5 ideas
18438 | Every worldly event, without exception, is a redistribution of microphysical states [Quine] |
Full Idea: Nothing happens in the world, not the flutter of an eyelid, not the flicker of a thought, without some redistribution of microphysical states. | |
From: Willard Quine (on Goodman's 'Ways of Worldmaking' [1978], p.98) | |
A reaction: Is this causation, identity, or baffling supervenience? |
23812 | Force is what turns man into a thing, and ultimately into a corpse [Weil] |
Full Idea: To define 'force' - it is that x that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing. Exercised to the limit, it turns man into a thing in the most literal sense: it makes a corpse out of him. | |
From: Simone Weil (The Iliad or the Poem of Force [1940], p.183) | |
A reaction: She celebrates The Iliad as the great examination of force in human affairs. I have felt that sense of reduction to a thing whenever anyone above me in the hierarchy has arbitrarily exerted their power over me. |
23813 | Only people who understand force, and don't respect it, are capable of justice [Weil] |
Full Idea: Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice. | |
From: Simone Weil (The Iliad or the Poem of Force [1940], p.212) | |
A reaction: There are, of course, occasions when we are grateful to people who exercise appropriate force on our behalf. I think she was concerned with what is inappropriate. |
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. |