8 ideas
| 7910 | Pursue truth with the urgency of someone whose clothes are on fire [Ashvaghosha] |
| Full Idea: As though your turban or your clothes were on fire, so with a sense of urgency should you apply your intellect to the comprehension of the truths. | |
| From: Ashvaghosha (Saundaranandakavya [c.50], XVI) | |
| A reaction: The best philosophers need no such urging. I retain a romantic view that we should be 'natural' in these things. See Plato's views in Idea 2153 and 1638. However, maybe I should be confronted with this quotation every morning when I awake. |
| 10467 | Individuals consist of 'compresent' tropes [Bacon,John] |
| Full Idea: 'Qualitons' or 'relatons' (quality and relation tropes) are held to belong to the same individual if they are all 'compresent' with one another. | |
| From: John Bacon (Tropes [2008], §4) | |
| A reaction: There is a perennial problem with bundles - how to distinguish accidental compresence (like people in a lift) from united compresence (like people who make a family). |
| 10464 | A trope is a bit of a property or relation (not an exemplification or a quality) [Bacon,John] |
| Full Idea: A trope is an instance or bit (not an exemplification) of a property or a relation. Bill Clinton's eloquence is not his participating in the universal eloquence, or the peculiar quality of his eloquence, but his bit, and his alone, of eloquence. | |
| From: John Bacon (Tropes [2008], Intro) | |
| A reaction: If we have identified something as a 'bit' of something, we can ask whether that bit is atomic, or divisible into something else, and we can ask what are the qualities and properties and powers of this bit, we seems to defeat the object. |
| 10465 | Trope theory is ontologically parsimonious, with possibly only one-category [Bacon,John] |
| Full Idea: A major attraction of tropism has been its promise of parsimony; some adherents (such as Campbell) go so far as to proclaim a one-category ontology. | |
| From: John Bacon (Tropes [2008], §2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to go against the folk idiom which suggests that it is things which have properties, rather than properties ruling to roost. Maybe if one identified tropes with processes, the theory could be brought more into line with modern physics? |
| 10466 | Maybe possible worlds are just sets of possible tropes [Bacon,John] |
| Full Idea: Meinongian tropism has the advantage that possible worlds might be thought of as sets of 'qualitons' and 'relatons' (quality and relational tropes). | |
| From: John Bacon (Tropes [2008], §3) | |
| A reaction: You are still left with 'possible' to explain, and I'm not sure that anything is explain here. If the actual world is sets of tropes, then possible worlds would also have to be, I suppose. |
| 7295 | Maybe induction is only reliable IF reality is stable [Mitchell,A] |
| Full Idea: Maybe we should say that IF regularities are stable, only then is induction a reliable procedure. | |
| From: Alistair Mitchell (talk [2006]), quoted by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me a very good proposal. In a wildly unpredictable reality, it is hard to see how anyone could learn from experience, or do any reasoning about the future. Natural stability is the axiom on which induction is built. |
| 7909 | The Eightfold Path concerns morality, wisdom, and tranquillity [Ashvaghosha] |
| Full Idea: The Eightfold Path has three steps concerning morality - right speech, right bodily action, and right livelihood; three of wisdom - right views, right intentions, and right effort; and two of tranquillity - right mindfulness and right concentration. | |
| From: Ashvaghosha (Saundaranandakavya [c.50], XVI) | |
| A reaction: Most of this translates quite comfortably into the aspirations of western philosophy. For example, 'right effort' sounds like Kant's claim that only a good will is truly good (Idea 3710). The Buddhist division is interesting for action theory. |
| 7908 | At the end of a saint, he is not located in space, but just ceases to be disturbed [Ashvaghosha] |
| Full Idea: When an accomplished saint comes to the end, he does not go anywhere down in the earth or up in the sky, nor into any of the directions of space, but because his defilements have become extinct he simply ceases to be disturbed. | |
| From: Ashvaghosha (Saundaranandakavya [c.50], XVI) | |
| A reaction: To 'cease to be disturbed' is the most attractive account of heaven I have encountered. It all sounds a bit dull though. I wonder, as usual, how they know all this stuff. |