Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'works', 'fragments/reports' and 'Reply to Fourth Objections'

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4 ideas

1. Philosophy / C. History of Philosophy / 2. Ancient Philosophy / c. Classical philosophy
21336 Crates lived in poverty, and treated his whole life as a joke [Crates of Thebes, by Plutarch]
     Full Idea: Crates, with his bag and threadbare cloak, spent his whole life laughing and joking as though he were on holiday.
     From: report of Crates (Theb) (fragments/reports [c.325 BCE]) by Plutarch - 30: Quiet of Mind 266e
     A reaction: Crates sounds a little less alarming than Diogenes, while living a similar life. Was Crates the first ancestor of post-modernism?
1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 5. Aims of Philosophy / a. Philosophy as worldly
1767 Everyone should study philosophy until they see all people in the same light [Crates of Thebes, by Diog. Laertius]
     Full Idea: A man should study philosophy up to the point of looking on generals and donkey-drivers in the same light.
     From: report of Crates (Theb) (fragments/reports [c.325 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 06.Cr.9
     A reaction: This seems to reject Aristote's idea that some people are clearly superior to others.
17. Mind and Body / E. Mind as Physical / 6. Conceptual Dualism
3643 The concept of mind excludes body, and vice versa [Descartes]
     Full Idea: The concept of body includes nothing at all which belongs to the mind, and the concept of mind includes nothing at all which belongs to the body.
     From: René Descartes (Reply to Fourth Objections [1641], 225)
     A reaction: A headache? Hunger? The mistake, I think, is to regard the mind as entirely conscious, thus creating a sharp boundary between two aspects of our lives. As shown by blindsight, I take many of my central mental operations to be pre- or non-conscious.
22. Metaethics / A. Ethics Foundations / 2. Source of Ethics / e. Human nature
4366 We can't accept Aristotle's naturalism about persons, because it is normative and unscientific [Williams,B, by Hursthouse]
     Full Idea: Williams has expressed pessimism about the project of Aristotelian naturalism on the grounds that his conception of nature, and thereby of human nature, was normative, and that, in a scientific age, this is not a conception that we can take on board.
     From: report of Bernard Williams (works [1971]) by Rosalind Hursthouse - On Virtue Ethics Ch.11
     A reaction: I think there is a compromise here. The existentialist denial of intrinsic human nature seems daft, but Aristotelians must grasp the enormous flexibility that is possible to human behaviour because of the open nature of rationality.