37 ideas
| 23308 | Reasoning relates to understanding as time does to eternity [Boethius, by Sorabji] |
| Full Idea: Boethius says that reasoning [ratiocinatio] is related to intellectual understanding [intellectus] as time to eternity, involving as it does movement from one stage to another. | |
| From: report of Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], 4, prose 6) by Richard Sorabji - Rationality 'Shifting' | |
| A reaction: This gives true understanding a quasi-religious aura, as befits a subject which is truly consoling. |
| 20189 | Belief is a feeling, independent of the will, which arises from uncontrolled and unknown causes [Hume] |
| Full Idea: Belief consists merely in a certain feeling or sentiment; in something, that depends not on the will, but must arise from certain determinate causes and principles, of which we are not master. | |
| From: David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740], Appen p.2) | |
| A reaction: This is the opposite of Descartes' 'doxastic voluntarism' (i.e. we choose what to believe). If you want to become a Christian, steep yourself in religious literature, and the company of religious people. It will probably work. |
| 21309 | A proposition cannot be intelligible or consistent, if the perceptions are not so [Hume] |
| Full Idea: No proposition can be intelligible or consistent with regard to objects, which is not so with regard to perceptions. | |
| From: David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740], Appendix) | |
| A reaction: An interesting variant on expressions of the empiricist principle. Presumably one can say intelligible things about Escher drawings. |
| 15755 | Hume needs a notion which includes degrees of resemblance [Shoemaker on Hume] |
| Full Idea: Hume needs a notion of resemblance where some things resemble a given thing more than other things do, and some may resemble exactly, and some hardly at all. | |
| From: comment on David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740]) by Sydney Shoemaker - Causality and Properties §02 | |
| A reaction: An astute and simple point. Once you admit degrees of resemblance, of course, then resemblance probably ceases to be a primitive concept in your system, and Hume would be well stuck. |
| 5323 | Experiences are logically separate, but factually linked by simultaneity or a feeling of continuousness [Ayer on Hume] |
| Full Idea: Our experiences are logically independent, but they may be factually connected. What unites them is that either they are experienced together, or (if at separate times) they are separated by a stream of experience which is felt to be continuous. | |
| From: comment on David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740], Bk 3 App.) by A.J. Ayer - The Central Questions of Philosophy §VI.A | |
| A reaction: A strict empiricist cannot deny that the feeling of continuity could be false, though that invites the Cartesian question of what exactly is experiencing the delusion. Hume denies that we experience any link between simultaneous experiences. |
| 21311 | Are self and substance the same? Then how can self remain if substance changes? [Hume] |
| Full Idea: Is the self the same with substance? If it be, how can that question have place concerning the subsistence of self, under a change of substance? If they be distinct, what is the difference between them? | |
| From: David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740], Appendix) | |
| A reaction: Locke seems to think there is a characterless substance which supports momories, and the latter constitute the self. So if my substance acquires Nestor's memories, I become Nestor. Hume, the stricter empiricist, cares nothing for characterless things. |
| 21312 | Perceptions are distinct, so no connection between them can ever be discovered [Hume] |
| Full Idea: If perceptions are distinct existences, they form a whole only by being connected together. But no connexions among distinct existences are ever discoverable. We only feel a connexion ...to pass from one object to another. | |
| From: David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740], Appendix) | |
| A reaction: This first part of this is a problem for any 'bundle' theory of objects or self. This is why Hume abandons all hope for his theory of personal identity based on association. You infer the associations, but don't perceive them. |
| 21308 | We have no impression of the self, and we therefore have no idea of it [Hume] |
| Full Idea: Every idea is derived from preceding impressions; and we have no impression of self or substance, as something simple and individual. We have, therefore, no idea of them in that sense. | |
| From: David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740], Appendix) | |
| A reaction: This spells out with beautiful simplicity how his empiricist assumptions lead him to this sceptical view. No logical positivist could reject this thought. Personally I favour empiricism with added inference to the best explanation. |
| 21310 | Does an oyster with one perception have a self? Would lots of perceptions change that? [Hume] |
| Full Idea: Suppose an oyster to have only one perception, as of thirst or hunger. Do you consider any thing but merely that perception? Have you any notion of self or substance? If not, the addition of other perceptions can never give you that notion. | |
| From: David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740], Appendix) | |
| A reaction: A splendid addition to his earlier sceptical thinking. We could form a different conclusion. Suppose I do have a self. If my multitudinous perceptions were reduced to a single perception of agonising pain, would that remove the self? |
| 5771 | Knowledge of present events doesn't make them necessary, so future events are no different [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: Just as the knowledge of present things imposes no necessity on what is happening, so foreknowledge imposes no necessity on what is going to happen. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], V.IV) | |
| A reaction: This, I think, is the key idea if you are looking for a theological answer to the theological problem of free will. Don't think of God as seeing the future 'now'. God is outside time, and so only observes all of history just as we observe the present. |
| 5767 | Rational natures require free will, in order to have power of judgement [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: There is freedom of the will, for it would be impossible for any rational nature to exist without it. Whatever by nature has the use of reason has the power of judgement to decide each matter. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], V.II) | |
| A reaction: A view taken up by Aquinas (Idea 1849) and Kant (Idea 3740). The 'power of judgement' pinpoints the core of rationality, and it is not clear how a robot could fulfil such a power, if it lacked consciousness. Does a machine 'judge' barcodes? |
| 5768 | God's universal foreknowledge seems opposed to free will [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: God's universal foreknowledge and freedom of the will seem clean contrary and opposite. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], V.III) | |
| A reaction: The original source of the great theological and philosophical anguish over free will. The problem is anything which fixes future facts, be it oracular knowledge or scientific prediction. Personally I think free will was an invention by religions. |
| 5769 | Does foreknowledge cause necessity, or necessity cause foreknowledge? [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: Does foreknowledge of the future cause the necessity of events, or necessity cause the foreknowledge? | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], V.III) | |
| A reaction: An intriguing question, though not one that bothers me. I don't understand how foreknowledge causes necessity, unless God's vision of the future is a kind of 'freezing ray'. Even the gods must bow to necessity (Idea 3016). |
| 5762 | The wicked want goodness, so they would not be wicked if they obtained it [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: If the wicked obtained what they want - that is goodness - they could not be wicked. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], IV.II) | |
| A reaction: This is a nice paradox which arises from Boethius being, like Socrates, an intellectualist. The question is whether the wicked want the good de re or de dicto. If they wanted to good de re (as its true self) they would obviously not be wicked. |
| 5770 | Rewards and punishments are not deserved if they don't arise from free movement of the mind [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: If there is no free will, then in vain is reward offered to the good and punishment to the bad, because they have not been deserved by any free and willed movement of the mind. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], V.III) | |
| A reaction: I just don't see why decisions have to come out of nowhere in order to have any merit. People are different from natural forces, because the former can be persuaded by reasons. A moral agent is a mechanism which decides according to reasons. |
| 5764 | When people fall into wickedness they lose their human nature [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: When people fall into wickedness they lose their human nature. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], IV.III) | |
| A reaction: This is a view I find quite sympathetic, but which is a million miles from the modern view. Today's paper showed a picture of a famous criminal holding a machine gun and a baby. We seem to delight in the idea that human nature is partly wicked. |
| 23115 | We have no natural love of mankind, other than through various relationships [Hume] |
| Full Idea: It may be affirm'd, that there is no such passion in human minds, as the love of mankind, merely as such, independent of personal qualities, of services, or of relation to ourself. | |
| From: David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740], p.481), quoted by John Kekes - Against Liberalism 9.4 | |
| A reaction: Hume says this is for the best. I can't imagine spontaneous love of human beings we have never met. It takes the teachings of some sort of doctrine - religious or political - to produce such an attitude. I see it as a distortion of love. A hijacking. |
| 5756 | Happiness is a good which once obtained leaves nothing more to be desired [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: Happiness is a good which once obtained leaves nothing more to be desired. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], III.I) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like the ancient 'eudaimonism' of Socrates and Aristotle, which might not be entirely compatible with orthodox Christianity. It is not true, though, that happy people lack ambition. To be happy, an unfilfilled aim may be needed. |
| 5763 | The bad seek the good through desire, but the good through virtue, which is more natural [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: The supreme good is the goal of good men and bad men alike, and the good seek it by means of a natural activity - the exercise of virtue - while the bad strive to acquire it by means of their desires, which is not a natural way of obtaining the good. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], IV.II) | |
| A reaction: Interesting here is the slightly surprising claim that the pursuit of virtue is 'natural', implying that the mere pursuit of desire is not. Doesn't nature have to be restrained to achieve the good? Boethius is in the tradition of Aristotle and stoicism. |
| 5759 | Varied aims cannot be good because they differ, but only become good when they unify [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: The various things that men pursue are not perfect and good, because they differ from one another; ..when they differ they are not good, but when they begin to be one they become good, so it is through the acquisition of unity that these things are good. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], III.XI) | |
| A reaction: This is a criticism of Aristotle's pluralism about the good(s) for man. Boethius' thought is appealing, and ties in with the Socratic notion that the virtues might be unified in some way. I think it is right that true virtues merge together, ideally. |
| 5754 | You can't control someone's free mind, only their body and possessions [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: The only way one man can exercise power over another is over his body and what is inferior to it, his possessions. You cannot impose anything on a free mind. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], II.VI) | |
| A reaction: Written, of course, in prison. Boethius had not met hypnotism, or mind-controlling drugs, or invasive brain surgery. He hadn't read '1984'. He hadn't seen 'The Ipcress File'. (In fact, he should have got out more…) |
| 6613 | The natural kinds are objects, processes and properties/relations [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: There are three hierarchies of natural kinds: objects or substances (substantive universals), events or processes (dynamic universals), and properties or relations (tropic universals). | |
| From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005], 91) | |
| A reaction: Most interesting here is the identifying of natural kinds with universals, making universals into the families of nature. Universals are high-level sets of natural kinds. To grasp universals you must see patterns, and infer the underlying order. |
| 16946 | Causation is just invariance, as long as it is described in general terms [Quine on Hume] |
| Full Idea: Hume explained cause as invariable succession, and this makes sense as long as the cause and effect are referred to by general terms. … This account leaves singular causal statements unexplained. | |
| From: comment on David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740]) by Willard Quine - Natural Kinds p.131 | |
| A reaction: A nice 20th century linguistic point made against a good 18th century theory. |
| 15250 | If impressions, memories and ideas only differ in vivacity, nothing says it is memory, or repetition [Whitehead on Hume] |
| Full Idea: Hume confuses 'repetition of impressions' with 'impression of repetitions of impressions'. ...In order of 'force and vivacity' we have: impressions, memories, ideas. This omits the vital fact that memory is memory; the notion of repetition is lost. | |
| From: comment on David Hume (Treatise of Human Nature, + Appendix [1740]) by Alfred North Whitehead - Process and Reality V.II | |
| A reaction: [compressed; Harré and Madden spotted this idea] This seems to pinpoint rather nicely the hopeless thinness of Hume's account. He is so desperate to get it down to minimal empirical experience that his explanations are too thin. One big idea.... |
| 6616 | Least action is not a causal law, but a 'global law', describing a global essence [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: The principle of least action is not a causal law, but is what I call a 'global law', which describes the essence of the global kind, which every object in the universe necessarily instantiates. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005]) | |
| A reaction: As a fan of essentialism I find this persuasive. If I inherit part of my essence from being a mammal, I inherit other parts of my essence from being an object, and all objects would share that essence, so it would look like a 'law' for all objects. |
| 6615 | A species requires a genus, and its essence includes the essence of the genus [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: A specific universal can exist only if the generic universal of which it is a species exists, but generic universals don't depend on species; …the essence of any genus is included in its species, but not conversely. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005], 91) | |
| A reaction: Thus the species 'electron' would be part of the genus 'lepton', or 'human' part of 'mammal'. The point of all this is to show how individual items connect up with the rest of the universe, giving rise to universal laws, such as Least Action. |
| 6614 | A hierarchy of natural kinds is elaborate ontology, but needed to explain natural laws [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: The hierarchy of natural kinds proposed by essentialism may be more elaborate than is strictly required for purposes of ontology, but it is necessary to explain the necessity of the laws of nature, and the universal applicability of global principles. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005], 91) | |
| A reaction: I am all in favour of elaborating ontology in the name of best explanation. There seem, though, to be some remaining ontological questions at the point where the explanations of essentialism run out. |
| 6612 | Without general principles, we couldn't predict the behaviour of dispositional properties [Ellis] |
| Full Idea: It is objected to dispositionalism that without the principle of least action, or some general principle of equal power, the specific dispositional properties of things could tell us very little about how these things would be disposed to behave. | |
| From: Brian Ellis (Katzav on limitations of dispositions [2005], 90) | |
| A reaction: Ellis attempts to meet this criticism, by placing dispositional properties within a hierarchy of broader properties. There remains a nagging doubt about how essentialism can account for space, time, order, and the existence of essences. |
| 16692 | Divine eternity is the all-at-once and complete possession of unending life [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: Divine eternity is the all-at-once [tota simul] and complete possession of unending life. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], V.6), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 18.1 | |
| A reaction: This is a famous definition, and 'tota simul' became the phrase used for 'entia successiva', such as a day, or the Olympic Games. |
| 5752 | Where does evil come from if there is a god; where does good come from if there isn't? [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: A philosopher (possibly Epicurus) asked where evil comes from if there is a god, and where good comes from if there isn't. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], I.IV) | |
| A reaction: A nice question. The best known answer to the first question is 'Satan'. Some would say that in the second case good is impossible, but I would have thought that the only possible answer is 'mankind'. |
| 5758 | God is the good [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: God is the good. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], III.XI) | |
| A reaction: This summary follows on from the rather dubious discussion in Idea 5757. If God IS the good, it is not clear how God could be usefully described as 'good'. We would know that he was good a priori, without any enquiry into his nature being needed. |
| 5757 | God is the supreme good, so no source of goodness could take precedence over God [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: That which by its own nature is something distinct from supreme good, cannot be supreme good. ..It is impossible for anything to be by nature better than that from which it is derived, so that which is the origin of all things is supreme good. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], III.X) | |
| A reaction: This is the contortion early Christians got into once they decided God had to be 'supreme' in the moral world (and every other world). Boethius allows a possible external source of all morality, but then has to say that this source is morally inferior. |
| 5760 | The power through which creation remains in existence and motion I call 'God' [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: For this power, whatever it is, through which creation remains in existence and in motion, I use the word which all people use, namely God. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], III.XII) | |
| A reaction: An interesting caution in the phrase 'whatever it is'. Boethius would have been very open-minded in discussion with modern science about the stability of nature. Personally I reject Boethius' theory, but don't have a better one. Cf Idea 1431. |
| 5753 | The regular events of this life could never be due to chance [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: I could never believe that events of such regularity as we find in this life are due to the haphazards of chance. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], I.VI) | |
| A reaction: It depends what you mean by 'chance'. Boethius infers a conscious mind, and presumes this to be God, but that is two large and unsupported steps. Modern atheists must acknowledge Boethius' problem. Why is there order? |
| 5765 | The reward of the good is to become gods [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: Goodness is happiness, ..but we agree that those who attain happiness are divine. The reward of the good, then, is to become gods. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], IV.III) | |
| A reaction: Kant offered a similar argument (see Idea 1455). Most of us are unlikely to agree with the second premise of Boethius' argument. The idea that we might somehow become gods gripped the imagination for the next thousand years. |
| 5761 | God can do anything, but he cannot do evil, so evil must be nothing [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: 'There is nothing that an omnipotent power could not do?' 'No.' 'Then can God do evil?' 'No.' 'So evil is nothing, since that is what He cannot do who can do anthing.' | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], III.XII) | |
| A reaction: A lovely example of the contortions necessary once you insist that God must be 'omnipotent', in some absolute sense of the term. Saying that evil is 'nothing' strikes me as nothing more than a feeble attempt to insult it. |
| 5766 | If you could see the plan of Providence, you would not think there was evil anywhere [Boethius] |
| Full Idea: If you could see the plan of Providence, you would not think there was evil anywhere. | |
| From: Boethius (The Consolations of Philosophy [c.520], IV.VI) | |
| A reaction: This brings out the verificationist in me. See Idea 1467, by Antony Flew. Presumably Boethius would retain his faith as Europe moved horribly from 1939 to 1945, and even if the whole of humanity sank into squalid viciousness. |