176 ideas
| 19693 | There is practical wisdom (for action), and theoretical wisdom (for deep understanding) [Aristotle, by Whitcomb] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle takes wisdom to come in two forms, the practical and the theoretical, the former of which is good judgement about how to act, and the latter of which is deep knowledge or understanding. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Dennis Whitcomb - Wisdom Intro | |
| A reaction: The interesting question is then whether the two are connected. One might be thoroughly 'sensible' about action, without counting as 'wise', which seems to require a broader view of what is being done. Whitcomb endorses Aristotle on this idea. |
| 12997 | Analysis is the art of finding the middle term [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The art of finding intermediate terms (the 'middle term') is the art of 'analysis'. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.02) | |
| A reaction: This proposal is straight out of Aristotle's 'Posterior Analytics'. Nowadays we would say there was much more to analysis, the finding of necessary and sufficient conditions being the most obvious way of putting it. |
| 13009 | A reason is a known truth which leads to assent to some further truth [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: A reason is a known truth whose connection with some less well-known truth leads us to give our assent to the latter. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.17) | |
| A reaction: This is plainly false, because you can have a reason for believing something, but still not give your assent to it, presumably because of counter-reasons. And a false belief could also be a reason, even to believe a truth. Tut tut. |
| 1575 | For Aristotle logos is essentially the ability to talk rationally about questions of value [Roochnik on Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: For Aristotle logos is the ability to speak rationally about, with the hope of attaining knowledge, questions of value. | |
| From: comment on Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by David Roochnik - The Tragedy of Reason p.26 |
| 1589 | Aristotle is the supreme optimist about the ability of logos to explain nature [Roochnik on Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle is the great theoretician who articulates a vision of a world in which natural and stable structures can be rationally discovered. His is the most optimistic and richest view of the possibilities of logos | |
| From: comment on Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by David Roochnik - The Tragedy of Reason p.95 |
| 12963 | Opposing reason is opposing truth, since reason is a chain of truths [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To speak against reason is to speak against truth, for reason is a chain of truths. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: Truth has a talismanic quality here (which it didn't always have). This is a lovely slogan for defenders of the Enlightenment. It forces modern critics of the Enlightenment (Adorno etc) to launch an attack on truth, which is a doomed line. |
| 19360 | General principles, even if unconscious, are indispensable for thinking [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: General principles enter into our thoughts, serving as their inner core and their mortar. Even if we give no thought to them, they are necessary for thought, as muscles and tendons are for walking. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01.20) | |
| A reaction: Famously, Leibniz identified sufficient reason and non-contradiction as the two foundational principles. Modern logicians seem less keen on this idea, but then they have less interest in how we actually think. |
| 12983 | A nominal definition is of the qualities, but the real definition is of the essential inner structure [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The essence of gold is what constitutes it and gives it the sensible qualities which let us recognize it and which make its nominal definition; but if we could explain this structure or inner constitution we would possess the real, causal definition. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: This is the view which I am championing, particularly in the role of explanation in the whole game. Explanation and understanding are the hallmarks of the discovery of a real essence. However, a falsehood may explain things well. Tricky. |
| 8200 | Aristotelian definitions aim to give the essential properties of the thing defined [Aristotle, by Quine] |
| Full Idea: A real definition, according to the Aristotelian tradition, gives the essence of the kind of thing defined. Man is defined as a rational animal, and thus rationality and animality are of the essence of each of us. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Willard Quine - Vagaries of Definition p.51 | |
| A reaction: Compare Idea 4385. Personally I prefer the Aristotelian approach, but we may have to say 'We cannot identify the essence of x, and so x cannot be defined'. Compare 'his mood was hard to define' with 'his mood was hostile'. |
| 12982 | One essence can be expressed by several definitions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Although a thing has only one essence, this can be expressed by several definitions. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 12976 and Idea 12977 for a view which seems to conflict with this. He seemed to imply that once you identify the essence, the definitions converge, with multiple definitions being symptomatic of imperfect ideas of things. |
| 12976 | If our ideas of a thing are imperfect, the thing can have several unconnected definitions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The result of having an imperfect idea of something is that the same subject admits of several mutually independent definitions: we shall sometimes be unable to derive one from another, or see in advance that they must belong to a single subject. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.31) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 12975 for imperfect ideas of things. Obviously the idea is that perfect knowledge will converge on a single definition, which will pinpoint the essence of a thing, and then all explanations will flow. A nice addition to the Aristotelian view. |
| 12984 | Real definitions, unlike nominal definitions, display possibilities [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The real definition displays the possibility of the definiendum, and the nominal definition does not. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: This, I take it, is because the real definition indicates the actual powers of the thing, and not just the superficial characteristics. Is knowledge of powers identical with knowledge of possibilities? |
| 4385 | Aristotelian definition involves first stating the genus, then the differentia of the thing [Aristotle, by Urmson] |
| Full Idea: For Aristotle, to give a definition one must first state the genus and then the differentia of the kind of thing to be defined. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by J.O. Urmson - Aristotle's Doctrine of the Mean p.157 | |
| A reaction: Presumably a modern definition would just be a list of properties, but Aristotle seeks the substance. How does he define a genus? - by placing it in a further genus? |
| 12980 | Genus and differentia might be swapped, and 'rational animal' become 'animable rational' [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The genus can very often be turned into the differentia, ...so that in place of saying that man is a 'reasonable animal' we could, if language permitted, say that man is an 'animable rational', a rational substance with animal nature. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: This is a very telling point which rather undermines any dogmatic approach to what Aristotle says about these sorts of definitions. I don't find this account of definitions very helpful anyway. Leibniz links it to the order of cataloguing. |
| 13000 | Truth is correspondence between mental propositions and what they are about [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Let us be content with looking for truth in the correspondence between the propositions which are in the mind and the things which they are about. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.05) | |
| A reaction: In an age when the nature of truth was hardly debated, and theories such as coherence and pragmatism, never mind semantic accounts, were unthought of, it is interesting to see that correspondence seems obvious to Leibniz. Correct! |
| 13282 | Aristotle relativises the notion of wholeness to different measures [Aristotle, by Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle proposes to relativise unity and plurality, so that a single object can be both one (indivisible) and many (divisible) simultaneously, without contradiction, relative to different measures. Wholeness has degrees, with the strength of the unity. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Kathrin Koslicki - The Structure of Objects 7.2.12 | |
| A reaction: [see Koslicki's account of Aristotle for details] As always, the Aristotelian approach looks by far the most promising. Simplistic mechanical accounts of how parts make wholes aren't going to work. We must include the conventional and conceptual bit. |
| 12992 | Logic teaches us how to order and connect our thoughts [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Logic teaches us how to order and connect our thoughts. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.10) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz had a higher opinion of logic than contemporaries like Locke. The question is whether logic can actually teach us better order than we could otherwise manage, or whether it just describes what most thinkers do. |
| 10056 | At bottom eternal truths are all conditional [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: At bottom eternal truths are all conditional, saying 'granted such a thing, such another thing is'. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.11.14), quoted by Alan Musgrave - Logicism Revisited §4 | |
| A reaction: Thus showing Leibniz to have sympathy with the if-thenist view. He cites geometry as his illustration. |
| 4730 | For Aristotle, the subject-predicate structure of Greek reflected a substance-accident structure of reality [Aristotle, by O'Grady] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle apparently believed that the subject-predicate structure of Greek reflected the substance-accident nature of reality. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Paul O'Grady - Relativism Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: We need not assume that Aristotle is wrong. It is a chicken-and-egg. There is something obvious about subject-predicate language, if one assumes that unified objects are part of nature, and not just conventional. |
| 12974 | People who can't apply names usually don't understand the thing to which it applies [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Someone who goes wrong in relating an idea to a name will usually go wrong about the thing he wants the name to stand for. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.29) | |
| A reaction: This seems to give tentative support to a Millian account of names, whose only content is just the thing which is named. Leibniz's observation certainly seems to be right. |
| 6653 | Syntactical methods of proof need only structure, where semantic methods (truth-tables) need truth [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Syntactical methods of proof (e.g.'natural deduction') have regard only to the formal structure of premises and conclusions, whereas semantic methods (e.g. truth-tables) consider their possible interpretations as expressing true or false propositions. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: This is highly significant, because the first method of reasoning could be mechanical, whereas the second requires truth, and hence meaning, and hence (presumably) consciousness. Is full rationality possible with 'natural deduction'? |
| 13002 | It is always good to reduce the number of axioms [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To reduce the number of axioms is always something gained. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.06) | |
| A reaction: This is rather revealing about the nature of axioms. They don't have any huge metaphysical status - in fact one might say that their status is epistemological, or even pedagogic. They enable us to get out minds round things. |
| 13008 | Geometry, unlike sensation, lets us glimpse eternal truths and their necessity [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: What I value most in geometry, considered as a contemplative study, is its letting us glimpse the true source of eternal truths and of the way in which we can come to grasp their necessity, which is something confused sensory images cannot reveal. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.12) | |
| A reaction: This is strikingly straight out of Plato. We should not underestimate this idea, though nowadays it is with us, but with geometry replaced by mathematical logic. |
| 12956 | Only whole numbers are multitudes of units [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The definition of 'number' as a multitude of units is appropriate only for whole numbers. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.15) | |
| A reaction: One can also define rational numbers by making use of units, but the strategy breaks down with irrational numbers like root-2 and pi. I still say the concept of a unit is the basis of numbers. Without whole numbers, we wouldn't call the real 'numbers'. |
| 12937 | We shouldn't just accept Euclid's axioms, but try to demonstrate them [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Far from approving the acceptance of doubtful principles, I want to see an attempt to demonstrate even Euclid's axioms, as some of the ancients tried to do. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: This is the old idea of axioms, as a bunch of basic self-evident truths, rather than the modern idea of an economical set of propositions from which to make deductions. Demonstration has to stop somewhere. |
| 12932 | The idea of being must come from our own existence [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I would like to know how we could have the idea of being if we did not, as beings ourselves, find being within us. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: I could envisage a creature with an entirely 'externa' mind, that just focused on environment, and took its own place in it unthinkingly for granted. I suppose he's right, though. |
| 12966 | Objects of ideas can be divided into abstract and concrete, and then further subdivided [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Divide terms, objects of ideas, into abstract and concrete, then the abstract into absolute and relational, the absolute into attributes and modifications, and those two into simple and composite; the concrete are substances and their substantial things. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.22) | |
| A reaction: Make your tree from this: ABSTRACT{absolute[attributes(simple)(composite)][modifications(simple)(composite)],relations}CONCRETE{[substance][substantial form]} |
| 12993 | Have five categories - substance, quantity, quality, action/passion, relation - and their combinations [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The scheme of categories is very useful, and it might be that all that is needed are five general headings for beings - namely substance, quantity, quality, action or passion, and relation - with any formed by composition from those. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.10) | |
| A reaction: 'Action or passion' as a single category sounds intriguing. He is very keen on active force in the world of physical objects, which presumably falls into this category. His plan sounds, initially, as good as any I have heard. |
| 12989 | Our true divisions of nature match reality, but are probably incomplete [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It can be said that whatever we truthfully distinguish or compare is also distinguished or made alike by nature, although nature has distinctions and comparisons which are unknown to us and which may be better than ours. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.06) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to be correct, though it is more like the credo of the sensible realist than it is like any sort of argument. |
| 12959 | We discern active power from our minds, so mind must be involved in all active powers [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The clearest idea of active power comes to us from the mind. So active power occurs only in things which are analogous to minds, that is, in entelechies; for strictly matter exhibits only passive power. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: If this is meant to be a precise argument, then 'so' and 'only' are blatantly unjustified. I guess that if it isn't analogous to a mind then he won't allow it to be a TRUE active power! I say mind arises from the entelechies of the physical brain. |
| 12967 | I use the word 'entelechy' for a power, to include endeavour, as well as mere aptitude [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If 'power' is the source of action, it means more than aptitude or ability. It also includes endeavour. It is in order to express this sense that I appropriate the term 'entelechy' to stand for power. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.22) | |
| A reaction: An 'entelechy' is, roughly, an instantiated thing, but I like what Leibniz is fishing for here - that we will never understand the world if we think of it as passive. |
| 12965 | All occurrence in the depth of a substance is spontaneous 'action' [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Anything which occurs in what is strictly a substance must be a case of 'action' in the metaphysically rigorous sense of something which occurs in the substance spontaneously, arising out of its own depths. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: I love this idea, which fits in with scientific essentialism. The question is whether Leibniz has idenified the end point of all explanations. Cutting edge physics is trying to give further explanations for what seemed basic, such as mass and gravity. |
| 12999 | Substances are primary powers; their ways of being are the derivative powers [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Primary powers are what make up the substances themselves; derivative powers, or 'faculties' if you like, are merely 'ways of being' - and they must be derived from substances. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.03) | |
| A reaction: We might talk of 'deep' and 'surface' properties, or maybe 'powers' and 'qualities' is better. 'Primary' and 'derivative' only gives the logical relationship, but not the causal relationship. |
| 5056 | Material or immaterial substances cannot be conceived without their essential activity [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I maintain that substances, whether material or immaterial, cannot be conceived in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance in general. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: Thus there could be no 'tabula rasa', because that would be an inactive mental substance. This strikes me as a nice question for modern physicists. Do they regard movement as essential, or an addition to bare particles? I'm with Leibniz. Essentialism. |
| 12969 | The active powers which are not essential to the substance are the 'real qualities' [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Powers which are not essential to substance, and which include not merely an aptitude but also a certain endeavour, are exactly what are or should be meant by 'real qualities'. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.23) | |
| A reaction: An important part of Leibniz's account. There are thus essential powers, in the 'depth' of the substance, and more peripheral powers, which also initiate action, and give rise to the qualities. The second must derive from the first? |
| 12941 | There cannot be power without action; the power is a disposition to act [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Where will one ever find in the world a faculty consisting in sheer power without performing an act? There is always a particular disposition to action, and towards one action rather than another. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: This is muddled. Leibniz defends powers in the possibilities of things, but he must then accept that some possibilities may never be realised, as with two complex chemicals which never ever come into contact with one another. |
| 12990 | Real (non-logical) abstract terms are either essences or accidents [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Real (as opposed to logical) abstract terms, or at least those which are conceived as real, are either essences or parts of essences, or else accidents (i.e. beings added to a substance). | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.08) | |
| A reaction: Interesting to refer to accidents as 'beings'. This seems to fit abstraction by ignoring, since you can either ignore the accidents to get the essence, or ignore the essence to get the accidents. |
| 12939 | Wholly uniform things like space and numbers are mere abstractions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Things which are uniform, containing no variety, are always mere abstractions: for instance, time, space, and the other entities of pure mathematics. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: I presume that being 'mere abstractions' denies them ontological status, and makes them creations of thought. If so, I like this idea a lot. |
| 12979 | The only way we can determine individuals is by keeping hold of them [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is impossible for us to know individuals or to find any way of precisely determining the individuality of any thing except by keeping hold of the thing itself. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: 'The tallest woman in London' seems to determine someone perfectly well, though only by cross-referencing universal concepts like 'tall'. |
| 12971 | If two individuals could be indistinguishable, there could be no principle of individuation [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If two individuals were perfectly similar and equal and, in short, indistinguishable in themselves, there would be no principle of individuation. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the main motive for Leibniz's unusual claim that there cannot be two indiscernible individuals, but it looks suspiciously like an a priori claim made about what should be an a posteriori discovery. Are electrons distinguishable? |
| 13098 | We use things to distinguish places and times, not vice versa [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is by means of things that we must distinguish one time and place from another, rather than vice versa. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27) | |
| A reaction: This rests on Leibniz's relative view of space (as opposed to Newton's absolute view). If you need to re-identify a thing to individuate it, re-identifying the exact place or time seems impossible, but it is usually manageable with thing. |
| 13075 | No two things are quite the same, so there must be an internal principle of distinction [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: In addition to the difference of time or of place there must always be an internal principle of distinction: although there can be many things of the same kind, it is still the case that none of them are ever exactly alike. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27) | |
| A reaction: This rests on Leibniz's unusual view that all things (even electrons) are qualitatively distinct. Personally I disagree with that, but agree with the idea. Things have time and place because they have identity, not the other way around. |
| 12953 | Fluidity is basic, and we divide into bodies according to our needs [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Fluidity is the fundamental condition, and the division into bodies is carried out - there being no obstacle to it - according to our need. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.13) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz is referring to what he usually calls 'aggregates', like piles of bricks, which are things lacking a unifying substance. There may be no true substances, in which fluidity is the order of the day. |
| 12943 | Individuality is in the bond substance gives between past and future [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Within each substance there is a perfect bond between the future and the past, which is what creates the identity of the individual. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: I'm not quite sure if this means anything, but the idea that a bond across time is a necessity for intrinsic identity is interesting. The 'bond' would, I take it, have to be a causal one. |
| 11855 | Substances cannot be bare, but have activity as their essence [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I maintain that substances (material or immaterial) cannot be conceived in their bare essence devoid of activity; that activity is of the essence of substance in general | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref 65) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz liked the idea that God was the source of this activity, but this remark makes Leibniz a direct ancestor of modern scientific essentialism. |
| 12970 | We can imagine two bodies interpenetrating, as two rays of light seem to [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We find that two shadows or two rays of light interpenetrate, and we could devise an imaginary world where bodies did the same. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27) | |
| A reaction: I suspect this is a case of being able to imagine something when you don't fully understand it (like a bonfire on the Moon), but when you fully understand the modern physics of it, you see the necessity of separation between objects. |
| 12986 | The essence of baldness is vague and imperfect [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There are vague and imperfect essences, as in the question of how few hairs a man can have without being bald. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.05) | |
| A reaction: This example is much discussed in contemporary debate, but I now learn that it has a venerable history. The surprise here is the word 'essences', because I had taken Leibnizian essences to be 'perfect ideas', and hence precise. |
| 13276 | The unmoved mover and the soul show Aristotelian form as the ultimate mereological atom [Aristotle, by Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle's discussion of the unmoved mover and of the soul confirms the suspicion that form, when it is not thought of as the object represented in a definition, plays the role of the ultimate mereological atom within his system. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Kathrin Koslicki - The Structure of Objects 6.6 | |
| A reaction: Aristotle is concerned with which things are 'divisible', and he cites these two examples as indivisible, but they may be too unusual to offer an actual theory of how Aristotle builds up wholes from atoms. He denies atoms in matter. |
| 13277 | The 'form' is the recipe for building wholes of a particular kind [Aristotle, by Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: Thus in Aristotle we may think of an object's formal components as a sort of recipe for how to build wholes of that particular kind. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Kathrin Koslicki - The Structure of Objects 7.2.5 | |
| A reaction: In the elusive business of pinning down what Aristotle means by the crucial idea of 'form', this analogy strikes me as being quite illuminating. It would fit DNA in living things, and the design of an artifact. |
| 12968 | A 'substratum' is just a metaphor for whatever supports several predicates [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: From the beginning we conceive several predicates in a single subject, and that is all there is to these metaphorical words 'support' and 'substratum'. So I do not see why it is made out to involve a problem. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.23) | |
| A reaction: The question is whether the substratum is 'bare' if you remove all the predicates, and clearly Leibniz believes you are left with true essential substance (although the removal process is presumably only possible in thought, thanks to God). |
| 12931 | Particular truths are just instances of general truths [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The reasons for particular truths rest wholly on the more general ones of which they are mere instances. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: Clearly particulars have their own distinctive truth, but the Leibniz case seems to be that a particular is a unique intersection for an array of general truths - and nothing else. Audrey Hepburn's smile has no generalities to it. |
| 12811 | We can't know individuals, or determine their exact individuality [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is impossible for us to have knowledge of individuals and to find the means of determining exactly the individuality of everything. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle was clearly also tempted by this doubt (since universals are involved), though individuals are what he wanted to understand. I think they are wrong. Leibniz gives the bizarre reason that we can't know individuals as they each contain infinity. |
| 12981 | Essence is just the possibility of a thing [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Essence is fundamentally nothing but the possibility of the thing under consideration. Something which is thought possible is expressed by a definition. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: It is unclear whether he means 'possible modes of existence' or 'possible actions of the thing'. Leibniz sees more clearly than Aristotle that essences extend beyond the actual thing, because Leibniz is more aware of the active powers. |
| 5057 | If you fully understand a subject and its qualities, you see how the second derive from the first [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Every time we find some quality in a subject, we ought to think that, if we understood the nature of this subject and of this quality, we should conceive how this quality could result from it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: Thus (in Kripke's analogy) God cannot make 'subjects' on Thursday and then add 'qualities' on Friday. Add the point that all subjects are physical, and I say you have the whole story. The physical entails the mental. The laws result from the qualities. |
| 12987 | For some sorts, a member of it is necessarily a member [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There are sorts or species such that if an individual has ever been of such a sort or species it cannot (naturally, at least) stop being of it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.06) | |
| A reaction: Note the thoughtful 'naturally, at least', which blocks genetic engineering. But natural selection is genetic engineering. Crucially, Leibniz is not attributing this to all sorts or species, and allows exceptions. |
| 12884 | The same whole ceases to exist if a part is lost [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We cannot say - with complete fidelity to the truth of things - that the same whole continues to exist if a part of it is lost. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27.11) | |
| A reaction: This is the reference Simons 1987:319 gives when he claims that Leibniz accepts mereological essentialism. I think this is mereological necessity of identity, but not what I call 'essentialism'. That has to distinguish essential from non-essential. |
| 12975 | We have a distinct idea of gold, to define it, but not a perfect idea, to understand it [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: That gold is a metal which resists cupellation and is insoluble in aquafortis is a distinct idea, for it gives us the criteria or definition of 'gold'. But it is not a perfect idea, because we know too little about cupellation and actions of aquafortis. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.31) | |
| A reaction: This connects the 'perfect idea' of something with knowing its active substance, and hence its essence. See Idea 12976 for the connection between perfect ideas and definitions. |
| 12805 | If two people apply a single term to different resemblances, they refer to two different things [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If one person applies the name 'avarice' to one resemblance, and some one else to another, there will be two different species designated by the same name. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 6.6.292), quoted by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz and Locke on Essences p.199 | |
| A reaction: Part of Leibniz's sustained attack on Locke's nominal essences. There is clearly an uninteresting nominal essence, where a 'big brown bear' is necessarily brown, but in the interesting respects I think Leibniz is right. |
| 12806 | Locke needs many instances to show a natural kind, but why not a single instance? [Leibniz, by Jolley] |
| Full Idea: Leibniz points out that it is a concealed premise of Locke's argument that if a natural kind exists it must have many instances, but there seems no a priori objection to the idea of a species with just one member. | |
| From: report of Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 6.6.311) by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz and Locke on Essences p.200 | |
| A reaction: I can't see this bothering Locke. Generally we formulate nominal essences by induction from bundles of ideas, but we can formulate a cautious first stab at it from one instance. If you see a new creature, is it a normal one, or a 'monster'? |
| 6618 | A 'substance' is a thing that remains the same when its properties change [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: By 'substance', in the context of the mind, we mean a persisting object or thing which can undergo changes in its properties over time while remaining one and the same thing. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: A neat account of the traditional philosophical notion of a substance. It invites the obvious question of how you know that a thing is the same if all of its properties seem to have changed (as with Descartes' wax). Epistemology discredits ontology. |
| 12972 | Bodies, like Theseus's ship, are only the same in appearance, and never strictly the same [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We must acknowledge that organic bodies as well as others remain 'the same' only in appearance, and not strictly speaking. It is rather like the river whose water is continually changing, or like Theseus's ship which Athenians constantly repaired. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27) | |
| A reaction: This is Leibniz's standard view, that something only remains the same if it has a unifying substance, and so a collection of planks is just an aggregate, and doesn't have any identity to begin with. |
| 5055 | No two things are totally identical [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: By virtue of insensible variations, two individual things can never be perfectly alike. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This sounds a bit like the 'discernibility of non-identicals', except that he says that the differences may not be 'sensible'. He has to be talking of physical things, since I presume that, say, the symmetry of two circles is perfectly identical. |
| 12978 | A perfect idea of an object shows that the object is possible [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: One mark of a perfect idea is that it shows conclusively that the object is possible. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.31) | |
| A reaction: Subtle but nice. My favourite example would be that the perfect idea of a bonfire on the Moon shows that it is not possible. Essence reveals necessity, as Aristotle and Kit Fine claim. A perfect idea has a single definition. |
| 17079 | Proofs of necessity come from the understanding, where they have their source [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The fundamental proof of necessary truths comes from the understanding alone, and other truths come from experience or from observations of the senses. Our mind is capable of knowing truths of both sorts, but it is the source of the former. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: Interesting because it not only spells out that necessary truths are known a priori, but also explicitly says that the understanding is the 'source' of the truths, or at least the source of their proofs. He also says possibilities derive from essences. |
| 5991 | For Aristotle, knowledge is of causes, and is theoretical, practical or productive [Aristotle, by Code] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle thinks that in general we have knowledge or understanding when we grasp causes, and he distinguishes three fundamental types of knowledge - theoretical, practical and productive. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Alan D. Code - Aristotle | |
| A reaction: Productive knowledge we tend to label as 'knowing how'. The centrality of causes for knowledge would get Aristotle nowadays labelled as a 'naturalist'. It is hard to disagree with his three types, though they may overlap. |
| 12960 | We understand things when they are distinct, and we can derive necessities from them [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We understand the things of which we are aware only when we have distinct ideas of them accompanied by the power to reflect and to derive necessary truths from those ideas. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: A rather startling way of putting it, but we also say that good understanding brings the power to predict. What must you understand in order to predict? What has to happen next! |
| 12998 | Understanding grasps the agreements and disagreements of ideas [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Ordinarily, when ideas are thoroughly understood, their agreements and disagreements are apparent. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.02) | |
| A reaction: In other words, there is a holistic aspect of understanding, which makes us ask how understanding ever gets off the ground. Is it not possible to understand a single idea in isolation? |
| 6635 | Causal theories of belief make all beliefs true, and can't explain belief about the future [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The causal theory of beliefs seems condemned to treat all beliefs as true, which is absurd, …and we do not want to say that tomorrow's rain 'causes' today's belief that it will rain tomorrow. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 4) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at Fodor. A false belief might be caused by reality if one had one's internal wires crossed, and a belief about the future might be caused by events happening now. This theory is not dead. |
| 13006 | Certainty is where practical doubt is insane, or at least blameworthy [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Certainty might be knowledge of a truth such that to doubt it in a practical way would be insane; and sometimes it is taken more broadly, to cover cases where doubt would be very blameworthy. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.11) | |
| A reaction: The normative aspect of the second half of this touches on a trend in recent epistemology. You have rights to believe, and duties to believe, and virtues for the justifying process. I prefer more neutral, value-free epistemology. |
| 12996 | I know more than I think, since I know I think A then B then C [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Not only is it immediately evident to me that I think, but it is just as evident that I think various thoughts: at one time I think about A and at another about B and so on. Thus the Cartesian principle is sound, but it is not the only one of its kind. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.02) | |
| A reaction: I don't suppose that Descartes would object to this, but he was aware that there didn't seem to be any actual introspective experience that united the various thoughts into a single thinker. Only logical connections between the thoughts does that. |
| 13003 | The Cogito doesn't prove existence, because 'I am thinking' already includes 'I am' [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To say 'I think therefore I am' is not really to prove existence from thought, since 'to think' and 'to be thinking' are one and the same, and to say 'I am thinking' [je suis pensant] is already to say 'I am' [je suis]. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.07) | |
| A reaction: This is the objection which was offered by A.J. Ayer, and I take it to the one of the two principle objections to the Cogito (i.e. that it may be a tautology), along with the objection about the assumption of the continuity of the same thinker. |
| 6619 | Perhaps 'I' no more refers than the 'it' in 'it is raining' [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps the 'I' in 'I think' no more serves to pick out a certain object than does the 'it' in 'it is raining'. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 2) | |
| A reaction: A nice example to remind us that not all English pronouns have genuine reference. You could reply that 'it' does refer, to the weather; or that you can switch to 'you think', but not to 'they/we are raining'. |
| 6643 | 'Ecological' approaches say we don't infer information, but pick it up directly from reality [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The 'ecological' approach to perception resists the idea that our brains have to construct information about our environment by inference from sensations, because the information is already present in the environment, available to well-tuned senses. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: The psychologist J.J.Gibson is the source of this view. This pushes us towards direct realism, and away from representative theories, which are based too much on problems arising from illusions (which are freak cases). Interesting. |
| 11239 | The notion of a priori truth is absent in Aristotle [Aristotle, by Politis] |
| Full Idea: The notion of a priori truth is conspicuously absent in Aristotle. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Vassilis Politis - Aristotle and the Metaphysics 1.5 | |
| A reaction: Cf. Idea 11240. |
| 21253 | Descartes needs to demonstrate how other people can attain his clear and distinct conceptions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is not sufficient for Descartes to claim that he perceives something in himself clearly and distinctly, for this is to not complete the demonstration, unless he shows the method through which others can attain the same experience. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], App X) | |
| A reaction: For the simplest rational insight this seems a rather tough requirement. If you say A>B, and B>C, so A>C, then once you have grasped the concept of 'greater than' I'm not sure there is a further possible demonstration. |
| 12933 | Arithmetic and geometry are implicitly innate, awaiting revelation [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I would name the propositions of arithmetic and geometry as innate. ...The actual knowledge of them is not innate. What is innate is what might be called the implicit knowledge of them, as the veins of marble outline a shape for the sculptor. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: This seems to walk straight into the empiricist guns. The marble example shows the problem, because the 'veins' will hardly outline David in the block. Locke's challenge is to show that merely 'implicit' ideas have demonstrable reality. |
| 12991 | Children learn language fast, with little instruction and few definitions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I have sometimes been amazed that children can learn languages so early, ...considering how little trouble is taken to instruct children in their native tongue, and how little thought adults give to getting sharp definitions. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.10) | |
| A reaction: A striking anticipation of the key observation on which Chomsky built his theories, from a philosopher who was equally concerned to defend innate ideas and innate knowledge. |
| 12929 | All of our thoughts come from within the soul, and not from the senses [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I always accepted the innate idea of God, but my new system says all the thoughts and actions of the soul come from its own depths and could not be given to it by the senses. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to adjudicate on this one. The counterexamples would be associations. I see a face in the crowd and think of my friend. But Leibniz could be right even about that. Who cares? Externalism is designed to bypass this problem. |
| 12940 | What is left of the 'blank page' if you remove the ideas? [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Those who hold forth about the 'blank page' cannot say what is left of it once the ideas have been taken away. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: This is a decisive criticism of the total tabula rasa idea, but empiricists responded by developing associationism - that what remains is principles of association for incoming experience. Brain mechanisms, we might say. |
| 19358 | Colour and pain must express the nature of their stimuli, without exact resemblance [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Ideas such as those of colour and pain are not arbitrary. ...That is not God's way ...I would say there is a resemblance of a kind, not a perfect one, but a resemblance in which one thing expresses another through some orderly relationship between them. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.08) | |
| A reaction: The main point of Locke's idea of 'secondary' qualities is that (unlike the 'primary' ones) they bear no resemblance to their stimuli. It's not much of an argument from Leibniz, to say that is not God's way, but he has a vast system to support his claim. |
| 12948 | A pain doesn't resemble the movement of a pin, but it resembles the bodily movement pins cause [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is true that pain does not resemble the movement of a pin; but it might thoroughly resemble the motions which the pin causes in our body, and it might resemble them in the soul; and I have not the least doubt that it does. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.08) | |
| A reaction: He may not have the least doubt, but the rest of us do, I should think. Try as I will, I cannot see any resemblance between pain and a motion. What feeling does a pendulum resemble? |
| 6638 | One must be able to visually recognise a table, as well as knowing its form [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: A bare knowledge that tables have a particular form will not enable one to recognise a table visually, unless one knows how something with such a form typically appears or looks from a variety of different angles. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a rather significant point, if we are trying to work out how concepts and models operate in the process of perception. Lowe points out that with electrons, we have some knowledge of the form, but no capacity for recognition. |
| 6644 | Computationalists object that the 'ecological' approach can't tell us how we get the information [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Computational psychologists object to the 'ecological' approach to perception (with its externalist, direct realist picture), because it leaves us entirely in the dark as to how our senses 'pick up' information about the environment. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: I find myself siding with the computationalists, but then I have always favoured the representational view of perception among philosophers. Lowe comments that both approaches neglect actual experience. We construct models, e.g. of London. |
| 6647 | Comparing shapes is proportional in time to the angle of rotation [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: When two objects, one of them rotated, are compared, the length of time it takes the subjects to determine they are of the same shape is roughly proportional to the size of angle of rotation, ...which suggests analogue modes of representation. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 7) | |
| A reaction: I consider this to be highly significant for our whole understanding of the mind, which I think of as a set of models organised like a database. Think about the weather, phenomenalism, London, the Renaissance, your leg. You play with models. |
| 6639 | The 'disjunctive' theory of perception says true perceptions and hallucinations need have nothing in common [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The 'disjunctive' theory of perception says that we have either veridical perception or else hallucination, but there is no common element in the form of a 'perceptual experience' which would be present in either case and merely caused in different ways. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: McDowell is associated with this view. It seems to be another attempt to get rid of sense-data. It seems odd, though, to say that a hallucination of a dagger has nothing in common at all with experience of real daggers. Why did hallucinations evolve? |
| 13005 | Truth arises among sensations from grounding reasons and from regularities [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The truth of sensible things is established by the links amongst them; these depend upon intellectual truths, grounded in reason, and upon observations of regularities among sensible things themselves, even when the reasons are not apparent. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.11) | |
| A reaction: It's not clear why regularities would establish truths, given that most hallucinations have regularities in them. I'm thinking that Leibniz is not sufficiently rationalist here, and that it is the rational coherence of experience which validates it. |
| 6640 | A causal theorist can be a direct realist, if all objects of perception are external [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: A causal theorist can be a 'direct realist' in the sense that he can hold that the only objects of perception are external objects. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: There still seem to be problems with perceiving reflections, or very distant objects (the time-lag problem), or perceiving 'secondary' qualities. |
| 6645 | If blindsight shows we don't need perceptual experiences, the causal theory is wrong [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: If we don't need to have perceptual experiences in order to see things (as 'blindsight' might suggest), the causal theory of perception cannot be correct. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: This is because the causal theory implies a chain of events culminating in experience as the last stage. There is no suggestion, though, that unconscious perception would be non-causal, as it bypasses all the problems about consciousness. |
| 6637 | How could one paraphrase very complex sense-data reports adverbially? [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: How could one paraphrase the sense-datum report 'I am aware of a red square sense-datum to the right of a blue round sense-datum' in an adverbial way? 'I am appeared to redly and squarely and roundly and bluely'? | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 5) | |
| A reaction: It is a nice question, but not an instant refutation of the adverbial theory. Vision may be a complex tangle of modes of seeing things, rather than a large collection of sense-data. As I look out of the window, how many sense-data do I experience? |
| 23312 | Aristotle is a rationalist, but reason is slowly acquired through perception and experience [Aristotle, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle is a rationalist …but reason for him is a disposition which we only acquire over time. Its acquisition is made possible primarily by perception and experience. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Michael Frede - Aristotle's Rationalism p.173 | |
| A reaction: I would describe this process as the gradual acquisition of the skill of objectivity, which needs the right knowledge and concepts to evaluate new experiences. |
| 4302 | You may experience a universal truth, but only reason can tell you that it is always true [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: However often one experiences instances of a universal truth, one could never know inductively that it would always hold unless one knew through reason that it was necessary. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: The problem, though, is that as soon as we go beyond experience we are not very reliable, and are liable to arrogance, error and lack of imagination. |
| 12947 | We only believe in sensible things when reason helps the senses [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The senses could not convince us of the existence of sensible things without help from reason. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.07) | |
| A reaction: This nicely pinpoints the big difficulty which keeps besetting orthodox empiricism. I've been educated as an empiricist, but I prefer Leibniz to Berkeley or Hume, and even to the more sensible Locke. |
| 12930 | The senses are confused, and necessities come from distinct intellectual ideas [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Intellectual ideas, from which necessary truths arise, do not come from the senses. ...The ideas that come from the senses are confused; and so too, at least in part, are the truths which depend on them, whereas intellectual ideas are distinct. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: One might compare Descartes' example of the chiliagon, which is only grasped clearly by the intellect. However, the problem of vagueness seems to intrude as much into intellectual ideas as it does into the senses. He was a mathematician... |
| 13001 | Our sensation of green is a confused idea, like objects blurred by movement [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The sensory idea of green (made of blue and yellow) is a confused idea, like the swift rotation of a cog-wheel which makes us perceive an artificial transparency, and we are not able to discern the cause, the idea of the teeth on the wheel. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.06) | |
| A reaction: This is one of Leibniz's less well-known objections to empiricism. He always says that intellectual ideas are capable of a clarity which is never found in sensory experience. |
| 16111 | Aristotle wants to fit common intuitions, and therefore uses language as a guide [Aristotle, by Gill,ML] |
| Full Idea: Since Aristotle generally prefers a metaphysical theory that accords with common intuitions, he frequently relies on facts about language to guide his metaphysical claims. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Mary Louise Gill - Aristotle on Substance Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: I approve of his procedure. I take intuition to be largely rational justifications too complex for us to enunciate fully, and language embodies folk intuitions in its concepts (especially if the concepts occur in many languages). |
| 6667 | There are memories of facts, memories of practical skills, and autobiographical memory [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Memory of facts is quite different from memory of practical skills, and both are quite distinct from what is sometimes called personal or autobiographical memory. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: If we accept David Marshall's proposal (Idea 6668), then all of the mind is memory, of many different types, and so the above analysis will be much too simple. |
| 12949 | Light takes time to reach us, so objects we see may now not exist [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Since rays of light need time - however little - to reach us, it is possible that the object should be destroyed during the interval and no longer exist when the light reaches the eye. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.09) | |
| A reaction: This is the well know 'time lag' argument. Leibniz is no sceptic, but he can hardly fail to accept the truth of this problem. It seems self-evident that stars we observe may no longer exist, although special relativity confuses that issue. |
| 6642 | Psychologists say illusions only occur in unnatural and passive situations [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Psychologists point out that illusions almost always occur in unnatural environments in which subjects are prevented from exploiting the natural interplay between perception and action. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: It has always struck me that philosophers make a great deal out of illusions, but I don't think I have ever had one. I don't know anyone who has seen a non-existent dagger. |
| 16971 | Plato says sciences are unified around Forms; Aristotle says they're unified around substance [Aristotle, by Moravcsik] |
| Full Idea: Plato's unity of science principle states that all - legitimate - sciences are ultimately about the Forms. Aristotle's principle states that all sciences must be, ultimately, about substances, or aspects of substances. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE], 1) by Julius Moravcsik - Aristotle on Adequate Explanations 1 |
| 5053 | The instances confirming a general truth are never enough to establish its necessity [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: All the instances which confirm a general truth, however numerous they may be, are not sufficient to establish the universal necessity of this same truth. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This is Leibniz's standardly rationalist view of induction. We can either say that induction is therefore inadequate, or (a better option) that there isn't much evidence for claims of necessity, and they must be treated with caution. |
| 11243 | Aristotelian explanations are facts, while modern explanations depend on human conceptions [Aristotle, by Politis] |
| Full Idea: For Aristotle things which explain (the explanantia) are facts, which should not be associated with the modern view that says explanations are dependent on how we conceive and describe the world (where causes are independent of us). | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Vassilis Politis - Aristotle and the Metaphysics 2.1 | |
| A reaction: There must be some room in modern thought for the Aristotelian view, if some sort of robust scientific realism is being maintained against the highly linguistic view of philosophy found in the twentieth century. |
| 3320 | Aristotle's standard analysis of species and genus involves specifying things in terms of something more general [Aristotle, by Benardete,JA] |
| Full Idea: The standard Aristotelian doctrine of species and genus in the theory of anything whatever involves specifying what the thing is in terms of something more general. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by José A. Benardete - Metaphysics: the logical approach Ch.10 |
| 12000 | Aristotle regularly says that essential properties explain other significant properties [Aristotle, by Kung] |
| Full Idea: The view that essential properties are those in virtue of which other significant properties of the subjects under investigation can be explained is encountered repeatedly in Aristotle's work. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Joan Kung - Aristotle on Essence and Explanation IV | |
| A reaction: What does 'significant' mean here? I take it that the significant properties are the ones which explain the role, function and powers of the object. |
| 12977 | We will only connect our various definitions of gold when we understand it more deeply [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We can define gold as the heaviest metal, or by assaying procedures, but only when men have penetrated more deeply into the nature of things will they be able to see why one belongs with the other. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.31) | |
| A reaction: He mentions that geometry is different, because we do have perfect ideas of things. This is part of Leibniz's optimism about the future of science, in comparison with the surprising pessimism of the empiricists. See Idea 12976 and Idea 12975. |
| 6641 | Externalists say minds depend on environment for their very existence and identity [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Externalism maintains that our minds 'reach out' into our physical environment, at least in the sense that our states of mind can depend for their very existence and identity upon what things that environment contains. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: A nice statement of the externalist view. Does this mean that a brain in a vat would not have a mind? Does a photograph 'reach out' to its subject-matter? |
| 6617 | The main questions are: is mind distinct from body, and does it have unique properties? [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy of mind seems to address the questions of whether the mind is distinct from the body, and whether the mind has properties, such as consciousness, which are unique to it. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Simple enough, but the modern debate seems to centre on the second question, which is here stated nice and clearly. Of course, wild garlic has a unique smell, but that doesn't quite qualify as a 'unique property'. Are the properties of mind unpredictable? |
| 5054 | Animal thought is a shadow of reasoning, connecting sequences of images by imagination [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The sequences of the brutes are but a shadow of reasoning, that is to say, they are but connexions of imagination, transitions from one image to another. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This account of animal thought cannot capture the fact that they are motivated by their images, and obviously make decisions based on them. Externally, there is usually an obvious reason why even an insect does something. |
| 6626 | 'Phenomenal' consciousness is of qualities; 'apperceptive' consciousness includes beliefs and desires [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: There is 'phenomenal' consciousness, which is what is distinctive of qualitative states of experience, and 'apperceptive' consciousness, which is awareness of all of one's mental states, including beliefs and desires. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: I am not convinced that this distinction is sharp enough to be useful, though I approve of trying to analyse the components of consciousness. Is there 'intentional' consciousness? Desires, and even beliefs, can have qualities. |
| 12944 | It is a serious mistake to think that we are aware of all of our perceptions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Many errors can flow from the belief that the only perceptions in the soul are the ones of which it is aware. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: What a perceptive remark, for its time! I took it that it was only modern neuroscience and psychology which had woken us up to how much non-conscious activity is central to the mind. |
| 6646 | The brain may have two systems for vision, with only the older one intact in blindsight [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Some physiologists maintain that the human brain is equipped with two different visual systems, an older one and a more recently evolved one, only the first of which is intact in blindsight subjects. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: Ramachandran (on TV) suggested that lizards lack the newer system, and therefore may not actually be conscious. The proposal of two systems seems to make nice sense of an odd phenomenon. We clearly have a non-conscious route to visual information. |
| 12951 | Abstraction attends to the general, not the particular, and involves universal truths [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Beasts recognise whiteness, but this does not amount to abstraction, which requires attention to the general apart from the particular, and consequently involves knowledge of universal truths. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.11) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure where 'truth' creeps into this. I might hallucinate pink elephants, and abstract the general notion of pink from them. Nevertheless, the features picked out in abstraction tend to be the shared features. |
| 19364 | Volition automatically endeavours to move towards what it sees as good (and away from bad) [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Volition is the effort or endeavour ('conatus') to move towards what one finds good and away from what one finds bad, the endeavour arising immediately out of one's awareness of those things. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: Modern neuroscience seems to confirm that there is a chicken-and-egg problem here. Is the moment of perception as good or bad itself an act of volition, or is it neutral? |
| 6665 | Persons are selves - subjects of experience, with reflexive self-knowledge [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that persons are selves - that is, they are subjects of experience which have the capacity to recognised themselves as being individual subjects of experience; selves possess reflexive self-knowledge. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: I would express this as 'a capacity for meta-thought'. I increasingly see that as the hallmark of homo sapiens, and the key quality I look for in assessing the intelligence of aliens. Very intelligent people are exceptionally self-aware. |
| 6670 | If my brain could survive on its own, I cannot be identical with my whole body [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: If, as seems intuitively plausible, I could survive with my brain detached from the rest of my body, I most certainly cannot be identical with my whole body. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: A key mistake is to treat the notion of 'I' as all-or-nothing. My surviving brain is much more like me than my surviving kidney, but the notion of my brain saying to my family 'it's me in that jar over there' sounds wrong. It is a bit of me. |
| 6671 | It seems impossible to get generally applicable mental concepts from self-observation [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: It seems impossible for me to acquire perfectly general concepts of thought and feeling, applicable to other people as well as to myself, purely from some queer kind of mental self-observation, but this is what the observational model demands. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: I don't understand the word 'queer' here, which seems part of an odd modern fashion for denigrating introspection. It is right, though, that the acquisition of general mental concepts from my mind seems to depend on analogy, which is a suspect method. |
| 12942 | Memory doesn't make identity; a man who relearned everything would still be the same man [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If a man were made young again, and learned everything anew - would that make him a different man? So it is not memory that makes the very same man. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz takes this as a foregone conclusion. If you flipped to a possible world where someone you know well, as a physical being, has been brought up entirely differently (new language, culture, ethics etc), is it really the same person? |
| 12973 | We know our own identity by psychological continuity, even if there are some gaps [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To discover one's own moral identity unaided, it is sufficient that between one state and a neighbouring (or just a nearby) one there be a mediating bond of consciousness, even if this has a jump or forgotten interval mixed into it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz appears to accept the psychological continuity view of personal identity (which was probably a new problem to him), even though he rightly rejects the account based purely on memory. |
| 6666 | All human languages have an equivalent of the word 'I' [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Every human language appears to have a word or expression equivalent to the English word 'I'. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch.10) | |
| A reaction: If this is true (what is his evidence?) I take it to be very significant support for what I take to be obvious anyway, that the mind/brain has a central controlling core, which understands and decides, and which is the most valued part of us. |
| 19368 | The will determines action, by what is seen as good, but it does not necessitate it [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Choice, however much the will is determined to make it, should not be called absolutely and strictly necessary: a predominance of goods of which one is aware inclines without necessitating, though this is determining and never fails to have its effect. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: Something like seeing that 7+5 equals 12 makes you say '12', but it doesn't actually necessitate your saying '12'? Certain facts seem determined by nature, but not necessitated. Or not necessarily necessitated? |
| 6625 | If qualia are causally inert, how can we even know about them? [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The idea that 'qualia' exist but are causally inert is difficult to sustain: for if they are causally inert, how can we even know about them? | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: The brain might be a special case. I can't know about a 'causally inert' object in my kitchen, but I might know about it if in some way I AM that object. Personally, though, I think everything that exists is causally active. |
| 6621 | You can only identify behaviour by ascribing belief, so the behaviour can't explain the belief [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: One must already understand what it means to ascribe to someone a belief that it is raining in order to be able to generate the items on the list of rain-behaviour, so the list cannot be used to explain what it means to ascribe to someone such a belief. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: This is thought by many to be a decisive objection of behaviourism, because it makes the enterprise hopelessly circular. If I put up an umbrella when it was dry, you would probably infer that I believed it was raining. |
| 6654 | A computer program is equivalent to the person AND the manual [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: A computer executing its program is not equivalent to the English-speaker in the Chinese Room, but to the combination of the English-speaker and the operation manual. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: Searle replies that there would be no understanding even if the person learned the manual off by heart. However, if we ask 'Is there any understanding of the universe in Newton's book?' the answer has to be 'yes'. So the manual contains understanding. |
| 6629 | Functionalism commits us to bizarre possibilities, such as 'zombies' [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Functionalism seems to commit us to bizarre possibilities, such as 'zombies'. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: This goes with the tendency of functionalism to imply epiphenomenalism - that is, to make the intrinsic character of mental states irrelevant to thinking. I'd love to eavesdrop on two zombies in an art gallery. |
| 6623 | Functionalism can't distinguish our experiences in spectrum inversion [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: It seems that functionalism can recognise no difference between my colour experiences and yours, in the case of spectrum inversion, suggesting that it fails to characterise colour experience adequately, by omitting its qualitative character. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: This is a standard objection to functionalism, but then it is an objection to most other theories as well. Even dualism just offers a mystery as to why experiences have qualities. Observing a patch of red involves about three billion brain connections. |
| 6628 | Functionalism only discusses relational properties of mental states, not intrinsic properties [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Functionalism has nothing positive to say about the intrinsic properties of mental states, only something about their relational properties. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me highly significant. All references to function (e.g. in Aristotle) invite the question of what enables something to have that function. Maybe the core question of philosophy of mind is whether mental states are intrinsic or relational. |
| 6622 | Non-reductive physicalism accepts token-token identity (not type-type) and asserts 'supervenience' of mind and brain [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The rejection of type-type identity and acceptance of token-token identity is referred to as 'non-reductive physicalism', and is usually link with the idea that mental state types are not identical with physical state types, but 'supervene' on them. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: A nice summary of the view (built on the arguments of Davidson) which has also become known as 'property dualism'. Personally I regard it as dangerous nonsense. If two things 'supervene' on one another, the first question to ask is: why? |
| 6634 | Physicalists must believe in narrow content (because thoughts are merely the brain states) [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Physicalists will, it seems, be committed to the notion of narrow content, because if a person and their counterpart are neurological duplicates, they must exemplify the same mental state types, and thus possess beliefs with the same contents. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 4) | |
| A reaction: Very important. How many philosophers currently believe in both wide content and reductive physicalism? However, if content is physical brain-plus-environment, we might reply that the whole package must be identical for same content. Cf Idea 7884! |
| 6630 | Eliminativism is incoherent if it eliminates reason and truth as well as propositional attitudes [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Eliminative materialism may be accused of incoherence, insofar as is threatens to eliminate reason and truth along with the propositional attitudes. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 3) | |
| A reaction: Lowe does not enlarge on this intriguing suggestion. I don't see a threat to truth, if brain events represent the outer world, as they can do it more or less well. Logic is built on truth. Reason grows out of logic. Evidence seems okay… Hm. |
| 6648 | Some behaviourists believe thought is just suppressed speech [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Some behaviourists have held the view that thinking just is, in effect, suppressed speech. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 7) | |
| A reaction: He cites J.B.Watson. This would imply that infants and animals can't think. Introspecting my own case, I don't believe it. When I am navigating through a town, for example, I directly relate to my mental map; I see little sign of anything verbal. |
| 12935 | Every feeling is the perception of a truth [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Every feeling is the perception of a truth. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: I wouldn't say feelings ARE perceptions of truths, but I might say that every experience we have has an intellectual dimension as well as an emotional one. Our beliefs drift and solidify in just the same way that feelings do. |
| 6651 | People are wildly inaccurate in estimating probabilities about an observed event [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: In the 'cab problem' (what colour was the cab in the accident?) most people estimate an 80% probability of it being a blue cab, but Bayes' Theorem calculates the probability at 41%, suggesting people put too much faith in eyewitness testimony. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: For details of the 'cab problem', see Lowe p.200. My suspicion is that people get into a tangle when confronted with numbers in a theoretical situation, but are much better at it when faced with a real life problem, like 'who ate my chocolate?' |
| 6652 | 'Base rate neglect' makes people favour the evidence over its background [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: 'Base rate neglect' (attending to the witness or evidence, and ignoring background information) is responsible for doctors exaggerating the significance of positive results in diagnosis of relatively rare medical conditions. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be one of the clearest cases where people's behaviour is irrational, though I suspect that people are much more rational about things if the case is simple and non-numerical. However, people are very credulous about wonderful events. |
| 23300 | Aristotle and the Stoics denied rationality to animals, while Platonists affirmed it [Aristotle, by Sorabji] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle, and also the Stoics, denied rationality to animals. …The Platonists, the Pythagoreans, and some more independent Aristotelians, did grant reason and intellect to animals. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Richard Sorabji - Rationality 'Denial' | |
| A reaction: This is not the same as affirming or denying their consciousness. The debate depends on how rationality is conceived. |
| 6655 | The 'Frame Problem' is how to program the appropriate application of general knowledge [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The 'Frame Problem' in artificial intelligence is how to write a program which not only embodies people's general knowledge, but specifies how that knowledge is to be applied appropriately, when circumstances can't be specified in advance. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: As Lowe observes, this is a problem, but not necessarily an impossibility. There should be a way to symbolically map the concepts of knowledge onto the concepts of perception, just as we must do. |
| 6657 | Computers can't be rational, because they lack motivation and curiosity [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Lack of motivation and curiosity are perhaps the most fundamental reason for denying that computers could be, in any literal sense, rational beings. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 9) | |
| A reaction: I don't see why programmers couldn't move those two priorities to the top of the list in the program. When you switch on a robot, its first words could be 'Teach me something!', or 'Let's do something interesting!' Every piece of software has priorities. |
| 6656 | The Turing test is too behaviourist, and too verbal in its methods [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The Turing test is open to the objection that it is inspired by behaviourist assumptions and focuses too narrowly on verbal evidence of intelligence. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 8) | |
| A reaction: This is part of the objection that the test exhibits human chauvinism, and robots and aliens are wasting their time trying to pass it. You need human behaviour, especially speech, to do well. Inarticulate people can exhibit high practical intelligence. |
| 6636 | The naturalistic views of how content is created are the causal theory and the teleological theory [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The leading naturalistic theories of what it is that confers a specific content upon a given attitudinal state are the causal theory, and the teleological theory, both of which contain serious difficulties. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 4) | |
| A reaction: 'Causal' theories (Fodor) say the world directly causes content; 'teleological' theories (Millikan, Papineau) are based on the evolutionary purpose of content for the subject. I agree that neither seems adequate… |
| 12938 | An idea is an independent inner object, which expresses the qualities of things [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: An idea is an immediate inner object, which expresses the nature or qualities of things, ..but since it is the object of thought it can exist before and after the thoughts. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: This sounds something like Frege's 'third realm' between mind and world (Idea 7740). Notice that Leibniz is also using the word 'object' in this context. Leibniz doesn't make the mistake of confusing concepts and images, as many did. |
| 12950 | We must distinguish images from exact defined ideas [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is essential to distinguish images from exact ideas which are composed of definitions. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.09) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 12615, which is attacking Descartes and Locke, I think, but fails to register that Spinoza and Leibniz had got the notion of an 'idea' much more clearly. |
| 12945 | Thoughts correspond to sensations, but ideas are independent of thoughts [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I distinguish ideas from thoughts. For we always have all our pure or distinct ideas independently of the senses, but thoughts always correspond to some sensation. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz's concept of an 'idea' is quite different from the empiricist notion of them, and strikes me as being much closer to Frege's notion of a concept. On the whole I like the Leibniz account best. |
| 19357 | The idea of green seems simple, but it must be compounded of the ideas of blue and yellow [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is obvious that green comes from a mixture of blue and yellow; which makes it credible that the idea of green is composed of the ideas of those two colours, although the idea of green appears to us as simple as that of blue. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.07) | |
| A reaction: This shows the use of 'idea' at that time for non-verbal mental events and concepts. Ideas are not, then, just undestood as phenomena, but can be analysed and explained more deeply. |
| 6633 | Twin Earth cases imply that even beliefs about kinds of stuff are indexical [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The implication of considerations of Twin Earth cases is that even beliefs about the properties of kinds of stuff are implicitly indexical, or context-dependent, in character. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 4) | |
| A reaction: This is a significant connection, between debates about the nature of indexicals (such as 'I' and 'this') and externalism about content generally. Is there no distinction between objective reference and contextual reference? |
| 12995 | The name 'gold' means what we know of gold, and also further facts about it which only others know [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The name 'gold' signifies not merely what the speaker knows of gold , but also what he does not know, which may be known by someone else: an inner constitution from which flow colour and weight, and generates other properties. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.11) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Thus in the course of defending true essences of gold (against Locke's claim that we are stuck with the nominal essence), Leibniz drifts into an externalist account of meaning. He mentions experts, as so often does Putnam. |
| 12807 | The word 'gold' means a hidden constitution known to experts, and not just its appearances [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The name 'gold' signifies not only what he who pronounces it knows about it, for example, something very heavy and yellow, but also what he does not know, and that another can know about it, its internal constitution from which colour and weight flow. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 6.6.354), quoted by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz and Locke on Essences | |
| A reaction: Leibniz goes on to use the word 'expert'. This isn't just a hint of Putnam's externalism about concepts like 'water' - it is a clear spelling out of the full idea. Locke would have been astounded by 'atomic number 79', and Leibniz would be, like, 'yeah'. |
| 6632 | The same proposition provides contents for the that-clause of an utterance and a belief [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: We use the same that-clause ('that snow is white') to specify the contents of both a person's utterances and of their beliefs, because it is the same proposition. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 4) | |
| A reaction: Certainly to say 'he believes that we should declare war' seems to refer to something non-linguistic, but it doesn't demonstrate that anything concrete or real is being referred to. It may be an abstract account of dispositions and desires. |
| 6631 | If propositions are abstract entities, how can minds depend on their causal powers? [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: If propositions are abstract entities, more like the objects of mathematics, it seems mysterious that states of mind should depend for their causal powers upon the propositions which allegedly constitute their 'contents'. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], 70) | |
| A reaction: Compare standard objections to Platonic Forms (e.g. Idea 3353). You can't believe in abstract propositions, but be a reductive physicalist about the mind. So propositions are dynamic brain structures. Easy. |
| 11240 | The notion of analytic truth is absent in Aristotle [Aristotle, by Politis] |
| Full Idea: The notion of analytic truth is conspicuously absent in Aristotle. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Vassilis Politis - Aristotle and the Metaphysics 1.5 | |
| A reaction: Cf. Idea 11239. |
| 6659 | The three main theories of action involve the will, or belief-plus-desire, or an agent [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The two alternatives to volitionism in explaining action are (firstly) certain complexes of belief and desire, and (secondly) causation by an agent. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 9) | |
| A reaction: A helpful framework. A key test case seems to that of trying to perform an action and failing (e.g. through paralysis), and this goes against the whole 'agent' being the most basic concept. One also needs room for reasons, and this supports volitionism. |
| 6661 | Libet gives empirical support for the will, as a kind of 'executive' mental operation [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Libet's experiments (on conscious and non-conscious choice) seem to provide empirical support for the concept of 'volition', conceived as a special kind of 'executive' mental operation. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 9) | |
| A reaction: Despite the strictures of Hobbes (Idea 2362) and Williams (Idea 2171), the will strikes me as a genuine item, clearly observable by introspection, and offering the best explanation of human behaviour. I take it to be part of the brain's frontal lobes. |
| 12946 | The idea of the will includes the understanding [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The idea of the will includes that of the understanding. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.06) | |
| A reaction: A nice remark, although I am not sure that I agree with it. The understanding (if we allow such talk of faculties, with which I have no problem) sometimes lags behind and sometimes forges ahead of the will. What else is weakness of the will? |
| 6662 | We feel belief and desire as reasons for choice, not causes of choice [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: When we choose how to act in the light of our beliefs and desires, we do not feel our choices to be caused by them, but we conceive of them as giving us reasons to choose. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 9) | |
| A reaction: I agree, though this 'feeling' could be a delusion, and we certainly don't need to start talking about a 'free' will. The best account of action seems to be that the will operates on the raw material of beliefs and desires. The will is our 'decision box'. |
| 6663 | People's actions are explained either by their motives, or their reasons, or the causes [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: When we ask why people act in the ways that they do, we are sometimes enquiring into people's motives, at other times we want to uncover their reasons, and at others we want to know the causes of their actions. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind [2000], Ch. 9) | |
| A reaction: Helpful distinctions. Any one of these explanations might be collapsed into the others. Kantians, utilitarians and contractarians can study reasons, nihilists can study causes, and virtue theorists I take to be concerned with motives. |
| 12964 | If would be absurd not to disagree with someone's taste if it was a taste for poisons [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If someone acquired a taste for poisons which would kill him or make him wretched, it would be absurd to say that we ought not to argue with him about his tastes. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a first step in any discussion of taste on which you would hope that sensible persons would agree. 'It is just a matter of taste' is definitely not the end of discussion. Aesthetic taste is important, just as values are important. |
| 6559 | Aristotle never actually says that man is a rational animal [Aristotle, by Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: To the best of my knowledge (and somewhat to my surprise), Aristotle never actually says that man is a rational animal; however, he all but says it. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.1 | |
| A reaction: When I read this I thought that this database would prove Fogelin wrong, but it actually supports him, as I can't find it in Aristotle either. Descartes refers to it in Med.Two. In Idea 5133 Aristotle does say that man is a 'social being'. But 22586! |
| 12958 | Love is pleasure in the perfection, well-being or happiness of its object [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To love is to be disposed to take pleasure in the perfection, well-being or happiness of the object of one's love. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.20) | |
| A reaction: I suppose so, though one might love a pathetic little plant that hangs on in the corner of the garden, just for its fighting qualities. He goes on to deny that we can truly love something that is incapable of happiness. Hm. |
| 12957 | The good is the virtuous, the pleasing, or the useful [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The good is divided into the virtuous, the pleasing, and the useful. ..The good is either pleasing or useful; and virtue itself consists of a pleasure of the mind. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.20) | |
| A reaction: I presume that the useful could be reduced to the pleasing. It strikes me as quite bizarre to define virtue as merely a pleasure of the mind. Aristotle says true virtue must also please the mind, but that is a different idea. |
| 12962 | Pleasure is a sense of perfection [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Fundamentally, pleasure is a sense of perfection, and pain a sense of imperfection. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: A bit odd, but I like the idea that there is an intellectual aspect to even the most visceral feelings. |
| 12934 | We can't want everyone to have more than their share, so a further standard is needed [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We would wish for more than our share if we had our own way; so do we also owe to others more than their share? If the rule applies only to a just will, the rule will need a standard. The rule means that to judge fairly we must adopt others' viewpoints. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: The first part of this is moving towards Kant's rational overview of ethics. Leibniz is wholly right here. All ethics faces the problem that initial values are needed to get it off the ground. What's wrong with pain, or unfairness, or hatred? |
| 12936 | There are natural rewards and punishments, like illness after over-indulgence [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There can be natural rewards and punishments without a law-maker; intemperance, for instance, is punished by illness. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: Hm. Maybe if it didn't result in illness it wouldn't be labelled as 'intemperance'. Why isn't studying philosophy all day long classed as intemperance? |
| 11150 | It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it [Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it. | |
| From: Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) | |
| A reaction: The epigraph on a David Chalmers website. A wonderful remark, and it should be on the wall of every beginners' philosophy class. However, while it is in the spirit of Aristotle, it appears to be a misattribution with no ancient provenance. |
| 3037 | Aristotle said the educated were superior to the uneducated as the living are to the dead [Aristotle, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle was asked how much educated men were superior to those uneducated; "As much," he said, "as the living are to the dead." | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 05.1.11 |
| 8660 | There are potential infinities (never running out), but actual infinity is incoherent [Aristotle, by Friend] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle developed his own distinction between potential infinity (never running out) and actual infinity (there being a collection of an actual infinite number of things, such as places, times, objects). He decided that actual infinity was incoherent. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by Michèle Friend - Introducing the Philosophy of Mathematics 1.3 | |
| A reaction: Friend argues, plausibly, that this won't do, since potential infinity doesn't make much sense if there is not an actual infinity of things to supply the demand. It seems to just illustrate how boggling and uncongenial infinity was to Aristotle. |
| 12058 | Aristotle's matter can become any other kind of matter [Aristotle, by Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle's conception of matter permits any kind of matter to become any other kind of matter. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE]) by David Wiggins - Substance 4.11.2 | |
| A reaction: This is obviously crucial background information when we read Aristotle on matter. Our 92+ elements, and fixed fundamental particles, gives a quite different picture. Aristotle would discuss form and matter quite differently now. |
| 11856 | Qualities should be predictable from the nature of the subject [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Whenever we find some quality in a subject, we ought to believe that if we understood the nature of both the subject and the quality we would conceive how the quality could arise from it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref 66) | |
| A reaction: This is the idea that powers are prior to properties, which seems right to me. I take essence to be something like the best explanation of qualities. |
| 12994 | Gold has a real essence, unknown to us, which produces its properties [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The complex idea of gold includes its being something which has a real essence whose detailed constitution is unknown to us, except for the fact that such qualities as malleability depend upon it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.10) | |
| A reaction: This is precisely the view of modern scientific essentialism. The underlying idea I take to be the conception of essence as the thing which explains the properties. |
| 12808 | Part of our idea of gold is its real essence, which is not known to us in detail [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is very true that it is part of the complex idea of gold that it is a thing which has a real essence, the constitution of which is not otherwise known to us in detail. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 6.6.345), quoted by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz and Locke on Essences p.201 | |
| A reaction: See also Idea 12807. This is the clearest possible statement of Leibniz's clear-cut scientific essentialism, here presented in opposition to Locke (thought I take the latter to be only bothered by our inability to know the hidden constitution). |
| 12985 | Maybe motion is definable as 'change of place' [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I believe 'motion' to be definable, and the definition which says that it is 'change of place' deserves respect. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.04) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the 'at-at' view of motion, championed by Bertrand Russell. (At p1 at t1, at p2 at t2...). Leibniz's version only mentions space and not time, and it includes 'change', which would need definition without mentioning motion. |
| 12952 | Space is an order among actual and possible things [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Space is a relationship: an order, not only among existents, but also among possibles as though they existed. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.13) | |
| A reaction: The modal end to this idea is a bit puzzling. Would there be any space if there were only possibles, and nothing yet existed, as in God's mind the instant before he got to work? |
| 12955 | If there were duration without change, we could never establish its length [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If there were a vacuum in space, one could establish its size. But if there were a vacuum in time, i.e. a duration without change, it would be impossible to establish its length. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.15) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 4226 for Shoemaker's wonderful counterproposal to this apparently unanswerable claim. I suppose Leibniz is right, but it just might be possible to bring induction to bear on the problem. |
| 12954 | God's essence is the source of possibilities, and his will the source of existents [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: God is the source of possibilities and of existents alike, the one by his essence and the other by his will. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.15) | |
| A reaction: Every now and then I rebel against metaphysics, and think 'how do these people know all this great things about which they make these dogmatic claims?' And this is one of those occasions. I get the idea, though... |
| 12988 | The universe contains everything possible for its perfect harmony [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The universe contains everything that its perfect harmony could admit. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.06) | |
| A reaction: This sort of Leibnizian remark leaves most modern readers, including me, totally bewildered. The claim depends entirely on the perfect nature of God. |
| 1414 | A perfection is a simple quality, which is positive and absolute, and has no limit [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I call every simple quality which is positive and absolute, or expresses whatever it expresses without any limits, a perfection. But a quality of this sort, because it is simple, is therefore irresolvable or indefinable. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], App X) | |
| A reaction: I don't think this definition of perfections would have occurred to anyone who wasn't planning to prove that perfections cannot be incompatible (as Leibniz is about to do). |
| 21252 | Perfections must have overlapping parts if their incompatibility is to be proved [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If two propositions (about perfections) are incompatible, that cannot be demonstrated without a resolution of the terms, for otherwise their nature would not enter into the ratiocination. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], App X) | |
| A reaction: If God is omnipotent and wholly free, these appear to be fully separate perfections. But it is their implications (can God decide to do otherwise, given His foreknowledge?) which lead to a problem. So this analyis of contradiction is wrong. |
| 19328 | Without the principle of sufficient reason, God's existence could not be demonstrated [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There is a fundamental axiom that 'nothing happens without reason', without which the existence of God and other great truths cannot be properly demonstrated. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21.13) | |
| A reaction: I'm rather drawn to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, but also to John Keats's 'negative capability'. Belief that there must be a reason in each case is not a justification for inventing a reason every time. There may be a reason for the universe.... |
| 22729 | The concepts of gods arose from observing the soul, and the cosmos [Aristotle, by Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle said that the conception of gods arose among mankind from two originating causes, namely from events which concern the soul and from celestial phenomena. | |
| From: report of Aristotle (works [c.330 BCE], Frag 10) by Sextus Empiricus - Against the Physicists (two books) I.20 | |
| A reaction: The cosmos suggests order, and possible creation. What do events of the soul suggest? It doesn't seem to be its non-physical nature, because Aristotle is more of a functionalist. Puzzling. (It says later that gods are like the soul). |
| 5058 | Animals have thought and sensation, and indestructible immaterial souls [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I hold (against the Cartesians) that brutes also have thought, and hold that they have sensation, and souls which are, properly speaking, immaterial, and as incapable of perishing as the atoms of Democritus or Gassendi. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: Insect heaven will be a bit crowded. I can never grasp why theologians would claim that souls are 'indestructible', when they are held to come into existence at a particular moment in space-time. Transmigration of souls is a much more rational belief. |