7 ideas
| 15533 | We can quantify over fictions by quantifying for real over their names [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Substitutionalists simulate quantification over fictional characters by quantifying for real over fictional names. | |
| From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.159) | |
| A reaction: I would say that a fiction is a file of conceptual information, identified by a label. The label brings baggage with it, and there is no existence in the label. |
| 15534 | We could quantify over impossible objects - as bundles of properties [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: We can quantify over Meinongian objects by quantifying for real over property bundles (such as the bundle of roundness and squareness). | |
| From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.159) |
| 15532 | 'Allists' embrace the existence of all controversial entities; 'noneists' reject all but the obvious ones [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: An expansive friend of the controversial entities who says they all exist may be called an 'allist'; a tough desert-dweller who says that none of them exist may be called a 'noneist'. | |
| From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.152) | |
| A reaction: Lewis gives examples of the obvious and the controversial entities. Lewis implies that he himself is in between. The word 'desert' is a reference to Quine. |
| 15535 | We can't accept a use of 'existence' that says only some of the things there are actually exist [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: If 'existence' is understood so that it can be a substantive thesis that only some of the things there are exist, we will have none of it. | |
| From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.163) | |
| A reaction: Lewis is a strong advocate, following Quine, of the univocal sense of the word 'exist', and I agree with them. |
| 19284 | Asserting a necessity just expresses our inability to imagine it is false [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: To say that we dignify a truth as necessary we are expressing our own mental attitudes - our own inability to make anything of a possible way of thinking which denies it. It is this blank unimaginability which we voice when we use the modal vocabulary. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Spreading the Word [1984], 6.5) | |
| A reaction: Yes, but why are we unable to imagine it? I accept that the truth or falsity of Goldbach's Conjecture may well be necessary, but I have no imagination one way or the other about it. Philosophers like Blackburn are very alien to me! |
| 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. |