7 ideas
| 13174 | A piece of flint contains something resembling perceptions and appetites [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I don't say that bodies like flint, which are commonly called inanimate, have perceptions and appetition; rather they have something of that sort in them, like worms are in cheese. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Johann Bernoulli [1699], 1698.12.17) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz is caricatured as thinking that stones are full of little active minds, but he nearly always says that what he is proposing is 'like' or 'analogous to' that. His only real point is that nature is active, as seen in the appetites of animals. |
| 13175 | Entelechies are analogous to souls, as other minds are analogous to our own minds [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Just as we somehow conceive other souls and intelligences on analogy with our own souls, I wanted whatever other primitive entelechies there may be remote from our senses to be conceived on analogy with souls. They are not conceived perfectly. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Johann Bernoulli [1699], 1698.12.17) | |
| A reaction: This is the clearest evidence I can find that Leibniz does not think of monads as actually being souls. He is struggling to explain their active character. Garber thinks that Leibniz hasn't arrived at proper monads at this date. |
| 13172 | What we cannot imagine may still exist [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It does not follow that what we can't imagine does not exist. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Johann Bernoulli [1699], 1698.11.18) | |
| A reaction: This just establishes the common sense end of the debate - that you cannot just use your imagination as the final authority on what exists, or what is possible. |
| 7861 | Libet says the processes initiated in the cortex can still be consciously changed [Libet, by Papineau] |
| Full Idea: Libet himself points out that the conscious decisions still have the power to 'endorse' or 'cancel', so to speak, the processes initiated by the earlier cortical activity: no action will result if the action's execution is consciously countermanded. | |
| From: report of Benjamin Libet (Unconscious Cerebral Initiative [1985]) by David Papineau - Thinking about Consciousness 1.4 | |
| A reaction: This is why Libet's findings do not imply 'epiphenomenalism'. It seems that part of a decisive action is non-conscious, undermining the all-or-nothing view of consciousness. Searle tries to smuggle in free will at this point (Idea 3817). |
| 6660 | Libet found conscious choice 0.2 secs before movement, well after unconscious 'readiness potential' [Libet, by Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Libet found that a subject's conscious choice to move was about a fifth of a second before movement, and thus later than the onset of the brain's so-called 'readiness potential', which seems to imply that unconscious processes initiates action. | |
| From: report of Benjamin Libet (Unconscious Cerebral Initiative [1985]) by E.J. Lowe - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind Ch.9 | |
| A reaction: Of great interest to philosophers! It seems to make conscious choices epiphenomenal. The key move, I think, is to give up the idea of consciousness as being all-or-nothing. My actions are still initiated by 'me', but 'me' shades off into unconsciousness. |
| 13173 | Death is just the contraction of an animal [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Death is nothing but the contraction of an animal, just as generation is nothing but its unfolding. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Johann Bernoulli [1699], 1698.11.18) | |
| A reaction: This is possibly the most bizarre view that I have found in Leibniz. He seemed to thing that if you burnt an animal on a bonfire, some little atom of life would remain among the ashes. I can't see why he would believe such a thing. |
| 20740 | Maybe humans are distinguished from other animals by feelings, rather than reason [Unamuno] |
| Full Idea: Man is said to be a reasoning animal. I do not know why he has not been defined as an affective or feeling animal. Perhaps that which differentiates him from other animals is feeling rather than reason. | |
| From: Miguel de Unamuno (The Tragic Sense of Life [1912], p.3), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 2 'Problem' | |
| A reaction: Perfectly plausible, given that we presume that our feelings are startlingly different from other animals - even if we feel far more community with other mammals than we did in Unamuno's day. |