15 ideas
| 21405 | Cicero sees wisdom in terms of knowledge, but earlier Stoics saw it as moral [Cicero, by Long] |
| Full Idea: Cicero (drawing on Panaetius) treats wisdom as if its province were primarily a disinterested pursuit of knowledge. But earlier Stoics gave purely moral definitions of wisdom. | |
| From: report of M. Tullius Cicero (On Duties ('De Officiis') [c.44 BCE], 1.11-20) by A.A. Long - Hellenistic Philosophy 5 | |
| A reaction: I would have thought that after long discussion most ancient (and even modern) philosophers would conclude that it is both. The 'intellectualism' of Socrates hovers in the background, implying that healthy knowledge produces virtue. |
| 20871 | Unfortunately we choose a way of life before we are old enough to think clearly [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: At the beginning of adolescence when our deliberative capacities are weak we decide on the way of life that we find attractive. So one gets entangled in a definite manner and pattern of life before one is able to judge which one is best. | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (On Duties ('De Officiis') [c.44 BCE], 1.117) | |
| A reaction: Hence it is important to have lots of means for bailing out of education courses, jobs, and even marriage. At least university postpones the key life choices till the early twenties. |
| 8797 | The negation of all my beliefs about my current headache would be fully coherent [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: If I have a headache, I could have a set of beliefs that I do not have a headache, that I am not in pain, that no one is in pain, and so on. The resulting system of beliefs would cohere as fully as does my actual system of beliefs. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (The Raft and the Pyramid [1980], §9) | |
| A reaction: I think this is a misunderstanding of coherentism. Beliefs are not to be formulated through a process of coherence, but are evaluated that way. A belief that I have headache just arrives; I then see that its denial is incoherent, so I accept it. |
| 10502 | We can rise by degrees through abstraction, with higher levels representing more things [Arnauld,A/Nicole,P] |
| Full Idea: I can start with a triangle, and rise by degrees to all straight-lined figures and to extension itself. The lower degree will include the higher degree. Since the higher degree is less determinate, it can represent more things. | |
| From: Arnauld / Nicole (Logic (Port-Royal Art of Thinking) [1662], I.5) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This attempts to explain the generalising ability of abstraction cited in Idea 10501. If you take a complex object and eliminate features one by one, it can only 'represent' more particulars; it could hardly represent fewer. |
| 18258 | We can only know the exterior world via our ideas [Arnauld,A/Nicole,P] |
| Full Idea: We can have knowledge of what is outside us only through the mediation of ideas in us. | |
| From: Arnauld / Nicole (Logic (Port-Royal Art of Thinking) [1662], p.63), quoted by J. Alberto Coffa - The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap 1 'Conc' |
| 8794 | There are very few really obvious truths, and not much can be proved from them [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: Radical foundationalism suffers from two weaknesses: there are not so many perfectly obvious truths as Descartes thought; and if we restrict ourselves to what it truly obvious, very little supposed common sense knowledge can be proved. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (The Raft and the Pyramid [1980], §3) | |
| A reaction: It is striking how few examples can ever be found of self-evident a priori truths. However, if there are self-evident truths about direct experience (pace Descartes), that would give us more than enough. |
| 8796 | A single belief can trail two regresses, one terminating and one not [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: A single belief can trail at once regresses of both sorts: one terminating and one not. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (The Raft and the Pyramid [1980], §6) | |
| A reaction: This makes foundationalism possible, while admitting the existence of regresses. It is a good point, and triumphalist anti-foundationalists can't just point out a regress and then smugly troop off to the pub. |
| 8799 | If mental states are not propositional, they are logically dumb, and cannot be foundations [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: If a mental state is not propositional, then how can it possibly serve as a foundation for belief? How can one infer or justify anything on the basis of a state that, having no propositional content, must be logically dumb? | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (The Raft and the Pyramid [1980], §11) | |
| A reaction: This may be the best objection to foundationalism. McDowell tries to argue that conceptual content is inherent in perception, thus giving the beginnings of inbuilt propositional content. But an organism awash with bare experiences knows nothing. |
| 8795 | Mental states cannot be foundational if they are not immune to error [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: If a mental state provides no guarantee against error, then it cannot serve as a foundation for knowledge. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (The Raft and the Pyramid [1980], §4) | |
| A reaction: That assumes that knowledge entails certainty, which I am sure it should not. On a fallibilist account, a foundation could be incredibly secure, despite a barely imaginable scenario in which it turned out to be false. |
| 8798 | Vision causes and justifies beliefs; but to some extent the cause is the justification [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: Visual experience is recognized as both the cause and the justification of our visual beliefs. But these are not wholly independent. Presumably the justification that something is red derives partly from the fact that it originates in visual experience. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (The Raft and the Pyramid [1980], §10) | |
| A reaction: Yes, but the fact that certain visual experiences originate in dreams is taken as grounds for denying their truth, not affirming it. So why do we distinguish them? I am thinking that only in the 'space of reasons' can a cause become a justification. |
| 16784 | Forms make things distinct and explain the properties, by pure form, or arrangement of parts [Arnauld,A/Nicole,P] |
| Full Idea: The form is what renders a thing such and distinguishes it from others, whether it is a being really distinct from the matter, according to the Schools, or whether it is only the arrangement of the parts. By this form one must explain its properties. | |
| From: Arnauld / Nicole (Logic (Port-Royal Art of Thinking) [1662], III.18 p240), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 27.6 | |
| A reaction: If we ask 'what explains the properties of this thing' it is hard to avoid coming up with something that might be called the 'form'. Note that they allow either substantial or corpuscularian forms. It is hard to disagree with the idea. |
| 10499 | We know by abstraction because we only understand composite things a part at a time [Arnauld,A/Nicole,P] |
| Full Idea: The mind cannot perfectly understand things that are even slightly composite unless it considers them a part at a time. ...This is generally called knowing by abstraction. (..the human body, for example). | |
| From: Arnauld / Nicole (Logic (Port-Royal Art of Thinking) [1662], I.5) | |
| A reaction: This adds the interesting thought that the mind is forced to abstract, rather than abstraction being a luxury extra feature. Knowledge through analysis is knowledge by abstraction. Also a nice linking of abstraction to epistemology. |
| 10501 | A triangle diagram is about all triangles, if some features are ignored [Arnauld,A/Nicole,P] |
| Full Idea: If I draw an equilateral triangle on a piece of paper, ..I shall have an idea of only a single triangle. But if I ignore all the particular circumstances and focus on the three equal lines, I will be able to represent all equilateral triangles. | |
| From: Arnauld / Nicole (Logic (Port-Royal Art of Thinking) [1662], I.5) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] They observed that we grasp composites through their parts, and now that we can grasp generalisations through particulars, both achieved by the psychological act of abstraction, thus showing its epistemological power. |
| 10500 | No one denies that a line has width, but we can just attend to its length [Arnauld,A/Nicole,P] |
| Full Idea: Geometers by no means assume that there are lines without width or surfaces without depth. They only think it is possible to consider the length without paying attention to the width. We can measure the length of a path without its width. | |
| From: Arnauld / Nicole (Logic (Port-Royal Art of Thinking) [1662], I.5) | |
| A reaction: A nice example which makes the point indubitable. The modern 'rigorous' account of abstraction that starts with Frege seems to require more than one object, in order to derive abstractions like direction or number. Path widths are not comparatives. |
| 6031 | The essence of propriety is consistency [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: The whole essence of propriety is quite certainly consistency. | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (On Duties ('De Officiis') [c.44 BCE], 1.110) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me the key intuition on which Kant built his deontological ethical theory. However, opponents say the consistency requires principles, and these are the enemies of truly good human behaviour, which involves Aristotle's 'particulars'. |