Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'works', 'Philosophy of Logics' and 'Are Persons Bodies?'

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5 ideas

3. Truth / C. Correspondence Truth / 3. Correspondence Truth critique

2572	Logical truth seems much less likely to 'correspond to the facts' than factual truth does [Haack]
	Full Idea: It is surely less plausible to suppose that logical truth consists in correspondence to the facts than that 'factual' truth does.
	From: Susan Haack (Philosophy of Logics [1978], 7.6)

3. Truth / F. Semantic Truth / 1. Tarski's Truth / a. Tarski's truth definition

2570	The same sentence could be true in one language and meaningless in another, so truth is language-relative [Haack]
	Full Idea: The definition of truth will have to be, Tarski argues, relative to a language, for one and the same sentence may be true in one language, and false or meaningless in another.
	From: Susan Haack (Philosophy of Logics [1978], 7.5)

6. Mathematics / B. Foundations for Mathematics / 3. Axioms for Geometry

13007	Archimedes defined a straight line as the shortest distance between two points [Archimedes, by Leibniz]
	Full Idea: Archimedes gave a sort of definition of 'straight line' when he said it is the shortest line between two points.
	From: report of Archimedes (fragments/reports [c.240 BCE]) by Gottfried Leibniz - New Essays on Human Understanding 4.13
	A reaction: Commentators observe that this reduces the purity of the original Euclidean axioms, because it involves distance and measurement, which are absent from the purest geometry.

16. Persons / A. Concept of a Person / 1. Existence of Persons

3238	'Dead person' isn't a contradiction, so 'person' is somewhat vague [Williams,B]
	Full Idea: If we say (in opposition to a physical view of identity) that when Jones dies 'Jones ceases to exist' but 'Jones' body does not cease to exist', this shouldn't be pressed too hard, because it would make 'dead person' a contradiction.
	From: Bernard Williams (Are Persons Bodies? [1970], p.74)
	A reaction: A good point, which nicely challenges the distinction between a 'human' and a 'person', but the problem case is much more the one where Jones gets advanced Alzheimer's, rather than dies. A dead body ceases as a mechanism, as well as as a personality.

3239	You can only really love a person as a token, not as a type [Williams,B]
	Full Idea: If you love a person as a type instead of as a token (i.e. a "person", instead of a physical body) you might prefer a run-down copy of them to no person at all, but at this point our idea of loving a person begins to crack.
	From: Bernard Williams (Are Persons Bodies? [1970], p.81)
	A reaction: Very persuasive. If you love a person you can cope with them getting old. If you own an original watercolour, you can accept that it fades, but you would replace a reproduction of it if that faded. But what, then, is it that you love?