22 ideas
| 1749 | If all laws were abolished, philosophers would still live as they do now [Aristippus elder] |
| Full Idea: If all laws were abolished, philosophers would still live as they do now. | |
| From: Aristippus the elder (fragments/reports [c.395 BCE]), quoted by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.4 | |
| A reaction: Presumably philosophers develop inner laws which other people lack. |
| 17000 | We might fix identities for small particulars, but it is utopian to hope for such things [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: Maybe strict identity only applies to the particulars (the molecules) in a case of vague identity. …It seems, however, utopian to suppose that we will ever reach a level of ultimate, basic particulars for which identity relations are never vague. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], note 18) | |
| A reaction: I agree with this. Ladyman and Ross laugh at the unscientific picture found in dreams of 'simples'. |
| 11868 | A different piece of wood could have been used for that table; constitution isn't identity [Wiggins on Kripke] |
| Full Idea: Could the artificer not, when he made the table, have taken other pieces? Surely he could. [n37: I venture to think that Kripke's argument in note 56 for the necessity of constitution depends on treating constitution as if it were identity]. | |
| From: comment on Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], note 56) by David Wiggins - Sameness and Substance Renewed 4.11 | |
| A reaction: Suppose the craftsman completed the table, then changed a piece of wood in it for some reason. Has he now made a second table and destroyed the first one? Wiggins seems to be right. |
| 17044 | A relation can clearly be reflexive, and identity is the smallest reflexive relation [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers have thought that a relation, being essentially two-termed, cannot hold between a thing and itself. This position is plainly absurd ('he is his own worst enemy'). Identity is nothing but the smallest reflexive relation. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], note 50) | |
| A reaction: I have no idea what 'smallest' means here. I can't be 'to the left of myself', so not all of my relations can be reflexive. I just don't understand what it means to say something is 'identical with itself'. You've got the thing - what have you added? |
| 16999 | A vague identity may seem intransitive, and we might want to talk of 'counterparts' [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: When the identity relation is vague, it may seem intransitive; a claim of apparent identity may yield an apparent non-identity. Some sort of 'counterpart' notion may have some utility here. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], note 18) | |
| A reaction: He firmly rejects the full Lewis apparatus of counterparts. The idea would be that a river at different times had counterpart relations, not strict identity. I like the word 'same' for this situation. Most worldly 'identity' is intransitive. |
| 17058 | What many people consider merely physically necessary I consider completely necessary [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: My third lecture suggests that a good deal of what contemporary philosophy regards as mere physical necessity is actually necessary tout court. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], Add (g)) | |
| A reaction: He avoids the term 'metaphysically necessary', which most people would not use for this point. |
| 4970 | What is often held to be mere physical necessity is actually metaphysical necessity [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: My third lecture suggests that a good deal of what contemporary philosophy regards as mere physical necessity is actually necessary 'tout court'. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], Add (g)) | |
| A reaction: This huge claim rides in on the back of Kripke's very useful clarifications. It is the 'new essentialism', and seems to me untenable in this form. There is no answer to Hume's request for evidence of necessity. Why can't essences (and laws) change? |
| 17059 | Unicorns are vague, so no actual or possible creature could count as a unicorn [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: If the unicorn myth is supposed to be a particular species, with insufficient internal structure to determine it uniquely, then there is no actual or possible species of which we can say that it would have been the species of unicorns. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], Add (a)) | |
| A reaction: Dummett and Rumfitt discuss this proposal elsewhere. |
| 4950 | Possible worlds are useful in set theory, but can be very misleading elsewhere [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: The apparatus of possible worlds has (I hope) been very useful as far as the set-theoretic model-theory of quantified modal logic is concerned, but has encouraged philosophical pseudo-problems and misleading pictures. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], note 15) | |
| A reaction: This is presumably a swipe at David Lewis, who claims possible worlds are real. The fact that the originator of possible worlds sees them as unproblematic doesn't mean they are. Fine if they are a game, but if they assert truth, they need a metaphysics. |
| 17003 | Kaplan's 'Dthat' is a useful operator for transforming a description into a rigid designation [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: It is useful to have an operator which transforms each description into a term which rigidly designates the object actually satisfying the description. David Kaplan has proposed such an operator and calls it 'Dthat'. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], note 22) |
| 9221 | The best known objection to counterparts is Kripke's, that Humphrey doesn't care if his counterpart wins [Kripke, by Sider] |
| Full Idea: The most famous objection to counterparts is Kripke's objection that Hubert Humphrey wouldn't care if he thought that his counterpart might have won the 1972 election. He wishes that he had won it. | |
| From: report of Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], note 12) by Theodore Sider - Reductive Theories of Modality 3.10 | |
| A reaction: Like Sider, I find this unconvincing. If there is a world in which I don't exist, but my very close counterpart does (say exactly me, but with a finger missing), I am likely to care more about such a person than about complete strangers. |
| 17052 | The a priori analytic truths involving fixing of reference are contingent [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: If statements whose a priori truth is known via the fixing of a reference are counted as analytic, then some analytic truths are contingent. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], note 63) |
| 4969 | I regard the mind-body problem as wide open, and extremely confusing [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: I regard the mind-body problem as wide open, and extremely confusing. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], note 77) | |
| A reaction: Kripke opposes reductive physicalism, but is NOT committed to dualism. He seems to be drawn to Davidson or Nagel (see his note 73). I think his discussion of contingent mind-brain identity is confused. |
| 4691 | If all mental life were conscious, we would be unable to see things, or to process speech [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: If there were nothing more to our mind than our conscious awareness, then we would be unable to see anything or to process speech. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Making of a Philosopher [2002], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: A vital point. Traditional dualism has left us a simplistic exaggeration of the role of consciousness, and the misapprehension that most of what we do is conscious - which it clearly isn't, once you think about it. |
| 4690 | If meaning is speaker's intentions, it can be reduced to propositional attitudes, and philosophy of mind [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: The importance of Grice's analysis of speaker meaning is that it offers the prospect of analysing the whole phenomenon of linguistic meaning in terms of propositional attitudes… thus turning semantics into a department of the philosophy of mind. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Making of a Philosopher [2002], Ch. 5) | |
| A reaction: Although meaning being truth conditions is the most cited theory, the reduction of semantics to an aspect of mind also seems almost orthodox now. But how do the symbols 'represent' the attitudes? |
| 4956 | A description may fix a reference even when it is not true of its object [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: In some cases an object may be identified, and the reference of a name fixed, using a description which may turn out to be false of its object. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], note 34) | |
| A reaction: This is clearly possible. Someone could be identified as 'the criminal' when they were actually innocent. Nevertheless, how do you remember which person was baptised 'Aristotle' if you don't hang on to a description, even a false one? |
| 17032 | Even if Gödel didn't produce his theorems, he's still called 'Gödel' [Kripke] |
| Full Idea: If a Gödelian fraud were exposed, Gödel would no longer be called 'the author of the incompleteness theorem', but he would still be called 'Gödel'. The description, therefore, does not abbreviate the name. | |
| From: Saul A. Kripke (Naming and Necessity notes and addenda [1972], note 37) | |
| A reaction: Clearly we can't make the description a necessary fact about Gödel, but that doesn't invalidate the idea that successful reference needs some description. E.g. Gödel is a person. |
| 3558 | Only the Cyrenaics reject the idea of a final moral end [Aristippus elder, by Annas] |
| Full Idea: The Cyrenaics are the most radical ancient moral philosophers, since they are the only school explicitly to reject the importance of achieving an overall final end. | |
| From: report of Aristippus the elder (fragments/reports [c.395 BCE]) by Julia Annas - The Morality of Happiness 11.1 | |
| A reaction: This looks like dropping out, but it could also be Keats's 'negative capability', of simply participating in existence without needing to do anything about it. |
| 5835 | The road of freedom is the surest route to happiness [Aristippus elder, by Xenophon] |
| Full Idea: The surest road to happiness is not the path through rule nor through servitude, but through liberty. | |
| From: report of Aristippus the elder (fragments/reports [c.395 BCE]) by Xenophon - Memorabilia of Socrates 2.1.9 | |
| A reaction: The great anarchist slogan. Personally I don't believe it, because I agree a little with Hobbes that authority is required to make cooperation flourish, and that is essential for full happiness. If I were a slave, I would agree with Aristippus. |
| 3018 | People who object to extravagant pleasures just love money [Aristippus elder, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: When blamed for buying expensive food he asked "Would you have bought it for just three obols?" When the person said yes, he said,"Then it is not that I am fond of pleasure, but that you are fond of money". | |
| From: report of Aristippus the elder (fragments/reports [c.395 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.7.4 |
| 1751 | Pleasure is the good, because we always seek it, it satisfies us, and its opposite is the most avoidable thing [Aristippus elder, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Pleasure is the good because we desire it from childhood, when we have it we seek nothing further, and the most avoidable thing is its opposite, pain. | |
| From: report of Aristippus the elder (fragments/reports [c.395 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.8 |
| 1755 | Errors result from external influence, and should be corrected, not hated [Aristippus elder, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Errors ought to meet with pardon, for a man does not err intentionally, but influenced by some external circumstances. We should not hate someone who has erred, but teach him better. | |
| From: report of Aristippus the elder (fragments/reports [c.395 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.9 |