15 ideas
| 8011 | Aristotle is a buffoon who has misled the Church [Luther, by MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Aristotle is a buffoon who has misled the Church. | |
| From: report of Martin Luther (talk [1525]) by Alasdair MacIntyre - A Short History of Ethics Ch.10 | |
| A reaction: Before he became famous, Luther was a university lecturer on Aristotle. This remark was a hundred years before philosophers began serious criticism of Aristotle. Presumably Protestants just stopped reading him. |
| 16422 | The necessity of a proposition concerns reality, not our words or concepts [Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: The necessity or contingency of a proposition has nothing to do with our concepts or the meanings of our words. The possibilities would have been the same even if we had never conceived of them. | |
| From: Robert C. Stalnaker (Conceptual truth and metaphysical necessity [2003], 1) | |
| A reaction: This sounds in need of qualification, since some of the propositions will be explicitly about words and concepts. Still, I like this idea. |
| 16423 | Conceptual possibilities are metaphysical possibilities we can conceive of [Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: Conceptual possibilities are just (metaphysical) possibilities that we can conceive of. | |
| From: Robert C. Stalnaker (Conceptual truth and metaphysical necessity [2003], 1) |
| 16421 | Critics say there are just an a priori necessary part, and an a posteriori contingent part [Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: Critics say there are no irreducible a posteriori truths. They can be factored into a part that is necessary, but knowable a priori through conceptual analysis, and a part knowable only a posteriori, but contingent. 2-D semantics makes this precise. | |
| From: Robert C. Stalnaker (Conceptual truth and metaphysical necessity [2003], 1) | |
| A reaction: [Critics are Sidelle, Jackson and Chalmers] Interesting. If gold is necessarily atomic number 79, or it wouldn't be gold, that sounds like an analytic truth about gold. Discovering the 79 wasn't a discovery of a necessity. Stalnaker rejects this idea. |
| 16429 | A 'centred' world is an ordered triple of world, individual and time [Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: A 'centred' possible world is an ordered triple consisting of a possible world, an individual in the domain of that world, and a time. | |
| From: Robert C. Stalnaker (Conceptual truth and metaphysical necessity [2003], 2) |
| 16428 | Meanings aren't in the head, but that is because they are abstract [Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: Meanings ain't in the head. Putnam's famous slogan actually fits Frege's anti-psychologism better than it fits Purnam's and Burge's anti-individualism. The point is that intensions of any kind are abstract objects. | |
| From: Robert C. Stalnaker (Conceptual truth and metaphysical necessity [2003], 2) | |
| A reaction: If intensions are abstract, that leaves (for me) the question of what they are abstracted from. I take it that there are specific brain events that are being abstractly characterised. What do we call those? |
| 16432 | One view says the causal story is built into the description that is the name's content [Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: In 'causal descriptivism' the causal story is built into the description that is the content of the name (and also incorporates a rigidifying operator to ensure that the descriptions that names abbreviate have wide scope). | |
| From: Robert C. Stalnaker (Conceptual truth and metaphysical necessity [2003], 5) | |
| A reaction: Not very controversial, I would say, since virtually every fact about the world has a 'causal story' built into it. Must we insist on rigidity in order to have wide scope? |
| 16430 | Two-D says that a posteriori is primary and contingent, and the necessity is the secondary intension [Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: Two-dimensionalism says the necessity of a statement is constituted by the fact that the secondary intensions is a necessary proposition, and their a posteriori character is constituted by the fact that the associated primary intension is contingent. | |
| From: Robert C. Stalnaker (Conceptual truth and metaphysical necessity [2003], 2) | |
| A reaction: This view is found in Sidelle 1989, and then formalised by Jackson and Chalmers. I like metaphysical necessity, but I have some sympathy with the approach. The question must always be 'where does this necessity derive from'? |
| 16431 | In one view, the secondary intension is metasemantic, about how the thinker relates to the content [Stalnaker] |
| Full Idea: On the metasemantic interpretation of the two-dimensional framework, the second dimension is used to represent the metasemantic facts about the relation between a thinker or speaker and the contents of her thoughts or utterances. | |
| From: Robert C. Stalnaker (Conceptual truth and metaphysical necessity [2003], 4) | |
| A reaction: I'm struggling to think what facts there might be about the relation between myself and the contents of my thoughts. I'm more or less constituted by my thoughts. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 6609 | With respect to religion, reason is a blind whore [Luther] |
| Full Idea: With respect to the mysteries of the Christian religion, reason is a blind whore. | |
| From: Martin Luther (talk [1525]), quoted by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason n4.2 | |
| A reaction: Reason is presumably a blind whore with respect to all impenetrable mysteries. Since the reason of Aquinas endorsed the mysteries of Christianity, the remark seems a bit strong, but it is appropriate if you think that only faith (in Christianity) matters. |