56 ideas
| 23027 | Ideals and metaphysics are practical, not imaginative or speculative [Green,TH, by Muirhead] |
| Full Idea: To T.H. Green an ideal was no creation of an idle imagination, metaphysics no mere play of the speculative reason. Ideals were the most solid, and metaphysics the most practical thing about a man. | |
| From: report of T.H. Green (works [1875]) by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State I | |
| A reaction: This is despite the fact that Green was an idealist in the Hegelian tradition. I like this. I see it not just as ideals having practical guiding influence, but also that ideals themselves arising out of experience. |
| 16227 | Philosophers are good at denying the obvious [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers are skilled at resisting even the most inviting thoughts. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5) | |
| A reaction: Not exactly 'despair', but it does show how far philosophers are able to stray from common sense. Monads, real possible worlds, real sets… Thomas Reid, the philosopher of common sense, might be the antidote. |
| 23030 | Truth is a relation to a whole of organised knowledge in the collection of rational minds [Green,TH, by Muirhead] |
| Full Idea: When we speak of anything as true or false, we do so on the ground of its relation to a whole of organised knowledge existing actually in no human mind, but prefigured in every mind which is possessed of reason. | |
| From: report of T.H. Green (works [1875]) by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State I n1 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the super-idealist view of the coherence account of truth. I have no idea what 'prefigured' means here. |
| 16216 | Part of the sense of a proper name is a criterion of the thing's identity [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A Fregean dictum is that part of the sense of proper name is a criterion of identity for the thing in question. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.8) | |
| A reaction: [She quotes Dummett 1981:545] We are asked to choose between this and the Kripke rigid/dubbing/causal account, with effectively no content. |
| 16211 | A homogeneous rotating disc should be undetectable according to Humean supervenience [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Imagine a perfectly homogeneous non-atomistic disc. A record of all the non-relational information about the world at that moment will not reveal whether the disc is rotating about a vertical axis through. This tells against Humean supervenience. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: [Armstrong 1980 originated this, and it is famously discussed by Kripke in lectures] There will, of course, be dispositions present because of the rotation, but Lewis excludes any such modal truths. |
| 15201 | That Queen Anne is dead is a 'general fact', not a fact about Queen Anne [Prior,AN] |
| Full Idea: The fact that Queen Anne has been dead for some years is not, in the strict sense of 'about', a fact about Queen Anne; it is not a fact about anyone or anything - it is a general fact. | |
| From: Arthur N. Prior (Changes in Events and Changes in Things [1968], p.13), quoted by Robin Le Poidevin - Past, Present and Future of Debate about Tense 1 b | |
| A reaction: He distinguishes 'general facts' (states of affairs, I think) from 'individual facts', involving some specific object. General facts seem to be what are expressed by negative existential truths, such as 'there is no Loch Ness Monster'. Useful. |
| 16219 | Non-linguistic things cannot be indeterminate, because they don't have truth-values at all [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Non-linguistic objects, properties, and states of affairs cannot be indeterminate because they cannot have determinate truth-values either. No cloud is indeterminate, just as no cloud is either determinately true or determinately false. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: If vagueness must be linguistic, this means animals can never experience it, which I doubt. Presumably 'this is a cloud' is only made vague by the vagueness of the object, rather than by the vagueness of the sentence? |
| 16223 | Maybe for the world to be vague, it must be vague in its foundations? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There is a question of whether there must be 'vagueness all the way down' for the world to be vague. One view is that if there is a base level of precisely describably facts, upon which all the others supervene, then the world is not really vague. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: My understanding of the physics is that it is non-vague all the way down, and then you get to the base level which is hopelessly vague! |
| 16226 | Epistemic vagueness seems right in the case of persons [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The epistemic account of vagueness is particularly attractive where persons are concerned. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.14) | |
| A reaction: You'll have to see her text for details. Interesting that there might be different views of what vagueness is for different cases. Or putting it another way, absolutely everything (said, thought, existing or done) might be vague in some way! |
| 16208 | Supervaluation refers to one vaguely specified thing, through satisfaction by everything in some range [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Supervaluationists take a present-tense predication as concerning a single, but vaguely specified, moment. …It is indeterminate which of a range of moments enters into the truth conditions, but it is true if satisfied by every member of the range. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: She is discussing stage theory, but this is a helpful clarification of the idea of supervaluation. Something can be satisfied by a whole bunch of values, even though you are not sure which one. |
| 16221 | Supervaluationism takes what the truth-value would have been if indecision was resolved [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A supervaluationist approach involves consideration of what the truth value of the utterance would have been if semantic indecision had been resolved in this way or that. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: At last, a lovely account of supervaluation in plain English that anyone can understand! Why don't they all do that? Well, done Katherine Hawley! ['semantic indecision' is uncertainty about what your words mean!] |
| 16230 | Maybe the only properties are basic ones like charge, mass and spin [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers suspect that properties are few and far between, that there are only properties like charge, mass, spin, and so on. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: I think properties are very sparse, and mainly consist of physical powers, but I am not sure what I think of this. It may be 'mere semantics'. Complex properties still seem to be properties. Powers combine to make properties, I suggest. |
| 16232 | An object is 'natural' if its stages are linked by certain non-supervenient relations [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that our distinction between natural and unnatural (gerrymandered) objects corresponds to a distinction between series of stages which are and are not linked by certain non-supervenient relations. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 16213 for the nature of these 'relations'. I don't understand how an abstraction (as I take it) like a relation can unify a physical object. A trout-turkey is unified by a relation of some sort. Hawley defends Stage Theory. |
| 16200 | Are sortals spatially maximal - so no cat part is allowed to be a cat? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Many philosophers believe that sortal predicates are spatially maximal - for example, that no cat can be a proper spatial part of a cat. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This sounds reasonable until you cut the tail off a cat. Presumably what remains is a cat? So presumably that smaller part was always a cat? Only essentialism can make sense of this! You can't just invent rules for sortals. |
| 16237 | The modal features of statue and lump are disputed; when does it stop being that statue? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: It is difficult to establish a consensus about the modal features of the statue and the lump. Could that statue be made of a different lump? Could that statue of Goliath have been spherical? Not a realistic statue of Goliath, but still the same statue? | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6) | |
| A reaction: The problem is with a wild wacky sculptor, who might say it is a statue of Goliath no matter what shape the lump takes. 'Goliath had a spherical character'. Sometimes we will say (pace Evans) it is 'roughly identical' to the original statue. |
| 16238 | Perdurantists can adopt counterpart theory, to explain modal differences of identical part-sums [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Perdurance theory claims that lumps and statues differ modally whilst always being made of the same parts. A natural way to make this less mysterious is for perdurantists to adopt counterpart theory, where objects in different worlds are never identical. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: This, of course, is exactly the system created by David Lewis. Personally I rather like counterparts, but perdurance seems a tad crazy. |
| 16220 | Vagueness is either in our knowledge, in our talk, or in reality [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There are three main views of vagueness: the Epistemic view says we talk precisely, but don't know what we talk precisely about; the Semantic view is that it is loose talk, or semantic indecision; the Ontic view says it is part of how the world is. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: [My summary of two paragraphs] She associates Williamson with the first view, Lewis with the second, and Van Inwagen with the third. |
| 16222 | Indeterminacy in objects and in properties are not distinct cases [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There is no important distinction to be drawn between cases where indeterminacy is due to the object involved and cases where indeterminacy is due to the property involved. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: You could always paraphrase the object's situation propertywise, or the property's situation objectwise. 'His baldness is indeterminate'; 'where does the mountainous terrain end?' |
| 16228 | The constitution theory is endurantism plus more than one object in a place [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Constitution theorists are endurance theorists who believe that there can be more than one object exactly occupying a spatial region at a certain moment. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: I increasingly think that this is a ridiculous view. The constitution of an object isn't a further object. A constitution is a necessary requirement for a physical object. Hylomorphism! Constitutions can't be separate - they must constitute something! |
| 16229 | Constitution theory needs sortal properties like 'being a sweater' to distinguish it from its thread [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Constitution theorists need to posit sortal properties of 'being a thread' or 'being a sweater', as grounds for the differences betwween the sweater and the thread that constitutes it. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: This is further grounds for thinking the constitution view ridiculous, because there are no such properties. 'Being a sweater' is a category, which something belongs in if it has all the properties of a sweater. The final property triggers sweaterhood. |
| 14492 | If the constitution view says thread and sweater are two things, why do we talk of one thing? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The constitution theorists, who claim that the sweater and the thread are different things, should offer some explanation of why we tend to say that there is just one thing there. They must simply claim that we 'do not count by identity'. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.8) | |
| A reaction: Her example is a sweater knitted from a single piece of thread. Presumably we could count by sortal identity, so there is one thread here, and there is one sweater here. We just can't add the two together. No ontological arithmetic. |
| 16193 | 'Adverbialism' explains change by saying an object has-at-some-time a given property [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Another strategy for the problem of change says that instantiation - the having of properties - is time-indexed, or relative to times, although properties themselves are not. This 'adverbialism' says that object has-at-t some property. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Johnson, Lowe and Haslanger for this] Promising. The question is whether the time index is attached to the object, to the property, or to the instantiation. The middle one is wrong. There aren't two properties - green-at-t1 and green-at-t2. |
| 16195 | Presentism solves the change problem: the green banana ceases, so can't 'relate' to the yellow one [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Adopting presentism solves the problem of change, since it means that, once the banana is yellow, there just is no green banana, and the question of the relationship between yesterday's green banana and today's yellow one therefore does not arise. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: Change remains kind of odd, but it is no longer the puzzlement of two things being the same when they are admitted to be different. There is only ever one thing. This is my preferred account, I think. I certainly hope past bananas don't exist. |
| 16202 | The problem of change arises if there must be 'identity' of a thing over time [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: It is the insistence on identity between objects wholly present at different times which gives rise to the problem of change. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: My solution is to say things are the 'same', in a slightly loose non-transitive way, rather than formally identical, which is a concept from maths, not from reality. |
| 16192 | Endurance theory can relate properties to times, or timed instantiations to properties [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Endurance theory might claim a banana stands (atemporally) in different relations to different times (being-green-at to Monday), ..or has different instantiation relations to different properties (instantiates-on-Monday to being green). | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: She suggests that the first approach is more plausible for endurantists. I think she is right (assuming these are the only two options). Monday awaits a banana, but yellow doesn't. |
| 16196 | Endurance is a sophisticated theory, covering properties, instantiation and time [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Endurance theory is not just a default 'no-theory' theory, for it must incorporate a sophisticated account of properties and instantiation, and requires a certain view of time if it is even to be formulable. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: A bit odd to claim it is a sophisticated theory when it is held (at least in our culture) by absolutely everyone apart from a few philosophers and physicists. The sophistication may come with trying to describe it using current metaphysical vocabulary. |
| 16197 | How does perdurance theory explain our concern for our own future selves? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A question for perdurance theory is whether it can account for the special concern we feel for our own future selves. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: That is one of those questions that begins to look very mysterious whatever your theory. I favour endurantism, but me next year looks a very remote person for me to be concerned about, in comparison with the people around me now. |
| 16191 | Perdurance needs an atemporal perspective, to say that the object 'has' different temporal parts [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Perdurance relies on our having an 'atemporal' perspective from which we can truly say a banana has both yellow and green parts, where this 'has' is not in the present tense. ..Perdurance theory cannot be expressed straightforwardly in the present tense. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to require the tenseless B-series view of time. It seems to need a tenseless view of the past, but what does it have to say about the future? |
| 16199 | If an object is the sum of all of its temporal parts, its mass is staggeringly large! [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The mass of an object is the sum of its nonoverlapping parts. Analogy would suggest that a persisting banana has, atemporally speaking, a mass that is the sum of all the masses of the 100g temporal parts, a worryingly large figure. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This is an objection to the Perdurance view that an object is the sum of all of its temporal parts. Their duration tends towards instantaneous, so the aggregate mass tends towards infinity. She says they should deny atemporal mass. |
| 16201 | Perdurance says things are sums of stages; Stage Theory says each stage is the thing [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: According to Perdurance Theory, it is long-lived sums of stages which are tennis balls, whereas according to Stage Theory, it is the stages themselves which are tennis balls. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: These seem to be the two options if you are a four-dimensionalist, though Fine says you could be a weird three-dimensionalist and choose stage theory. |
| 16240 | If a life is essentially the sum of its temporal parts, it couldn't be shorter or longer than it was? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: It seems that perdurance theory should identify Descartes with the sum of his temporal parts, but that means Descartes essentially lived for 54 years, which seems absurd, as he could have lived longer or less long than he in fact did. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6.10) | |
| A reaction: [She credits Van Inwagen with this] I'm not clear why a counterpart of Descartes could not have a shorter or longer sum of parts, and still be Descartes. If the sum is rigidly designated, that is a problem for endurance too. |
| 16203 | Stage Theory seems to miss out the link between stages of the same object [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The first worry for Stage Theory is that many present stages are bananas, and many stages tomorrow are bananas, but this seems to omit the important fact that some of those stages are intimately linked, that certain stages are the same banana. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: Hawley has a theory to do with external relations, which I didn't find very persuasive. Just to say stages have a 'relation' seems too abstract. Stages of disparate things can also have 'relations', but presumably the wrong sort. |
| 16204 | Stage Theory says every stage is a distinct object, which gives too many objects [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The second worry for Stage Theory is that there are far too many bananas in the world on this account. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: The point is that each (instantaneous) stage is considered to be a whole banana (as opposed to one sum of all the stages of the banana, in the Perdurance view). A pretty serious problem, which she tries to deal with. |
| 16212 | An isolated stage can't be a banana (which involves suitable relations to other stages) [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A single isolated stage could not be a banana, because in order to be a banana a stage must be suitably related to other stages with appropriate properties. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.4.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems at odds with the claim that each stage is the whole thing (rather than the long temporal 'worm' of perdurance theory). Isolated stages are instantaneous, so can't be anything, really. Her 'relations' seem hand-wavy to me. Connections? |
| 16213 | Stages of one thing are related by extrinsic counterfactual and causal relations [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: I claim that there are relations between the distinct stages of a persisting object which are not determined by the intrinsic properties of those stages. …The later stages depend, counterfactually and causally, upon the earlier stages. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: This is the heart of her theory. How can there be a causal link between two stages which is not the result of intrinsic properties of the stages? This begins to sound like Malebranche's Occasionalism. |
| 16206 | Stages must be as fine-grained in length as change itself, so any change is a new stage [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: To account for change, stages and temporal parts must be as fine-grained as change: a material thing must have as many stages or parts as it is in incompatible states during its lifetime. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.4) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be a dilemma for stages here, of being so fat that they are divisible and change, or so thin that they barely exist. Lose-lose, I'd say. |
| 16205 | The stages of Stage Theory seem too thin to populate the world, or to be referred to [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A third worry for Stage Theory is that the momentary stages themselves are just too thin to populate the world, and too thin to be the objects of reference. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: Her three objections to her own theory add up to sufficient to refute it, in my view, though a large chunk of her book is spent trying to refute the objections. |
| 16225 | If two things might be identical, there can't be something true of one and false of the other [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: We can call the 'transference principle' the claim that if it is indeterminate whether two objects are identical, then nothing determinately true of one can be determinately false of the other. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.9) | |
| A reaction: The point is that Leibniz's Law could immediately be invoked to show there is no possibility of their identity. |
| 16239 | To decide whether something is a counterpart, we need to specify a relevant sortal concept [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: When asked whether a possible object is a counterpart of something, we need to specify which sortal we are interested in. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: The compares this to the 'respect' in which two things are similar. For example, what would count as a counterpart of the current British Prime Minister? De re or de dicto reference? |
| 23044 | All knowledge rests on a fundamental unity between the knower and what is known [Green,TH, by Muirhead] |
| Full Idea: All knowledge is seen on ultimate analysis to rest upon the idea of a fundamental unity between subject and object, between the knower and that which there is to be known. | |
| From: report of T.H. Green (works [1875]) by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State III | |
| A reaction: I don't really understand this thought, but I think it embodies the essence of Hegelian idealism. If I know a tree in the wood, any 'unity' between us strikes as merely imaginary. If the tree isn't separate, what does 'knowing' it mean? |
| 23034 | The ultimate test for truth is the systematic interdependence in nature [Green,TH, by Muirhead] |
| Full Idea: Systematic interdependence in the world of nature is the ultimate test of truth. | |
| From: report of T.H. Green (works [1875]) by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State II | |
| A reaction: Green (or Muirhead) drifts between coherence as the nature of truth and coherence as the nature of justification. He it is the 'test' for truth, which was Russell's view. |
| 16218 | On any theory of self, it is hard to explain why we should care about our future selves [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: It is rather difficult to say why one should care about one's future self, even on an endurance theory account of the self. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.9) | |
| A reaction: A nice passing remark, that strikes me forcibly as one of those basic mysteries of experience that philosophers can only gawp at, and have no theory to offer. |
| 23032 | What is distinctive of human life is the desire for self-improvement [Green,TH, by Muirhead] |
| Full Idea: All that is distinctively human in the life of man springs not from the desire to possess this or that object, and so far to realise a better, but to be something more and better than he is. | |
| From: report of T.H. Green (works [1875]) by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State II | |
| A reaction: An example of Victorian optimism, I think. I'm guessing that people who are not motivated by this impulse are not behaving in a way that is 'distinctively human'. That said, this is an interesting aspect of human nature. |
| 23033 | Hedonism offers no satisfaction, because what we desire is self-betterment [Green,TH, by Muirhead] |
| Full Idea: Hedonism failed because it offered as an end of human aspiration an object in which the human spirit, pledged by its own nature to self-betterment, …could never find satisfaction. | |
| From: report of T.H. Green (works [1875]) by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State II | |
| A reaction: It is always both sad and amusing to see that 150 years ago someone wrote of a doctrine that is still with us that it has 'failed'. Nowadays they try to say the same of physicalism. His objection rests on optimism about humanity. |
| 23045 | Politics is compromises, which seem supported by a social contract, but express the will of no one [Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: Where laws and institutions are apparently the work of deliberate volition, they are in reality the result of a compromise, which while by a kind of social contract it has the acquiescence of all, expresses the will of none. | |
| From: T.H. Green (works [1875]), quoted by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State III | |
| A reaction: Politicians who claim to be enacting the 'will of the people' (e.g. when they won a referendum 52-48) are simply lying. Committees usually end up enacting one person's will, but often without realising what has happened. |
| 23050 | The ideal is a society in which all citizens are ladies and gentlemen [Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: With all seriousness and reverence we may hope and pray for a condition of English society in which all honest citizens will recognise themselves and be recognised by each other as gentlemen. | |
| From: T.H. Green (works [1875]), quoted by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State IV | |
| A reaction: Call me old fashioned but, as long as we expand this to include ladies, I like this thought. Chaucer's knight (in his Prologue) should be our national role model. The true gentleman is an Aristotelian ideal. |
| 23052 | Enfranchisement is an end in itself; it makes a person moral, and gives a basis for respect [Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: Enfranchisement of the people is an end in itself. …Only citizenship makes the moral man; only citizenship gives that respect which is the true basis of the respect for others. | |
| From: T.H. Green (works [1875], iii:436), quoted by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State IV | |
| A reaction: Should people respect their betters? If so, that is a sort of deferential respect which is different from the mutual respect between equals. That said, I wholly approve of this idea. |
| 23036 | The good is identified by the capacities of its participants [Green,TH, by Muirhead] |
| Full Idea: The modern idea of the good has developed in respect of the range of persons who have the capacity and therefore the right to participate in this good. | |
| From: report of T.H. Green (works [1875]) by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State II | |
| A reaction: Green is a notable Victorian liberal, starting from an idealist metaphysics. This is an intriguing view of liberal values. The concept of the good should be what suits persons with full capacity. Having the capacity bestows the right of access to it. Hm. |
| 23039 | A true state is only unified and stabilised by acknowledging individuality [Green,TH, by Muirhead] |
| Full Idea: In so far as society commits itself to the principle of individuality of its citizens does it realise the unity and stability that constitute it a true 'State'. | |
| From: report of T.H. Green (works [1875]) by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State II | |
| A reaction: This asserts the liberal vision of a state, rather than asserting a fact. A state consistently mostly of slaves still seems to be a state, and may achieve a lot. |
| 23038 | People only develop their personality through co-operation with the social whole [Green,TH, by Muirhead] |
| Full Idea: In so far as the individual commits himself to the principle of co-operation in a social whole does he realise his end as individual personality. | |
| From: report of T.H. Green (works [1875]) by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State II | |
| A reaction: This makes for a very communitarian type of liberalism. The question is whether we create insitutions which suck our free citizens into a communal way of life, or whether that is a matter of their own initiative. |
| 23040 | If something develops, its true nature is embodied in its end [Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: To anyone who understands a process of development, the result being developed is the reality; and it is its ability to become this that the subject undergoing development has its true nature. | |
| From: T.H. Green (works [1875], iii: 224), quoted by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State II | |
| A reaction: Although this contains the dubious Hegelian idea that development tends towards some 'end', presented as fixed and final, it still seems important that anything accepted as a 'development' is the expression of some natural potential. |
| 16215 | Causation is nothing more than the counterfactuals it grounds? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Counterfactual accounts of causation say that a causal connection is exhausted by the counterfactuals it appears to ground. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: I am bewildered as to how this became a respectable view in philosophy. I quite understand that this might exhaust the 'logic' of causal relations. Presumably you can have counterfactuals in mathematics which are not causal? |
| 22899 | 'Thank goodness that's over' is not like 'thank goodness that happened on Friday' [Prior,AN] |
| Full Idea: One says 'thank goodness that is over', ..and it says something which it is impossible which any use of any tenseless copula with a date should convey. It certainly doesn't mean the same as 'thank goodness that occured on Friday June 15th 1954'. | |
| From: Arthur N. Prior (Changes in Events and Changes in Things [1968]), quoted by Adrian Bardon - Brief History of the Philosophy of Time 4 'Pervasive' | |
| A reaction: [Ref uncertain] This seems to be appealing to ordinary usage, in which tenses have huge significance. If we take time (with its past, present and future) as primitive, then tenses can have full weight. Did tenses mean anything at all to Einstein? |
| 16207 | Time could be discrete (like integers) or dense (rationals) or continuous (reals) [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There seem to be three possible ways for time to be fine-grained. The ordering of instants could be discrete (like the integers), dense (like the rational numbers) or continuous (like the real numbers). | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: She seems to assume that time must be 'grained', but I would take the continuous view to imply that there is no grain at all (which is bad news for her version of stage theory). |
| 23031 | God is the ideal end of the mature mind's final development [Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: God is a subject which is eternally all that the self-conscious subject as developed in time has the possibility of becoming. | |
| From: T.H. Green (works [1875]), quoted by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State I | |
| A reaction: [Ethics p.197] Reminiscent of Peirce's account of truth, as the ideal end of enquiry. If God is a human ideal, we either limit God, or exaggerate our powers of idealisation. |
| 23041 | God is the realisation of the possibilities of each man's self [Green,TH] |
| Full Idea: God is identical with the self of every man in the sense of being the realisation of its determinate possibilities.…In being conscious of himself man is conscious of God and thus knows that God is, but only in so far as he knows what he himself really is. | |
| From: T.H. Green (works [1875], iii:226-7), quoted by John H. Muirhead - The Service of the State II | |
| A reaction: Does this, by the transitivity of identity, imply the identity of all individual men? Do we all contain identical possibilities, which converge on a unified concept of God? I always take the monotheistic God to far exceed mere human possibilities. |