6 ideas
2602 | What experience could prove 'If a=c and b=c then a=b'? [Descartes] |
Full Idea: Please tell me what the corporeal motion is that is capable of forming some common notion to the effect that 'things which are equal to a third thing are equal to each other'. | |
From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.366) |
2600 | The mind's innate ideas are part of its capacity for thought [Descartes] |
Full Idea: I have never written or taken the view that the mind requires innate ideas which are something distinct from its own faculty of thinking. | |
From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365) |
2601 | Qualia must be innate, because physical motions do not contain them [Descartes] |
Full Idea: The ideas of pains, colours, sounds etc. must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions. | |
From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365) | |
A reaction: Simple and brilliant! We know perfectly well that there is no redness zooming through the air from a tomato (or the air would be pink!). Redness occurs when the light arrives, so we add the redness, so it is innate. |
21932 | 'Différance' is the interwoven history of each sign [Derrida, by Glendinning] |
Full Idea: What Derrida calls 'différance' can be understood as the movement through which every sign is 'constituted historically as a weave of differences'....This replacement for 'speech' in the 'origin' of the system is to avoid the circularity in structuralism. | |
From: report of Jacques Derrida (Différance [1982]) by Simon Glendinning - Derrida: A Very Short Introduction 5 | |
A reaction: [compressed] Struggling to grasp this. Some English words entirely change their meaning over time (e.g. buxom). Does the lost meaning remain part of the new meaning? If so, how? He also calls différance 'sameness which is not identical'. |
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. |