45 ideas
| 2922 | All intelligent Romans were Epicureans [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Every mind of any account in the Roman Empire was an Epicurean. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ [1889], 58) |
| 23770 | Reductive analysis makes a concept clearer, by giving an alternative simpler set [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: A reductive analysis is one that provides an alternative set of concepts by which some target concept can be understood. It must be non-circular, and given in terms of concepts that are themselves better understood. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 01.2) | |
| A reaction: There seem to be two aims of analysis: this one emphasises understanding, but the other one concerns ontology - by demonstrating that some concept or thing can be understood fully by what happens at a lower level. |
| 23769 | Promoting an ontology by its implied good metaphysic is an 'argument-by-display' [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: The form of argument which sells an ontology on the basis a metaphysic is known as an 'argument-by-display'. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 01.2) | |
| A reaction: [Attributed to John Bigelow 1999] New to me, but I'm quite a fan of this. For example, my rejection of platonism is not based on specific arguments, but on looking at the whole platonic picture of reality. |
| 12223 | It is a fallacy to explain the obscure with the even more obscure [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: The fallacy of 'ad obscurum per obscurius' is to explain the obscure by appeal to what is more obscure. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §3) | |
| A reaction: Not strictly a fallacy, so much as an example of inadequate explanation, along with circularity and infinite regresses. |
| 23520 | Truth has had to be fought for, and normal life must be sacrificed to achieve it [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Truth has had to be fought for every step of the way, almost everything else dear to our hearts, on which our love and our trust in life depend, has had to be sacrificed to it. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ [1889], 50) | |
| A reaction: This, in one of his final works, seems to contradict every idea that Nietzsche is the high priest of relativism about truth. He (and Foucault) and interested in the social role of truth, but are not so daft as to reject its possibility. |
| 2914 | One must never ask whether truth is useful [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: One must never ask whether truth is useful. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ [1889], Fore) |
| 12230 | Singular terms refer if they make certain atomic statements true [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: Anyone should agree that a justification for regarding a singular term as having objectual reference is provided just as soon as one has justification for regarding as true certain atomic statements in which it functions as a singular term. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §9) | |
| A reaction: The meat of this idea is hidden in the word 'certain'. See Idea 10314 for Hale's explanation. Without that, the proposal strikes me as absurd. |
| 12225 | Neo-Fregeanism might be better with truth-makers, rather than quantifier commitment [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: A third way has been offered to 'make sense' of neo-Fregeanism: we should reject Quine's well-known criterion of ontological commitment in favour of one based on 'truth-maker theory'. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §4 n19) | |
| A reaction: [The cite Ross Cameron for this] They reject this proposal, on the grounds that truth-maker theory is not sufficient to fix the grounding truth-conditions of statements. |
| 12224 | Are neo-Fregeans 'maximalists' - that everything which can exist does exist? [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: It is claimed that neo-Fregeans are committed to 'maximalism' - that whatever can exist does. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §4) | |
| A reaction: [The cite Eklund] They observe that maximalism denies contingent non-existence (of the £20 note I haven't got). There seems to be the related problem of 'hyperinflation', that if abstract objects are generated logically, the process is unstoppable. |
| 23783 | Change exists, it is causal, and it needs an explanation [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: There is a phenomenon of change. I am starting with the assumptions that it is a causal phenomenon, and that it requires explanation. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 06.1) | |
| A reaction: That is, I take it, that we need a theory which explains change, rather than just describing it. Well said. Williams says, roughly, that each stage causes the next stage. |
| 23784 | Processes don't begin or end; they just change direction unexpectedly [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: No process every really starts or ends. …A process we see as derailed is really just an expected sequence that continues in an unexpected direction. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 06.3) | |
| A reaction: Obviously if you cannot individuate processes, then the concept of a process is not much use in ontology. Williams rejects processes, and I think he is probably right. He breaks processes down into smaller units. |
| 23790 | Processes are either strings of short unchanging states, or continuous and unreducible events [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: Processes can be modelled in two ways. They are drawn out events encompassing many changes, but dissectible into short-lived states, none including change. Or they are continuous and impenetrable, and to split them is impossible. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 09.3) | |
| A reaction: Obviously a process has temporal moments in it, so the unsplittability is conceptual. I find the concept of changeless parts baffling. But if processes are drawn out, they can't be basic to ontology. |
| 23786 | The status quo is part of what exists, and so needs metaphysical explanation [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: The status quo is part of what exists, and thus it is a proper topic of concern for the metaphysician, and so it warrants explanation. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 07.2) | |
| A reaction: His point is that ontology as a mere inventory of things gives no account of why they remain unchanged, as well as their processes and connections. |
| 23768 | A metaphysic is a set of wider explanations derived from a basic ontology [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: A metaphysic is what you get when you embed a fundamental ontology within a larger metaphysical framework by repeatedly appealing to elements of that ontology in explaining metaphysical phenomena. …Only then do you see what the ontology is worth. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 01.1) | |
| A reaction: Confirming my mantra that metaphysics is an explanatory activity. I think it is important that the ontology includes relations (such as 'determinations'), and is not just an inventory of types of entity. |
| 23773 | Humeans say properties are passive, possibility is vast, laws are descriptions, causation is weak [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: The main components of neo-Humean metaphysics are that properties are inherently non-modal and passive, that what is possible is restricted only by imagination and coherence, that laws are non-governing descriptions, and causation is weak and extrinsic. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 02.1) | |
| A reaction: This is Williams identifying the enemy, prior to offering the much more active and restictive powers ontology. I'm with Williams. |
| 23779 | We shouldn't posit the existence of anything we have a word for [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: There seems to be a mysterious desire to posit entities simply because certain terms pop up in our vocabulary. But we should not be so indiscriminate about our posits, even if our talk is properly vetted. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 04.1) | |
| A reaction: This should hardly need saying, and the familiar example is 'for the sake of' entailing sakes, but it seems to be a vice that is still found in metaphysical philosophy. The word 'nothingness' comes to mind. |
| 12226 | The identity of Pegasus with Pegasus may be true, despite the non-existence [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: Identity is sometimes read so that 'Pegasus is Pegasus' expresses a truth, the non-existence of any winged horse notwithstanding. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §5) | |
| A reaction: This would give you ontological commitment to truth, without commitment to existence. It undercuts the use of identity statements as the basis of existence claims, which was Frege's strategy. |
| 12229 | Maybe we have abundant properties for semantics, and sparse properties for ontology [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: There is a compatibilist view which says that it is for the abundant properties to play the role of 'bedeutungen' in semantic theory, and the sparse ones to address certain metaphysical concerns. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §9) | |
| A reaction: Only a philosopher could live with the word 'property' having utterly different extensions in different areas of discourse. They similarly bifurcate words like 'object' and 'exist'. Call properties 'quasi-properties' and I might join in. |
| 18443 | A successful predicate guarantees the existence of a property - the way of being it expresses [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: The good standing of a predicate is already trivially sufficient to ensure the existence of an associated property, a (perhaps complex) way of being which the predicate serves to express. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §9) | |
| A reaction: 'Way of being' is interesting. Is 'being near Trafalgar Sq' a way of being? I take properties to be 'features', which seems to give a clearer way of demarcating them. They say they are talking about 'abundant' (rather than 'sparse') properties. |
| 23775 | Powers are 'multi-track' if they can produce a variety of manifestations [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: Powers are 'multi-track', meaning that they are capable of producing a variety of different manifestations when me with diverse stimuli. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 03.1) | |
| A reaction: He later mentions magnetism. Not convinced of this. Powers probably never exist in isolation, so a different manifestation could be because a different power becomes involved. (Bird is a single-tracker). |
| 23780 | Every possible state of affairs is written into its originating powers [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: On the model of powers I prefer, every possible state of affairs that can arise is written into the powers that would constitute them. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 04.3) | |
| A reaction: I can't make any sense of 'written into', any more than I could when Leibniz proposed roughly the same thing about monads. I presume he means that any state of affairs which ever arises is the expression of the intrinsic nature of powers. |
| 23789 | Naming powers is unwise, because that it usually done by a single manifestation [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: Naming powers is unwise; the main reason is that there is a long tradition of naming powers according to the manifestations they can produce, and that does not square well with multi-track powers. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 08.4) | |
| A reaction: On the other hand there must be some attempt to individuate powers (by scientists, if not by philosophers), and that can only rely on the manifestations. Describe them, rather than name them? Just assign them a number! |
| 23771 | Fundamental physics describes everything in terms of powers [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: Physics describes fundamental entities exclusively in terms of what sound like powers. 'Charge' names the power to produce electromagnetic fields; 'spin' the power to contribute to the angular momentum of of system; 'mass' to produce gravitational force. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 01.4) | |
| A reaction: These are the three basic properties of an electron, which is fundamental in the standard model. You can say that their field is more fundamental than the particles, but the field is also only known as a set of powers. Powers rule! |
| 23776 | Rather than pure powers or pure categoricals, I favour basics which are both at once [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: Power Monism: all properties are powers. Categoricalism: all fundamentals are categorical. Dualism allows both types. I defend Mixed Monism - that there is a single class of fundamental properties that are at once powerful and categorical. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 03.3) | |
| A reaction: This is the main dilemma for the powers ontology - of how powers can be basic, if there needs to be some entity which possesses the power. But what possesses the powers of an electron? I like Williams's idea, without being clear about it. |
| 23777 | Powers are more complicated than properties which are always on display [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: The mode in which a power presents itself is more complicated than those properties that have (strictly) nothing more to them than that which is always on display. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 03.3) | |
| A reaction: This is the key idea that nature is dynamic, and so must consist of potentials as well as actuals. Interesting distinction. A basic division between those properties 'always on display', and those that are not? |
| 23774 | There are basic powers, which underlie dispositions, potentialities, capacities etc [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: It is no surprise that talk of dispositions, capacities, abilities, tendencies, powers, and potentialities are part of our everyday interactions. …I have in mind a basic set of powers, the sort which underlie all of these. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 03.1) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as the correct picture. It is misleading say that a ball has a 'power' to roll smoothly. The powers are inside the ball. |
| 23791 | Dispositions are just useful descriptions, which are explained by underlying powers [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: Powers are the properties at the core of the powers ontology, and dispositions are more like useful talk. …Dispositions are the phenomena to be explained by the power metaphysic. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 10.2) | |
| A reaction: The picture I subscribe to. The first step is to see nature as dynamic (as Aristotle does with his 'potentialities'), and the next step to understand what must ground these dynamic dispositional properties. He calls dispositions 'process initiators'. |
| 23772 | If objects are property bundles, the properties need combining powers [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: If objects are bundles of properties …they must be robust enough to enter into building relations with one another such that they can form objects. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 01.5) | |
| A reaction: A very nice point. The Humean bundle view of objects just seems to take properties to be 'impressions' or verbal predicates, but they must have causal powers to be a grounding for ontology. |
| 23788 | Four-Dimensional is Perdurantism (temporal parts), plus Eternalism [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: 'Perdurantism' is the view that objects persist by being composed of temporal parts. When it is commonly combined with the eternalist account of the ontology of time, the result is known as 'four-dimensionalism'. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 08.1) | |
| A reaction: At last, a clear account of the distinction between these two! They're both wrong. He says the result is the spatiotemporal 'worm' view (i.e. one temporal extended thing, rather than a collection of parts). |
| 12227 | Abstractionism needs existential commitment and uniform truth-conditions [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: Abstractionism needs a face-value, existentially committed reading of the terms occurring on the left-hand sides together with sameness of truth-conditions across the biconditional. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §5) | |
| A reaction: They employ 'abstractionism' to mean their logical Fregean strategy for defining abstractions, not to mean the older psychological account. Thus the truth-conditions for being 'parallel' and for having the 'same direction' must be consistent. |
| 12228 | Equivalence abstraction refers to objects otherwise beyond our grasp [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: Abstraction principles purport to introduce fundamental means of reference to a range of objects, to which there is accordingly no presumption that we have any prior or independent means of reference. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §8) | |
| A reaction: There's the rub! They make it sound like a virtue, that we open up yet another heaven of abstract toys to play with. As fictions, they are indeed exciting new fun. As platonic discoveries they strike me as Cloud-Cuckoo Land. |
| 12231 | Reference needs truth as well as sense [Hale/Wright] |
| Full Idea: It takes, over and above the possession of sense, the truth of relevant contexts to ensure reference. | |
| From: B Hale / C Wright (The Metaontology of Abstraction [2009], §9) | |
| A reaction: Reference purely through sense was discredited by Kripke. The present idea challenges Kripke's baptismal realist approach. How do you 'baptise' an abstract object? But isn't reference needed prior to the establishment of truth? |
| 2921 | Philosophy grasps the limits of human reason, and values are beyond it [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: All the supreme problems of value are beyond human reason. …To grasp the limits of human reason, only this is philosophy. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ [1889], 55) | |
| A reaction: The single most powerful idea in the writings of Nietzsche. Reason and truth are values. Why do we value philosophy? There is no escaping Nietzsche's question. |
| 20138 | Christianity is at war with the higher type of man, and excommunicates his basic instincts [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Christianity has waged a war to the death against the higher type of man, it has excommunicated all the fundamental instincts of this type. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ [1889], 05) | |
| A reaction: It seems rather insulting to say that the finest and most dedicated altruism practised by the most admirable Christians is the expression of a 'lower' instinct. |
| 20375 | Virtues must be highly personal; if not, it is merely respect for a concept [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: A virtue has to be our invention, our most personal defence and necessity: in any other sense it is merely a danger. What does not condition our life harms it: a virtue merely from a feeling of respect for the concept 'virtue', as Kant desires it, is harm | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ [1889], §11) | |
| A reaction: Presumably he sees virtue as the cutting edge of stiffling conventional morality. I'm a bit nervous about embracing highly personal virtues, partly because they might isolate me from my community. I ain't no übermensch. |
| 2915 | Each person should devise his own virtues and categorical imperative [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Each one of us should devise his own virtue, his own categorical imperative. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ [1889], 11) |
| 23785 | Causation needs to explain stasis, as well as change [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: I believe that it is also the job of a theory of causation to explain non-change | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 07.2) | |
| A reaction: Good point. Most attempts to pin down causation refer only to changes and differences. Two playing cards propping one another up is his example. |
| 23782 | Causation is the exercise of powers [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: Causation is the exercising of powers. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 06.1) | |
| A reaction: Job done. Get over it. This is the view I prefer. |
| 23787 | If causes and effects overlap, that makes changes impossible [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: It would be shocking if an account of causation ruled out the possibility of change. But if a cause perfectly overlaps its effect in time, then the rejection of change is precisely what follows. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 07.6) | |
| A reaction: He cites Kant, Martin, Heil and Mumford/Anjum for this view. The latter seem to see causation as a 'process' (allowing change), which Williams as ruled out. The Williams point must be correct. |
| 23778 | Powers contain lawlike features, pointing to possible future states [Williams,NE] |
| Full Idea: Powers carry their lawlike features within them: it is part of their essence, qua power. Their pointing at future states just is their internal law-like nature; it is what gets expressed in such and such conditions. | |
| From: Neil E. Williams (The Powers Metaphysics [2019], 03.3) | |
| A reaction: Modern writers on powers seem unaware that Leibniz got there first. This seems to me the correct account of the ontology of laws. The formulation of laws is probably the best descriptive system for nature's patterns (over time as well as space). |
| 2920 | A God who cures us of a head cold at the right moment is a total absurdity [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: A God who cures a headcold for us at the right moment is so absurd a God he would have to be abolished even if he existed. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ [1889], 52) |
| 2917 | Christianity is a revolt of things crawling on the ground against elevated things [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Christianity is a revolt of everything which crawls along the ground against everything which is elevated. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ [1889], 43) |
| 2918 | The story in Genesis is the story of God's fear of science [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Has the famous story which stands at the beginning of the Bible really been understood - the story of God's mortal terror of science? | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ [1889], 48) |
| 2919 | 'Faith' means not wanting to know what is true [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: 'Faith' means not wanting to know what is true. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ [1889], 52) |
| 2916 | The great lie of immortality destroys rationality and natural instinct [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The great lie of personal immortality destroys all rationality, all naturalness of instinct. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (The Anti-Christ [1889], 43) |