5 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. |
| 15873 | Laws of nature are just records of regularities and correlations, with concepts to make recording them easier [Mach, by Harré] |
| Full Idea: For Mach, the laws of nature are simply the compendious record of sensory regularities, correlations of elements. Any additional concepts are no more than symbols or devices for the convenient recording of general sensory patterns. | |
| From: report of Ernst Mach (Popular Scientific Lectures [1894], pp.201-5) by Rom Harré - Laws of Nature 2 | |
| A reaction: Mach is the high priest of scientific positivism, which is really just hard-line empiricism. |
| 10650 | In the military, persons are parts of parts of large units, but not parts of those large units [Rescher] |
| Full Idea: In military usage, persons can be parts of small units, and small units parts of large ones; but persons are never parts of large units. | |
| From: Nicholas Rescher (Axioms for the Part Relation [1955]), quoted by Achille Varzi - Mereology 2.1 | |
| A reaction: This much-cited objection to the transitivity of the 'part' relation seems very odd. There could hardly be an army or a regiment if there weren't soldiers to make up parts of it. |
| 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. |