7 ideas
| 14633 | How do we tell a table's being contingently plastic from its being essentially plastic? [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: On a friendly reading of Quine, there is nothing to make the difference between a table's being contingently plastic and its being essentially plastic. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is, of course, the dreaded modern usage of 'essential' to just mean 'necessary' and nothing more. In my view, there may be a big problem with knowing whether a problem is necessary, but knowing whether it is essential is much easier. |
| 14635 | An x is essentially F if it is F in every possible world in which it appears [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: On the possible world's account, x's being essentially F is nothing more nor less than x's being F in every world in which it appears. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 6) | |
| A reaction: There you go - 'true in every possible world' is the definition of metaphysical necessity, not the definition of essence. Either get back to Aristotle, or stop (forever!) talking about 'essence'! |
| 14632 | Quine may have conflated de re and de dicto essentialism, but there is a real epistemological problem [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: The unfriendly response to Quine's objection to essentialism is that it conflates the de re and the de dicto. The friendly response is that behind that conflation is a real epistemological problem for essentialism. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 1) | |
| A reaction: He cites Richard Cartwright 1968 for the friendly response. The epistemological question is how we can know the essentialness of an essence. |
| 14631 | How can you show the necessity of an a posteriori necessity, if it might turn out to be false? [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: If something is offered as a candidate necessary a posteriori truth, how could we show that it is necessary, in the face of the fact that it takes investigation to show that it is true, and so, in some sense, it might have turned out to be false? | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is the topic of his paper, which he compares with how we can know that essences are essential. |
| 22419 | 'I' is a subject in 'I am in pain' and an object in 'I am bleeding' [Wittgenstein, by McGinn] |
| Full Idea: 'I' is used as a subject in 'I am in pain', ....and used as an object in 'I am bleeding'. | |
| From: report of Ludwig Wittgenstein (The Blue and Brown Notebooks [1936], pp. 66-7) by Colin McGinn - Subjective View: sec qualities and indexicals 4 | |
| A reaction: How about 'my wound is painful'? Does that have the logical form of a conversation? This idea is incorrect. Shoemaker (1968) suggests that the subjective use is immune to error, unlike the object use. |
| 6318 | The doctrine of indeterminacy of translation seems implied by the later Wittgenstein [Wittgenstein, by Quine] |
| Full Idea: Perhaps the doctrine of indeterminacy of translation will have little air of paradox for readers familiar with Wittgenstein's latter-day remarks on meaning. | |
| From: report of Ludwig Wittgenstein (The Blue and Brown Notebooks [1936], II.§16 n) by Willard Quine - Word and Object II.§16 n | |
| A reaction: This may be right, and I am inclined to link the names of Wittgenstein and Quine among those who led philosophy up a relativistic and sceptical cul-de-sac for many years. You can think too hard, you know. |
| 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. |