6 ideas
| 291 | Don't assume that wisdom is the automatic consequence of old age [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Don't assume that wisdom is the automatic consequence of old age. | |
| From: Plato (Laches [c.381 BCE], 188b) | |
| A reaction: I have taught teenagers who seemed to me wiser than nearly all the adults I have ever met. |
| 10835 | True sentences says the appropriate descriptive thing on the appropriate demonstrative occasion [Austin,JL] |
| Full Idea: A sentence is said to be true when the historic state of affairs to which it is correlated by the demonstrative conventions (the one to which it 'refers') is of a type with which the sentence used in making it is correlated by the descriptive conventions. | |
| From: J.L. Austin (Truth [1950], §3) | |
| A reaction: This is correspondence by convention rather than correspondence by mapping. Personally I prefer some sort of mapping account, despite all the difficulty and vagueness of specifying what maps onto what. |
| 10836 | Correspondence theorists shouldn't think that a country has just one accurate map [Austin,JL] |
| Full Idea: Correspondence theorists too often talk as one would who held that every map is either accurate or inaccurate; that every country can have but one accurate map. | |
| From: J.L. Austin (Truth [1950], n 24) | |
| A reaction: A well-made point, for those who intuitively hang on to correspondence as not only good common sense, but also some sort of salvation for a realist view of the world which might give us certainty in epistemology. |
| 293 | Being unafraid (perhaps through ignorance) and being brave are two different things [Plato] |
| Full Idea: To be unafraid (like a small child who doesn't understand the danger) and to be brave are two quite different things. | |
| From: Plato (Laches [c.381 BCE], 197b) |
| 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. |