50 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. |
| 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 |
| 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'. |
| 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? |
| 8166 | Truth is part of semantics, since valid inference preserves truth [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The concept of truth belongs to semantics, since after all truth is what must be preserved by a valid deductive inference. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 2) | |
| A reaction: Does this conclusion follow? Compare 'nice taste belongs to cooking, since that is what cooking must preserve'. I don't like this. I take 'truth' to be a relevant concept to a discussion of a dog's belief that it is going to be taken for a walk. |
| 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. |
| 8173 | Language can violate bivalence because of non-referring terms or ill-defined predicates [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Two features of natural languages cause them to violate bivalence: singular terms (or proper names) which have a sense but fail to denote an object ('the centre of the universe'); and predicates which are not well defined for every object. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 4) | |
| A reaction: If we switch from sentences to propositions these problems might be avoided. If there is no reference, or a vague predicate, then there is (maybe) just no proposition being expressed which could be evaluated for truth. |
| 8179 | The law of excluded middle is the logical reflection of the principle of bivalence [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The law of excluded middle is the reflection, within logic, of the principle of bivalence. It states that 'For any statement A, the statement 'A or not-A' is true'. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 5) | |
| A reaction: True-or-not-true is an easier condition to fulfil than true-or-false. The second says that 'false' is the only alternative, but the first allows other alternatives to 'true' (such as 'undecidable'). It is hard to challenge excluded middle. Somewhat true? |
| 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. |
| 8184 | Philosophers should not presume reality, but only invoke it when language requires it [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The philosopher's task is not to make a prior commitment for or against realism, but to discover how far realist considerations must be invoked in order to describe our understanding of our language: they may be invoked only if they must be invoked. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 6) | |
| A reaction: I don't see why the default position should be solipsism, or a commitment to Ockham's Razor. This is the Cartesian 'Enlightenment Project' approach to philosophy - that everything has to be proved. There is more to ontology than language. |
| 8185 | We can't make sense of a world not apprehended by a mind [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: We can make no clear sense of there being a world that is not apprehended by any mind. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 8) | |
| A reaction: I find Dummett's view quite baffling. It is no coincidence that Dummett is a theist, along (it seems) Berkeleian lines. I see no more problem with imagining such worlds than with imagining ships sunken long ago which will never be found. |
| 8163 | Since 'no bird here' and 'no squirrel here' seem the same, we must talk of 'atomic' facts [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: What complex of objects constitutes the fact that there is no bird on the bough, and how is that distinct from no squirrel on the bough? This drives us to see the world as composed of 'atomic' facts, making complexes into compounds, not reality itself. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 1) | |
| A reaction: [He cites early Wittgenstein as an example] But 'no patch of red here' (or sense-datum) seems identical to 'no patch of green here'. I suppose you could catalogue all the atomic facts, and note that red wasn't among them. But you could do that for birds. |
| 8161 | We know we can state facts, with true statements [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: One thing we know about facts, namely that we can state them. Whenever we make some true statement, we state some fact. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 1) | |
| A reaction: Then facts become boring, and are subsumed within the problem of what 'true' means. Personally I have a concept of facts which includes unstatable facts. The physical basis of melancholy I take to be a complex fact which is beyond our powers. |
| 8180 | 'That is red or orange' might be considered true, even though 'that is red' and 'that is orange' were not [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: A statement of the form 'that is red or orange', said of something on the borderline between the two colours, might rank as true, although neither 'that is red' nor 'that is orange' was true. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 5) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me that the problem here would be epistemological rather than ontological. One of the two is clearly true, but sometimes we can't decide which. How can anyone say 'It isn't red and it isn't orange, but it is either red or orange'? |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 6451 | Visual sense data are an inner picture show which represents the world [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: In the case of vision, sense data are a kind of inner picture show which itself only indirectly represents aspects of the external world. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy [1994], p.347) | |
| A reaction: I'm unsure whether this is correct. Russell says the 'roughness' of the table is the sense datum. If it is even a possibility that there are unsensed sense-data, then they cannot be an aspect of the mind, as Blackburn is suggesting they are. |
| 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. |
| 8178 | Empirical and a priori knowledge are not distinct, but are extremes of a sliding scale [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Our sentences cannot be divided into two classes, empirical and a priori, the truth of one to be decided by observation, the other by ratiocination. They lie on a scale, with observational sentences at one end, and mathematical ones at the other. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 5) | |
| A reaction: The modern post-Kantian dissolution of the rationalist-empiricist debate. I would say that mathematical sentences require no empirical evidence (for their operation, rather than foundation), but a bit of reasoning is involved in observation. |
| 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). |
| 2866 | A true belief might be based on a generally reliable process that failed on this occasion [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: Reliabilism is open to the counterexample that a belief may be the result of some generally reliable process (a pressure gauge) which was in fact malfunctioning on this occasion, when we would be reluctant to attribute knowledge to the subject. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy [1994], p.327) | |
| A reaction: Russell's stopped clock that tells the right time twice a day. A good objection. Coming from a reliable source is very good criterion for good justification, but it needs critical assessment. |
| 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 |
| 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. |
| 8175 | A theory of thought will include propositional attitudes as well as propositions [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: A comprehensive theory of thought will include such things as judgement and belief, as well as the mere grasp of propositions. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 4) | |
| A reaction: This seems to make any theory of thought a neat two-stage operation. Beware of neatness. While propositions might be explained using concepts, syntax and truth, the second stage looks faintly daunting. See Idea 2209, for example. |
| 8174 | The theories of meaning and understanding are the only routes to an account of thought [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: For the linguistic philosopher, the theory of meaning, and the theory of understanding that is built upon it, form the only route to a philosophical account of thought. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 4) | |
| A reaction: I am of the party that thinks thought is prior to language (esp. because of animals), but Dummett's idea does not deny this. He may well be right that this is the 'only route'. We can only hope to give an account of human thought. |
| 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. |
| 8165 | To 'abstract from' is a logical process, as opposed to the old mental view [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: The phrase 'abstracted from' does not refer to the mental process of abstraction by disregarding features of concrete objects, in which many nineteenth century thinkers believed; it is a logical (not mental) process of concept-formation. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 1) | |
| A reaction: I take Frege's attack on 'psychologism' to be what dismissed the old view (Idea 5816). Could one not achieve the same story by negating properties in quantified logical expressions, instead of in the mind? |
| 8168 | To know the truth-conditions of a sentence, you must already know the meaning [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: You can know the condition for a sentence to be true only when you know what the sentence means. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 3) | |
| A reaction: This makes the truth-conditions theory of meaning circular, and is Dummett's big objection to Davidson's view. The composition of a sentence creates a model of a world. Truth-conditions may only presuppose knowledge of concepts. |
| 8181 | A justificationist theory of meaning leads to the rejection of classical logic [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: If we adopt a justificationist theory of meaning, we must reject the universal law of excluded middle, and with it classical logic (which rests on the two-valued semantics of bivalence). We admit only intuitionist logic, which preserves justifiability. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is Dummett's philosophy in a very neat nutshell. He seems to have started by accepting Brouwer's intuitionism, and then working back to language. It all implies anti-realism. I don't buy it. |
| 8182 | Verificationism could be realist, if we imagined the verification by a superhuman power [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: There is a possible route to realism, which has been called 'ideal verificationism', if we base our grasping the understanding and truth of a range of sentences on the procedure that would be available to an imagined being with superhuman powers. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is actually a slippery slope for verificationists, as soon as they allow that verification could be done by other people. A verifier might turn up who had telepathy, or x-ray vision, or could see quarks... |
| 8183 | If truths about the past depend on memories and current evidence, the past will change [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: If justificationists succumb to the temptation for statements in the past, we shall view their senses as given by present memories and present traces of past events; but this will force us into a view of the past as itself changing. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 6) | |
| A reaction: Obviously Dummett attempts to sidestep this problem, but it strikes me as powerful support for the realist view about the past. How can we not be committed to the view that there are facts about the past quite unconnected to our verifying abilities? |
| 8176 | We could only guess the meanings of 'true' and 'false' when sentences were used [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Even if we guessed that the two words denoted the two truth-values, we should not know which stood for the value 'true' and which for the value 'false' until we knew how the sentences were in practice used. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 4) | |
| A reaction: These types of problem are always based on the idea that some one item must have logical priority in the process, but there is a lot of room for benign circularity in the development of mental and linguistic functions. |
| 8170 | Sentences are the primary semantic units, because they can say something [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: While words are semantic atoms, sentences remain the primary semantic units, in the sense of the smallest bits of language by means of which it is possible to say anything. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 3) | |
| A reaction: Syncategorematic terms (look it up!) may need sentences, but most nouns and verbs can communicate quite a lot on their own. Whether words or sentences come first may not be a true/false issue. |
| 8169 | We can't distinguish a proposition from its content [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: No distinction can be drawn between a proposition and its content; no two distinct propositions can have the same content. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 3) | |
| A reaction: And one proposition cannot have two possible contents (ambiguity). Are we to say that a proposition supervenes on its content, or that proposition and content are identical? Ockham favours the latter. |
| 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. |
| 2864 | The main objection to intuitionism in ethics is that intuition is a disguise for prejudice or emotion [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: Critics say that intuitionism in ethics explains nothing, but may merely function as a disguise for prejudice or passion. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy [1994], p.198) | |
| A reaction: If someone claims to have an important moral intuition about something, you should carefully assess the person who has the intuition. I would trust some people a lot. |
| 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! |
| 2865 | Critics of prescriptivism observe that it is consistent to accept an ethical verdict but refuse to be bound by it [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: Critics of prescriptivism have noted the problem that whilst accepting a command seems tantamount to setting oneself to obey it, accepting an ethical verdict is, unfortunately, consistent with refusing to be bound by it. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy [1994], p.300) | |
| A reaction: We nearly all of us accept that our behaviour should be better than it actually is, so we accept the oughts but fail to act. Actually 'refusing', though, sounds a bit contradictory. |
| 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. |
| 8186 | Time is the measure of change, so we can't speak of time before all change [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Time is the measure of change, and it makes no sense to speak of how things were before there was anything that changed. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 8) | |
| A reaction: Something creating its own measure sounds like me marking my own exam papers. If an object appears, then inverts five seconds later, how can the inversion create the five seconds? How does that differ from inverting ten seconds later? |
| 8167 | If Presentism is correct, we cannot even say that the present changes [Dummett] |
| Full Idea: If Presentism is correct - the doctrine that there is nothing at all, save what holds good at the present moment - then we cannot even say that the present changes, because that requires that things are not now as they were some time ago. | |
| From: Michael Dummett (Thought and Reality [1997], 2) | |
| A reaction: Presumably we can compare our present memory with our present experience. See Idea 6668. The logic (very ancient!) is that the present has not duration at all, and so no experiences can occur during it. |
| 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). |