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. |
| 9184 | We can't presume that all interesting concepts can be analysed [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: We have no prior reason to suppose that philosophically significant concepts have interesting analyses into necessary and sufficient conditions. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Review of Bob Hale's 'Abstract Objects' [1988]) | |
| A reaction: We might think that they are either analysable or primitive, and that failure of analysis invites us to take a concept as primitive. But maybe God can analyse it and we can't. |
| 9183 | Platonism claims that some true assertions have singular terms denoting abstractions, so abstractions exist [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The Fregean argument for platonism is that some true assertions contain singular terms which denote abstract objects if they denote anything; since the assertions are true, the singular terms denote. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (Review of Bob Hale's 'Abstract Objects' [1988]) | |
| A reaction: I am perplexed that anyone would rest their view of reality on such an argument. The obvious comparison would be with true remarks about blatantly fictional characters, or blatantly invented concepts such as 'checkmate'. |
| 20887 | A rape disregards the status of being a person - but so does all assault [Foa] |
| Full Idea: In a rape a person is used without proper regard for her personhood - but this is true of every kind of assault. | |
| From: Pamela Foa (What's Wrong with Rape? [1977], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is a good step towards her attempt to pin down what is specifically wrong with rape, which strikes me as an extremely important question, and not merely in order to justify punishments. |
| 20888 | Rape of children is dreadful, but no one thinks children should have a right of consent [Foa] |
| Full Idea: Rape of children is at least as heinous as rape of adults, though few believe that children have or ought to have the same large domain of consent adults (male and female) ought to have. | |
| From: Pamela Foa (What's Wrong with Rape? [1977], 1) | |
| A reaction: A powerful point. She is not quite spelling out the crux, which is that no one thinks children should have a right to consent to sexual intercourse, which means that consent is irrelevant in such a case of rape. So it can't be the key to adult rape? |
| 20889 | If men should lust and women shouldn't, that makes rape the prevalent sexual model [Foa] |
| Full Idea: We are taught that sexual desires are desires women ought not to have and men must have. This is the model which makes necessary an eternal battle of the sexes. It explains why rape is the prevalent model of sexuality. | |
| From: Pamela Foa (What's Wrong with Rape? [1977], 3) | |
| A reaction: A striking thought. See 'The Origins of Sex' by F.Dabhoiwala, which claims that women used to be seen as the sexual predators, and the balance shifted in the 18thC. Are women obliged to exhibit lust, in order to defuse rapacious desires? |
| 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. |