6 ideas
12167 | Reference without predication is the characteristic of expression [Scruton] |
Full Idea: Characteristic of expression is the presence of 'reference' without predication. | |
From: Roger Scruton (Representation in Music [1976], p.71) | |
A reaction: This echoes (in linguistic terms) Kant's thought that art is 'purposive without purpose'. The remark is comfortable in an essay on music, but it gets more tricky when the topic is literature, or even representational painting. |
12166 | If music refers to love, it contains no predication, so it is expression, not language [Scruton] |
Full Idea: If a passage carries a reference to love, we are not told what it says about love. And to speak of language with 'reference' but no predication is simply to misuse the word. We leave the realm of representation and enter that of expression. | |
From: Roger Scruton (Representation in Music [1976], p.63-4) | |
A reaction: This is a beautifully simple objection to the idea (associated with Nelson Goodman) that art is a language. Though what an 'expression' of something amounts to I am not quite sure. |
12168 | Music is not representational, since thoughts about a subject are never essential to it [Scruton] |
Full Idea: Music is not representational, since thoughts about a subject are never essential to the understanding of music. | |
From: Roger Scruton (Representation in Music [1976], p.74) | |
A reaction: I would not have thought that many people thought music was representational, but Scruton particularly mentions passages in opera that seem to pick up aspects of the story. Do even bell sounds not represent bells? |
20992 | Right and wrong concerns what other people cannot reasonably reject [Scanlon] |
Full Idea: Thinking about right and wrong is, at the most basic level, thinking about what could be justified to others on grounds that they, if appropriately motivated, could not reasonably reject. | |
From: Thomas M. Scanlon (What We Owe to Each Other [1998], Intro) | |
A reaction: The tricky bit is that the acceptance by others must be 'reasonable', so we need a reasonably objective view of rationality. Don't picture your neighbours, picture the locals when you are on holiday in a very different culture. Other Nazis? |
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. |