thinking philosophically (except by totalitarian education). Are there philosophers in North Korea, or among the Taliban? |
| 16781 | The 17th century is a metaphysical train wreck [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The seventeenth century is a metaphysical train wreck. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 26.6) | |
| A reaction: This is, roughly, because the corpuscularian philosophy lacked the resources to answer all the problems dealt with by substantial forms. |
| 22270 | Frege changed philosophy by extending logic's ability to check the grounds of thinking [Potter on Frege] |
| Full Idea: Frege's 1879 logic transformed philosophy because it greatly expanded logic's reach - what thought can achieve unaided - and hence compelled a re-examination of everything previously said about the grounds of thought when logic gives out. | |
| From: comment on Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 Intro | |
| A reaction: I loved the gloss on logic as 'what thought can achieve unaided'. I largely see logic in terms of what is mechanically computable. |
| 8939 | We should not describe human laws of thought, but how to correctly track truth [Frege, by Fisher] |
| Full Idea: Frege disagree that logic should merely describe the laws of thought - how people actually did reason. Logic is essentially normative, not descriptive. We want the one logic which successfully tracks the truth. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Jennifer Fisher - On the Philosophy of Logic 1.III | |
| A reaction: This explains Frege's sustained attack on psychologism, and it also explains we he ended up as a platonist about logic - because he wanted its laws to be valid independently of human thinking. A step too far, perhaps. Brains are truth machines. |
| 16677 | Anti-Razor: if you can't account for a truth, keep positing things until you can [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The Anti-Razor says 'whenever an affirmative proposition is truly stated, if one thing does not suffice to account for its truth, then one must posit things, and if two do not suffice then three, and so on to infinity'. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 14.3) | |
| A reaction: This is quoted from an anonymous logic text of 1325. Apparently Ockham himself articulated the idea more than once. |
| 4971 | I don't use 'subject' and 'predicate' in my way of representing a judgement [Frege] |
| Full Idea: A distinction of subject and predicate finds no place in my way of representing a judgement. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879], §03) | |
| A reaction: Perhaps this sentence could be taken as the beginning of modern analytical philosophy. The old view doesn't seem to me entirely redundant - merely replaced by a much more detailed analysis of what makes a 'subject' and what makes a 'predicate'. |
| 17745 | For Frege, 'All A's are B's' means that the concept A implies the concept B [Frege, by Walicki] |
| Full Idea: 'All A's are B's' meant for Frege that the concept A implies the concept B, or that to be A implies also to be B. Moreover this applies to arbitrary x which happens to be A. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Michal Walicki - Introduction to Mathematical Logic History D.2 | |
| A reaction: This seems to hit the renate/cordate problem. If all creatures with hearts also have kidneys, does that mean that being enhearted logically implies being kidneyfied? If all chimps are hairy, is that a logical requirement? Is inclusion implication? |
| 7728 | Frege has a judgement stroke (vertical, asserting or judging) and a content stroke (horizontal, expressing) [Frege, by Weiner] |
| Full Idea: Frege distinguished between asserting a proposition and expressing it, and he introduced the judgement stroke (a small vertical line, assertion) and the content stroke (a long horizontal line, expression) to represent them. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Joan Weiner - Frege Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: There are also strokes for conditional and denial. |
| 16881 | The laws of logic are boundless, so we want the few whose power contains the others [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Since in view of the boundless multitude of laws that can be enunciated we cannot list them all, we cannot achieve completeness except by searching out those that, by their power, contain all of them. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879], §13) | |
| A reaction: He refers to these laws in the previous sentence as the 'core'. His talk of 'power' is music to my ears, since it implies a direction of explanation. Burge says the power is that of defining other concepts. |
| 7622 | In 1879 Frege developed second order logic [Frege, by Putnam] |
| Full Idea: By 1879 Frege had discovered an algorithm, a mechanical proof procedure, that embraces what is today standard 'second order logic'. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Hilary Putnam - Reason, Truth and History Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: Note that Frege did more than introduce quantifiers, and the logic of predicates. |
| 7729 | Frege replaced Aristotle's subject/predicate form with function/argument form [Frege, by Weiner] |
| Full Idea: Frege's regimentation is based on the view of the simplest sort of statement as having, not subject/predicate form (as in Aristotle), but function/argument form. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Joan Weiner - Frege | |
| A reaction: This looks like being a crucial move into the modern world, where one piece of information is taken in and dealt with, as in computer procedures. Have educated people reorganised their minds along Fregean lines? |
| 9950 | A quantifier is a second-level predicate (which explains how it contributes to truth-conditions) [Frege, by George/Velleman] |
| Full Idea: The contribution of the quantifier to the truth conditions of sentences of which it is a part cannot be adequately explained if it is treated as other than a second-level predicate (for instance, if it is viewed as name). | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by A.George / D.J.Velleman - Philosophies of Mathematics Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: They suggest that this makes it something like a 'property of properties'. With this account it becomes plausible to think of numbers as quantifiers (since they do, after all, specify quantities). |
| 9991 | For Frege the variable ranges over all objects [Frege, by Tait] |
| Full Idea: For Frege the variable ranges over all objects. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by William W. Tait - Frege versus Cantor and Dedekind XII | |
| A reaction: The point is that Frege had not yet seen the necessity to define the domain of quantification, and this leads him into various difficulties. |
| 10536 | Frege's domain for variables is all objects, but modern interpretations first fix the domain [Dummett on Frege] |
| Full Idea: For Frege there is no need to specify the domain of the individual variables, which is taken as the totality of all objects. This contrasts with the standard notion of an interpretation, which demands that we first fix the domain. | |
| From: comment on Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Michael Dummett - Frege Philosophy of Language (2nd ed) Ch.14 | |
| A reaction: What intrigues me is how domains of quantification shift according to context in ordinary usage, even in mid-sentence. I ought to go through every idea in this database, specifying its domain of quantification. Any volunteers? |
| 7730 | Frege introduced quantifiers for generality [Frege, by Weiner] |
| Full Idea: In order to express generality, Frege introduced quantifier notation. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Joan Weiner - Frege | |
| A reaction: This is the birth of predicate logic, beloved of analytical philosophers (but of no apparent interest to phenomenalists, deconstructionists, existentialists?). Generality is what you get from induction (which is, of course, problematic). |
| 7742 | Frege reduced most quantifiers to 'everything' combined with 'not' [Frege, by McCullogh] |
| Full Idea: Frege treated 'everything' as basic, and suggested ways of recasting propositions containing other quantifiers so that this was the only one remaining. He recast 'something' as 'at least one thing', and defined this in terms of 'everything' and 'not'. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Gregory McCullogh - The Game of the Name 1.6 | |
| A reaction: Extreme parsimony seems highly desirable in logic as well as ontology, but it can lead to frustrations, especially over the crucial question of the existence of things quantified over. See Idea 6068. |
| 13824 | Proof theory began with Frege's definition of derivability [Frege, by Prawitz] |
| Full Idea: Frege's formal definition of derivability is perhaps the first investigation in general proof theory. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Dag Prawitz - Gentzen's Analysis of First-Order Proofs 2 n2 | |
| A reaction: In 'On General Proof Theory §1' Prawitz says "proof theory originated with Hilbert" in 1900. Presumably Frege offered a theory, and then Hilbert saw it as a general project. |
| 13609 | Frege produced axioms for logic, though that does not now seem the natural basis for logic [Frege, by Kaplan] |
| Full Idea: Frege's work supplied a set of axioms for logic itself, at least partly because it was a well-known way of presenting the foundations in other disciplines, especially mathematics, but it does not nowadays strike us as natural for logic. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by David Kaplan - Dthat 5.1 | |
| A reaction: What Bostock has in mind is the so-called 'natural' deduction systems, which base logic on rules of entailment, rather than on a set of truths. The axiomatic approach uses a set of truths, plus the idea of possible contradictions. |
| 17855 | It may be possible to define induction in terms of the ancestral relation [Frege, by Wright,C] |
| Full Idea: Frege's account of the ancestral has made it possible, in effect, to define the natural numbers as entities for which induction holds. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Crispin Wright - Frege's Concept of Numbers as Objects 4.xix | |
| A reaction: This is the opposite of the approach in the Peano Axioms, where induction is used to define the natural numbers. |
| 10607 | Frege's logic has a hierarchy of object, property, property-of-property etc. [Frege, by Smith,P] |
| Full Idea: Frege's general logical system involves a type hierarchy, distinguishing objects from properties from properties-of-properties etc., with every item belonging to a determinate level. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Peter Smith - Intro to Gödel's Theorems 14.1 | |
| A reaction: The Theory of Types went on to apply this hierarchy to classes, where Frege's disastrous Basic Law V flattens the hierarchy of classes, putting them on the same level (Smith p.119) |
| 11008 | Existence is not a first-order property, but the instantiation of a property [Frege, by Read] |
| Full Idea: When Kant said that existence was not a property, what he meant was, according to Frege, that existence is not a first-order property - it is not a property of individuals but a property of properties, that the property has an instance. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Stephen Read - Thinking About Logic Ch.5 |
| 16598 | Priority was a major topic of dispute for scholastics [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: For a scholastic author, hardly anything was so likely to precipitate a lengthy disputatio as talk of priority, in its various kinds. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 04.3) |
| 16727 | In mixtures, the four elements ceased to exist, replaced by a mixed body with a form [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The standard view was that in a mixture there is only the mixed body and its substantial form (gold). There are no further substantial forms of the elements, because the elements do not actually exist within the body. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 22.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to be the key idea that was overthrown in the seventeenth century, so that corpuscular matter kept aspects of its ingredients, which science could then investigate. With the substantial form, investigation seemed impossible. |
| 16732 | 17th C qualities are either microphysical, or phenomenal, or powers [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The seventeenth century is often said to have bequeathed us three ways of thinking about sensible qualities: either in reductive microphysical terms, or as internal phenomenal states, or else as powers or dispositions. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 23.1) | |
| A reaction: Pasnau goes on to claim that no one in the 17th century believed the third one. I take it to be a very new, and totally wonderful and correct, view. |
| 16733 | 17th century authors only recognised categorical properties, never dispositions [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: In the seventeenth century, my claim is that authors during the period recognise only categorical properties, and never dispositional properties. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 23.1) |
| 16662 | The biggest question for scholastics is whether properties are real, or modes of substances [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Among scholastics the primary agreement is that what primarily exist are substances. The primary disagreement concerns the nature of their changeable properties. Are they real accidents, or mere modes of substance? | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 13.1) |
| 16767 | There is no centralised power, but we still need essence for a metaphysical understanding [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: One could empirically reject a centralised power within a substance - and still think a genuine substance requires a form of some more abstract kind, not for a physical explanation, but for a full metaphysical understanding of how things are. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 25.2) | |
| A reaction: This divorce of the 'metaphysical' from the physical is a running theme in Pasnau, and he cites support from Leibniz. I'm not sure I understand 'metaphysical' understanding, if it is actually contrary to physics. I take it to be 'psychological'. |
| 16788 | Instead of adding Aristotelian forms to physical stuff, one could add dispositions [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Someone who wants to enrich a strict corpuscularian account with other metaphysical entities has alternatives other than Aristotelian hylomorphism. One can, for instance, introduce dispositions. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 28.2) | |
| A reaction: This slightly throws me, because I have been flirting with a dispositional account of hylomorphism. The implication is that the form is abstract and structural, where the disposition is real and physical. But dispositions can do the job of forms. |
| 16738 | Scholastics reject dispositions, because they are not actual, as forms require [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Scholastics reject anything like bare dispositions, on Aristotelian principles. Powers are forms, and forms actualise their subject, and are causally efficacious. Therefore no powers can be bare dispositions. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 23.5) | |
| A reaction: The point seems to be that a mere disposition is not actual, as a form is required to be. I would have thought that a power does not have to be operational to be actual. A live electric wire is a real phenomenon. It isn't waiting to be live. |
| 16649 | Scholastics say there is a genuine thing if it is 'separable' [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Among the scholastics (after Duns Scotus) it would be come to be taken for granted that the crucial test for being a genuine thing - a 'res' - is separability. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 11.2) | |
| A reaction: The idea of separability is implicit in Aristotle. In borderline cases, it seems that they are tempted to claim that things like accidental properties are separable, simply because they want them to be genuine things. A criterion for separability? |
| 16785 | If you reject essences, questions of individuation become extremely difficult [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Given the accepted linkage between a thing's essence and its identity, the rejection of essences makes a complete mess out of questions of individuation. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 27.6) | |
| A reaction: I note that he talks of a thing having 'identity', contra the view of identity as a two-place relation. I agree with this, but there is a chicken-egg problem. Do I perceive an identity and surmise an essence, or surmise an essence and deduce identity? |
| 16680 | Scholastics thought Quantity could be the principle of individuation [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Quantity was a leading scholastic contender for the principle of individuation. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 14.4) |
| 16628 | Corpuscularianism promised a decent account of substance [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: One of the great attractions of corpuscularianism is that it promises to put our acquaintance with substances on a solid foundation. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 07.3) | |
| A reaction: This is why the seventeenth century did not abandon 'substance', even though they banished 'substantial form'. |
| 16617 | Corpuscularian critics of scholasticism say only substances exist [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Corpuscularian critics of scholasticism tend to think that only substances exist. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 06.2) | |
| A reaction: Pasnau treats this as an extreme 17th C reaction which was hopelessly inadequate as metaphysics. We have been struggling with the nature of 'properties' ever since, while losing our grip on the concept of a unified 'substance'. |
| 16741 | Scholastics wanted to treat Aristotelianism as physics, rather than as metaphysics [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: There is a broad scholastic tendency to understand Aristotelianism not in abstract, metaphysical terms, but as a concrete, physical theory of the world. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 23.5) | |
| A reaction: This seems to give a good explanation of why Aristotelianism plummeted to oblivion in the 17th C. Pasnau obviously wants to revive it, by drawing a sharp line between metaphysics and science. I doubt the line. |
| 16777 | If crowds are things at all, they seem to be Substances, since they bear properties [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Crowds seem to be the bearers of properties, and if they are things at all, then there is no place for them other than in the category of Substance. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 26.1) | |
| A reaction: It is tempting to say, based on Aristotle, that a substance is whatever 1) bears properties, and 2) endures in spite of change, but a crowd is a nice problem case, because it looks too disunited to be a 'substance'. |
| 16615 | Scholastics use 'substantia' for thick concrete entities, and for thin metaphysical ones [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Scholastic texts are rife with different senses of 'substantia', using the term to refer, among other things, both to thick concrete entities and to thin metaphysical ones. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 06.1) | |
| A reaction: Pasnau introduces 'thin' and 'thick' substance for this reason. I may adopt this. Without distinctions between thin and thick concepts of things we can get very muddled. I like the word to label something which is an 'entity'. |
| 16775 | For corpuscularians, a substance is just its integral parts [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: According to strict corpuscularianism the only real constituents of a substance are its integral parts. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 26.1) | |
| A reaction: An understandable reaction to the emptiness of Aristotelian substantial forms in science. It seems to leave out the structural principles that distinguish one arrangement of parts from another. See Koslicki on this. |
| 16769 | If clay survives destruction of the statue, the statue wasn't a substance, but a mere accident [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The unitarian view of substance says it cannot be divided. If the clay can survive the destruction of the statue, then that shows that the statue was not a substance at all, and that its shape (or whatever made it a statue) was merely a passing accident. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 25.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems to give the orthodox Aristotelian/Thomist reading, assuming that a substance only has one form, which unifies it. Since clay must have shape, and statues must have matter, I have never understood how there were two objects here. |
| 16602 | Corpuscularianism rejected not only form, but also the dependence of matter on form [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: What marks the rise of the corpuscularian movement is not just the rejection of form, but the rejection of matter as dependent on form. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 04.5) | |
| A reaction: The point was that matter required form to have any kind of actual existence, but now matter can stand on its own. |
| 16612 | Hylomorphism may not be a rival to science, but an abstract account of unity and endurance [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Hylomorphism admits of an alternative formulation, as an explanatory schema at a different level of analysis, not competing with corpuscular-mechanistic theory, but accounting for abstract features of the world - notably unity and endurance of substances. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 06.1) | |
| A reaction: Pasnau is clearly sympathetic. As a view of why normal objects have unity and persist over time it is almost the only decent theory around. Hawley, for example, struggles to explain how 'stages' of a thing are linked. Classical mereology is silly. |
| 16613 | Hylomorphism declined because scholastics made it into a testable physical theory [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Scholastics lost their grip on hylomorphism as a metaphysical theory, conceiving of it as a concrete, physical hypothesis about causal forces. Once form and matter were made subject to empirical research, their days were inevitably numbered. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 06.1) | |
| A reaction: Pasnau seems to make a sharp distinction between science, and a separate realm he labels 'metaphysical'. You can't keep causation out of Aristotelian hylomorphism. The defence is that it is at a higher level of generality than science. |
| 16747 | Scholastics made forms substantial, in a way unintended by Aristotle [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The conception of form as somehow substantial took on new life among scholastic Aristotelians, and was developed in ways that Aristotle himself never suggested. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 24.1) | |
| A reaction: This is music to we modern neo-Aristotelians, because scholasticism was rightly dumped in the 17th C, but we can go back and start again from what The Philosopher actually said. |
| 16759 | Scholastics began to see substantial form more as Aristotle's 'efficient' cause [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The whole scholastic conception of substantial form came to have more and more in common with an Aristotelian efficient cause. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 24.2) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle, of course, identified the form with the 'formal cause [aitia]', which is the shape of the statue, rather than the efficient cause, which is the sculptor. |
| 16748 | Aquinas says a substance has one form; Scotists say it has many forms [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Aquinas subscribes to the unitarian doctrine that a single substance has just a single substantial form, but authors like Scotus subscribe to a plurality of substantial forms. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 24.1) | |
| A reaction: The Scotists seem to think that qualities themselve can have forms. I take it that Aristotle would have agreed with Aquinas. |
| 16671 | Scholastic Quantity either gives a body parts, or spreads them out in a unified way [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: On one version of Quantity realism it is what makes a body have parts; on another version, it is what makes the body's parts be spread out in a continuous and unified way. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 14.1) |
| 16579 | There may be different types of substrate, or temporary substrates [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The substratum thesis says …perhaps there is a different subject for different kinds of changes, and perhaps what endures through one kind of change will be corrupted by another. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 02.5) |
| 16596 | A substratum can't be 'bare', because it has a job to do [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: A completely bare substratum seems not just incoherent but also unable to carry out the function for which it is intended - to be a substratum. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 03.3) |
| 16584 | If a substrate gives causal support for change, quite a lot of the ingredients must endure [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: When the substratum thesis is grounded on the idea that the ingredients must endure through the change, if they are to play a causal role, then it is natural to suppose that quite a lot of the ingredients must endure. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 02.5) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle sharply distinguishes alteration from substantial change, but as the substrate gets thinner, the boundary between those two would blur. |
| 16580 | A substrate may be 'prime matter', which endures through every change [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The 'conservation thesis' about substrates says that there is a single, most basic substrate that endures through every material change, something we call 'prime matter'. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 02.5) |
| 16749 | Aristotelians deny that all necessary properties are essential [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: For an Aristotelian not all necessary properties are essential; the essential properties are those that define a thing as what it is. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 24.1) | |
| A reaction: I take it as basic that whatever is essential is in some way important, whereas necessities can be trivial. |
| 16694 | Typical successive things are time and motion [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The standard scholastic examples of 'entia successiva' are time and motion. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 18.1) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle's examples of a day and the Games seem clearer, as time and motion do not count so clearly as 'things'. |
| 16583 | Weak ex nihilo says it all comes from something; strong version says the old must partly endure [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The weak ex nihilo principle says that everything comes from something, and the strong ex nihilo principle says that in everything new, something of the old must endure | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 02.5) |
| 16783 | Essences must explain, so we can infer them causally from the accidents [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Without the explanatory role of essence, the underlying epistemic picture would be jeopardised, because there would no longer be any causal route by which we might get from accidents to essence. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 27.5) | |
| A reaction: There is a slight whiff of circularity here. It could be that we are psychologically desperate for essences, and so we invent bogus causal routes from the accidents to get at them. Can we know there are essences awaiting us, on independent grounds? |
| 22280 | Frege's account was top-down and decompositional, not bottom-up and compositional [Frege, by Potter] |
| Full Idea: Frege's account was top-down, not bottom-up: he aimed to decompose and discern function-argument structure in already existing sentences, not to explain how those sentences acquired their meanings in the first place. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 03 'Func' | |
| A reaction: This goes with the holistic account of meaning, which leads to Quine's gavagai and Kuhn's obfuscation of science. I recommend compositionality for everthing. |
| 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 |
| 16609 | Atomists say causation is mechanical collisions, and all true qualities are microscopic [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: The atomist view is that causation is limited to collisions among corpuscles (which is 'mechanism'), and the only bodily qualities are those found at the microcorpuscular level; sensible qualities are in fact sensations. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 05.4) | |
| A reaction: [Part of a full summary of atomism by Pasnau] |
| 16603 | In the 17th C matter became body, and was then studied by science [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: In the seventeenth century, matter becomes body, and body becomes the object of natural science. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 04.5) |
| 16592 | Atomism is the commonest version of corpuscularianism, but isn't required by it [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Atomism is the most common version of corpuscular prime matter, but it is not the only option. Indeed, atomism neither entails nor is entailed by the combination of corpuscularianism and the substratum thesis. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 03.2) | |
| A reaction: The point is that the corpuscles may be endlessly divisible (which Lewis called 'gunk'). |
| 16750 | If there are just arrangements of corpuscles, where are the boundaries between substances? [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: If all there are corpuscles of various shapes and sizes, variously arranged, it is not easy to see how we might draw the boundary lines, at any given moment, between one substance and another. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 24.2) | |
| A reaction: We still have precisely that problem, and it leads to the nihilism about ordinary objects found in Unger, Van Inwagen and Merricks. I have so far found modern defences of ordinary objects unpersuasive. |
| 16722 | Scholastic causation is by changes in the primary qualities of hot, cold, wet, dry [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: There is a scholastic theory of causation. Of Aristotle's Four Causes, the main one is the 'formal' cause, and that consists of changes in the primary, elemental qualities, which are hot, cold, wet and dry. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 21.2) | |
| A reaction: [my summary] It is probably right to call this 'scholastic' rather than 'Aristotelian', as I take Aristotelian essence to run deeper than this, and involve principles as well as qualities. |
| 16760 | Substantial forms were a step towards scientific essentialism [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Substantial forms might well be viewed as an early step in the development of scientific essentialism. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 24.4) | |
| A reaction: This is the scholastic view of substantial forms, which is much more physical and causal, rather than Aristotle's more abstract view. The rejection of substantial forms led to the 'Humean' view of laws of nature. |
| 16581 | Scholastic authors agree that matter was created by God, out of nothing [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Authors from 1274 to 1671 unanimously endorse the Christian doctrine that matter was created by God, before which time there was no material world at all. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 02.5) |
| 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. |
| 7741 | The predicate 'exists' is actually a natural language expression for a quantifier [Frege, by Weiner] |
| Full Idea: On Frege's logical analysis, the predicate 'exists' is actually a natural language expression for a quantifier. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Joan Weiner - Frege Ch.8 | |
| A reaction: However see Idea 6067, for McGinn's alternative view of quantifiers. In the normal conventions of predicate logic it may be that existence is treated as a quantifier, but that is not the same as saying that existence just IS a quantifier. |
| 16642 | Transubstantion says accidents of bread and wine don't inhere in the substance [Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Transubstantiation maintains that the accidents of the bread and wine endure after consecration without inhering in the substance. | |
| From: Robert Pasnau (Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 [2011], 10.3) | |
| A reaction: It's a big puzzle to outsiders why softness and nice taste should have theological significance. If it is the body and blood of Christ, presumably a miracle has occurred, so normal theories don't apply. It is the key difficulty for scholastic metaphysics. |