42 ideas
| 16588 | I prefer a lack of form to mean non-existence, than to think of some quasi-existence [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: I sooner judged that what lacks all form does not exist, than thought of as something in between form and nothing, neither formed nor nothing, unformed and next to nothing. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], XII.6), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 03.1 | |
| A reaction: Scholastics were struck by the contrast between this remark, and the remark of Averroes (Idea 16587) that prime matter was halfway existence. Their two great authorities disagreed! This sort of thing stimulated the revival of metaphysics. |
| 22979 | Three main questions seem to be whether a thing is, what it is, and what sort it is [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: I am told that I can ask three sorts of questions - whether a thing is, what it is, and what sort it is. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], X.10) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a very Aristotelian approach. I am pleased to see that what it is and what sort it is are not conflated. The first one must be its individual essence, and the second its generic essence. |
| 22427 | To explain object qualities, primary qualities must be more than mere sources of experience [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: In order that we have available an explanation of the qualities of objects we need to be able to conceive primary qualities as consisting in something other than powers to produce experiences. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6 n 52) | |
| A reaction: I suppose if the qualities are nothing more than the source of the experiences, that is Kant's noumenon. Nothing more could be said. The seems to be a requirement for tacit inference here. We infer the interior of the tomato. |
| 22413 | Being red simply consists in looking red [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: What we should claim is that being red consists in looking red. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: A very nice simple account. There is more to being square than looking square (which may not even guarantee that it is square). That's the primary/secondary distinction in a nut shell. But red things don't look red in the dark. Sufficient, not necessary. |
| 22415 | Relativity means differing secondary perceptions are not real disagreements [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Relativity permits differences in the perceived secondary qualities not to imply genuine disagreement, whereas perceived differences of primary qualities imply that at least one perceiver is in error. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: An example of 'relativity' is colour blindness. Sounds good, but what of one perceiver seeing a square as square, and another seeing it obliquely as a parallelogram? The squareness then seems more like a theory than a perception. |
| 22416 | Phenomenalism is correct for secondary qualities, so scepticism is there impossible [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: We might say that scepticism is ruled out for secondary qualities because (roughly) phenomenalism is correct for them; but phenomenalism is not similarly correct for primary qualities, and scepticism cannot get a foothold. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: An odd idea, if phenomenalism says that reality consists entirely of phenomena. I should think phenomenalism is a commitment to the absence of primary qualities. |
| 22422 | Maybe all possible sense experience must involve both secondary and primary qualities [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: The inseparability thesis about perception says that for any actual and possible sense the content of experiences delivered by that sense must be both of secondary qualities and of primary qualities. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: That would mean that all possible experience must have a mode of presentation, and also must be 'of' something independent of experience. So a yellow after-image would not count as an 'experience'? |
| 22428 | You understood being red if you know the experience involved; not so with thngs being square [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: To grasp what it is to be red is to know the kind of sensory experience red things produce; ...but it is not true that to grasp what it is to be square one needs to know what kinds of sensory experience square things produce. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 8) | |
| A reaction: Are any experiences involved in the understanding of squareness? We don't know squareness by a priori intuition (do we?). To grasp squareness if may be necessary to have a variety of experiences of it. Or to grasp that it is primary. |
| 22414 | You don't need to know how a square thing looks or feels to understand squareness [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: To grasp what it is for something to be square it is not constitutively necessary to know how square things look or feel, since what it is to be square does not involve any such relation to experience. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: You could even describe squareness verbally, unlike redness. It seems crucial that almost any sense (such as bat echoes) can communicate primary qualities, but secondary qualities are tied to a sense, and wouldn't exist without it. |
| 22423 | Touch doesn't provide direct experience of primary qualities, because touch feels temperature [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Bennett's claim that touch provides experience of primary qualities without experience of any secondary qualities strikes me as false, because tactile experience includes felt temperature, which is a dispositional secondary quality. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: [J.Bennett 1971 pp. 90-4] Fair point. What about shape and texture? We experience forces, but the shape is assembled in imagination rather than in experience. So do we meet primary qualities directly in forces, such as acceleration? No secondary quality? |
| 22426 | We can perceive objectively, because primary qualities are not mind-created [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: I hold that experience succeeds in representing the world objectively, since primary quality perceptual content is not contributed by the mind. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: My new example of a direct perception of a primary quality is acceleration in a lift. What would we say to one passenger who denied feeling the acceleration? It took an effort to see that mind contributes to secondary qualities (so make more effort?). |
| 22412 | Lockean secondary qualities (unlike primaries) produce particular sensory experiences [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: In the Lockean tradition, secondary qualities are defined as those whose instantiation in an object consists in a power or disposition of the object to produce sensory experiences in perceivers of a certain phenomenological character. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: Primary qualities are said to lack such dispositions. Not sure about these definitions. Primaries offer no experiences? With these definitions, comparing them would be a category mistake. I take it primaries reflect reality and secondaries do not. |
| 22421 | Could there be a mind which lacked secondary quality perception? [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Can we form a conception of a type of mind whose representations are free of secondary quality perceptions? | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: Nice question. Minds must have experiences, and there has to be a 'way' or 'mode' for those experiences. A mind which directly grasped the primary quality of sphericity would seem to be visionary rather than sensual or experiential. |
| 22424 | Secondary qualities contain information; their variety would be superfluous otherwise [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Surely we learn something about an object when we discover its secondary qualities? ...If secondary quality experience were informationally inert, its variety would be something of a puzzle. Why not employ the same medium for all primary informaton? | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: This is important. We can't just focus on the primary qualities, and ignore the secondary. But diverse colours draw attention to information, which can then be translated into neutral data, as in spectroscopic analysis. Locke agrees with this. |
| 22425 | The utility theory says secondary qualities give information useful to human beings [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Secondary quality perception, according to the utility theory, gives information about the relation between the perceptual object and the perceiver's needs and interests. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: Almost the only example I can think of is whether fruit is ripe or rotten. ...Also 'bad' smells. We recognise aggressive animal noises, but that is not the same as dangerous (e.g. rustling snake). Divine design is behind this theory, I think. |
| 7629 | We see objects 'directly' by representing them [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: My view is that we see objects 'directly' by representing them in visual experience. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], Ch.8 n1) | |
| A reaction: [Quoted by Maund] This rejects both inference in perception and sense-data, while retaining the notion of representation. It is a view which has gained a lot of support. But how can it be direct if it represents? Photographs can't do that. |
| 22981 | Mind and memory are the same, as shown in 'bear it in mind' or 'it slipped from mind' [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: The mind and the memory are one and the same. We even call the memory the mind, for when we tell a person to remember something, we tell them to 'bear this in mind', and when we forget something 'it slipped out of my mind'. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], X.14) | |
| A reaction: This idea has become familiar in modern neuroscience, I think, presumably because we do not find distinct types of neurons for consciousness and for memory. |
| 22980 | Memory contains innumerable principles of maths, as well as past sense experiences [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: The memory contains the innumerable principles and laws of numbers and dimensions. None of these can have been conveyed to me by the bodily senses. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], X.12) | |
| A reaction: Even if you have a fairly empirical view of the sources of mathematics (a view with which I sympathise), it must by admitted that our endless extrapolations from the sources also reside in memory. So we remember thoughts as well as experiences. |
| 22983 | We would avoid remembering sorrow or fear if that triggered the emotions afresh [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: If we had to experience sorrow or fear every time that we mentioned these emotions, no one would be willing to speak of them. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], X.14) | |
| A reaction: Remembering the death of a loved one can trigger fresh grief, but remembering their dangerous illness from which they recovered no longer contains the feeling of fear. |
| 22977 | I can distinguish different smells even when I am not experiencing them [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: I can distinguish the scent of lilies from that of violets, even though there is no scent at all in my nostrils. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], X.08) | |
| A reaction: Augustine has a nice introspective account of how we experience memory, and identifies lots of puzzling features. I know I can identify the smell of vinegar, but I can't bring it to mind, the way I can the appearance of roses. |
| 22982 | Why does joy in my mind make me happy, but joy in my memory doesn't? [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: How can it be that my mind can be happy because of the joy that is in it, and yet my memory is not sad by reason of the sadness that is in it? | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], X.14) | |
| A reaction: This seems to contradict his thought in Idea 22981, that memory and mind are the same. Recall seems to be a part of consciousness which is not fully wired up to the rest of the mind. |
| 15282 | Facts should be deducible from the theory and initial conditions, and prefer the simpler theory [Osiander, by Harré/Madden] |
| Full Idea: The two positivist criteria for a scientific theory are that the facts must be deducible from the theory together with initial conditions, and if there is more than one theory the simplest must be chosen. | |
| From: report of Andreas Osiander (Preface to 'De Revolutionibus' [1543]) by Harré,R./Madden,E.H. - Causal Powers 7.I | |
| A reaction: Harré and Madden cite this as a famous early statement of positivism. It seems to combine Hempel and Lewis very concisely. Wrong, of course. It does not, though, appear to mention 'laws'. |
| 22978 | Memory is so vast that I cannot recognise it as part of my mind [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: The memory is a vast immeasurable sanctuary. It is part of my nature, but I cannot understand all that I am. Hence the mind is too narrow to contain itself entirely. Is the other part outside of itself, and not within it? How then can it be a part? | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], X.08) | |
| A reaction: He seems to understand the mind as entirely consisting of consciousness. Nevertheless, this seems to be the first inklings of the modern externalist view of the mind. |
| 22984 | Without memory I could not even speak of myself [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: I do not understand the power of memory that is in myself, although without it I could not even speak of myself. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], X.16) | |
| A reaction: Even if the self is not identical with memory, this idea seems to establish that memory is an essential aspect of the self. This point is neglected by those who see the self as an entity (the 'soul pearl') which persists through all experience. |
| 5982 | If the future does not exist, how can prophets see it? [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: How do prophets see the future, if there is not a future to be seen? | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], XI.17) | |
| A reaction: The answer, I suspect, is that prophets can't see the future. The prospect that the future already exists would seem to saboutage human freedom and responsibility, and point to Calvinist predestination, and even fatalism. |
| 22420 | The indexical perspective is subjective, incorrigible and constant [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: I attribute three properties to the indexical perspective: it is subjective, incorrigible, and constant. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 5) | |
| A reaction: That is as good an idea as any for summarising the view (associated with John Perry) that the indexical perspective is an indispensable feature of reality. For a good attack on this, which I favour, see Cappelen and Dever. |
| 18410 | Indexical thought is in relation to my self-consciousness [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Very roughly, we can say that to think of something indexically is to think of it in relation to me, as I am presented to myself in self-consciousness. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: So it is characterised relationally, which doesn't mean it has a distinctive intrinsic character. If I'm lost, and I overhear someone say 'Peter is in Hazlemere', I get the same relational information (in a different mode) without the indexicality. |
| 22417 | Indexicals do not figure in theories of physics, because they are not explanatory causes [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: Indexicals are like secondary qualities in not figuring in causal explanations of the interactions of objects: physics omits them not because they are relative and egocentric, but because they do not constitute explanatory predicates of a causal theory. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 2) | |
| A reaction: They are outside explanatory physics, but not outside explanation. The object moved because a force acted on it; or the object moved because I wanted it moved. |
| 18402 | Indexical concepts are indispensable, as we need them for the power to act [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: The present suggestion is that indexical concepts are ineliminable because without them agency would be impossible: when I imagine myself divested of indexical thoughts employing only centreless mental representations, I am deprived of the power to act. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 6) | |
| A reaction: A nice clear statement of the view developed by Perry and Lewis. I agree with Cappelen and Dever that it is entirely wrong, and that indexical thought is entirely eliminable, and nothing special. |
| 22976 | Memories are preserved separately, according to category [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: In memory everything is preserved separately, according to its category. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], X.08) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as the first seeds of the idea that the mind functions by means of mental files. Our memories of cats are 'close to' or 'linked to' our memories of dogs. |
| 22418 | I can know indexical truths a priori, unlike their non-indexical paraphrases [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: I know the truth of the sentence 'I am here now' a priori, but I do not know a priori 'McGinn is in London on 15th Nov 1981'. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals [1983], 3) | |
| A reaction: I'm not convinced that I can grasp the concepts of 'here' and 'now' (i.e. space and time) by purely a priori means. But he certainly shows that you can't glibly dismiss indexicals by paraphrasing them in that way. |
| 22985 | Everyone wants happiness [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: Surely happiness is what everyone wants, so much so that there can be none who do not want it? | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], X.20) | |
| A reaction: His concept of happiness is, of course, religious. Occasionally you meet habitual grumblers about life who give the impression that they are only happy when they are discontented. So happiness is achieving desires, not feeling good? |
| 5984 | Maybe time is an extension of the mind [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: I begin to wonder whether time is an extension of the mind itself. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], XI.26) | |
| A reaction: The observation that the mind creates a 'specious present' (spreading experience out over a short fraction of second) reinforces this. Personally I like David Marshall's proposal that consciousness is entirely memory, which would deny this idea. |
| 22888 | To be aware of time it can only exist in the mind, as memory or anticipation [Augustine, by Bardon] |
| Full Idea: Augustine answers that for us to be aware of time it must exist only in the mind, …and the difference between past and future is just the difference between memory and anticipation. | |
| From: report of Augustine (Confessions [c.398]) by Adrian Bardon - Brief History of the Philosophy of Time 1 'Augustine's' | |
| A reaction: This is an extreme idealist view. Are we to say that the past consists only of what can be remembered, and the future only of what is anticipated? Absurd anti-realism, in my view. Where do his concepts come from, asks Le Poidevin. |
| 5980 | How can ten days ahead be a short time, if it doesn't exist? [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: A short time ago or a short time ahead we might put at ten days, but how can anything which does not exist be either long or short? | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], XI.15) | |
| A reaction: A nice question, which gets at the paradoxical nature of time very nicely. How can it be long, but non-existent? We could break the paradox by concluding '..and therefore time does exist', even though we can't see how. |
| 5979 | If the past is no longer, and the future is not yet, how can they exist? [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: Of the three divisions of time, how can two, the past and the future, be, when the past no longer is, and the future is not yet? | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], XI.14) | |
| A reaction: This is the oldest bewilderment about time, which naturally leads us to the thought that time cannot actually 'exist'. The remark implies that at least 'now' is safe, but that also succumbs to paradox pretty quickly. |
| 5981 | The whole of the current year is not present, so how can it exist? [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: We cannot say that the whole of the current year is present, and if the whole of it is not present, the year is not present. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], XI.15) | |
| A reaction: Another nice way of presenting the paradox of time. We are in a particular year, so it has to be real. |
| 5978 | I know what time is, until someone asks me to explain it [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: I know well enough what time is, provided that nobody asks me; but if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], XI.14) | |
| A reaction: A justly famous remark, even though it adds nothing to our knowledge of time. This sort of thought pushes us towards accepting many things as axiomatic, such as time, space, identity, persons, mind. |
| 5983 | I disagree with the idea that time is nothing but cosmic movement [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: I once heard a learned man say that time is nothing but the movement of the sun and the moon and the stars, but I do not agree. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], XI.22) | |
| A reaction: It is tempting to say that you either take time or movement as axiomatic, and describe one in terms of the other, but you are stuck unable to give the initial statement of the axiom without mentioning the second property you were saving for later. |
| 5977 | Heaven and earth must be created, because they are subject to change [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: The fact that heaven and earth are there proclaims that they were created, for they are subject to change and variation; ..the meaning of change and variation is that something is there which was not there before. | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], XI.04) | |
| A reaction: It seems possible that the underlying matter is eternal (as in various conservation laws, such as that of energy), and that all change is in the form rather than the substance. |
| 22887 | If God existed before creation, why would a perfect being desire to change things? [Augustine, by Bardon] |
| Full Idea: If nothing existed by God before creation, then what could have happened to, or within, God that led God to decide to create the universe at that particular moment? Why would an eternal or perfect being want or need to change? | |
| From: report of Augustine (Confessions [c.398]) by Adrian Bardon - Brief History of the Philosophy of Time 1 'Augustine's' | |
| A reaction: I suppose you could reply that change is superior to stasis, but then why did God delay the creation? |
| 5976 | If God is outside time in eternity, can He hear prayers? [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: O Lord, since you are outside time in eternity, are you unaware of the things that I tell you? | |
| From: Augustine (Confessions [c.398], XI.01) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as the single most difficult and most elusive question about the nature of a supreme divine being. If the being is trapped in time, as we are, it is greatly diminished, and if it is outside, it is hard to see how it could be a participant. |