14 ideas
| 22026 | Philosophy is homesickness - the urge to be at home everywhere [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy is actually homesickness - the urge to be everywhere at home. | |
| From: Novalis (General Draft [1799], 45) | |
| A reaction: The idea of home [heimat] is powerful in German culture. The point of romanticism was seen as largely concerning restless souls like Byron and his heroes, who do not feel at home. Hence ironic detachment. |
| 22462 | We should speak the truth, but also preserve and pursue it [Foot] |
| Full Idea: There belongs to truthfulness not only the avoidance of lying but also that other kind of attachment to truth which has to do with its preservation and pursuit. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Utilitarianism and the Virtues [1985], p.74) | |
| A reaction: This is truth as a value, rather than as a mere phenomenon of accurate thought and speech. The importance of 'preserving' the truth is the less common part of this idea. |
| 19591 | Desire for perfection is an illness, if it turns against what is imperfect [Novalis] |
| Full Idea: An absolute drive toward perfection and completeness is an illness, as soon as it shows itself to be destructive and averse toward the imperfect, the incomplete. | |
| From: Novalis (General Draft [1799], 33) | |
| A reaction: Deep and true! Novalis seems to be a particularist - hanging on to the fine detail of life, rather than being immersed in the theory. These are the philosophers who also turn to literature. |
| 22458 | Consequentialists can hurt the innocent in order to prevent further wickedness [Foot] |
| Full Idea: For consequentialists there will be nothing that it will not be right to do to a perfectly innocent individual, if that is the only way of preventing another agent from doing more things of the same kind. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Utilitarianism and the Virtues [1985], p.61) | |
| A reaction: This is her generalised version that Williams dramatised as Jim and the Indians. Roughly, if you achieve a good outcome, it matters little how it is achieved. Foot sees consequentialism as the main problem with utilitarianism. |
| 22460 | Why might we think that a state of affairs can be morally good or bad? [Foot] |
| Full Idea: We should ask why we think that it makes sense to talk about morally good and bad states of affairs. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Utilitarianism and the Virtues [1985], p.68) | |
| A reaction: This is the key question in her attack on consequentialism. There is nothing 'morally' good about my football team winning a great victory. |
| 22461 | Good outcomes are not external guides to morality, but a part of virtuous actions [Foot] |
| Full Idea: It is not that maximum welfare or 'the best outcome' stands outside morality as it foundation and arbiter, but rather that it appears within morality as the end of one of the virtues. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Utilitarianism and the Virtues [1985], p.73) | |
| A reaction: She cites justice and benevolence as aiming at different (and even conflicting) outcomes. I'm not sure about her distinction between 'outside' and 'within' morality. I suppose a virtuously created end is a moral end, unlike mere good states of affairs. |
| 22464 | The idea of a good state of affairs has no role in the thought of Aristotle, Rawls or Scanlon [Foot] |
| Full Idea: The idea of the goodness of total states of affairs played no part in Aristotle's moral philosophy, and in modern times plays not part either in Rawls's account of justice or in the theories of more thoroughgoing contractualists such as Scanlon. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Utilitarianism and the Virtues [1985], p.76) | |
| A reaction: We can add Kant to that. But if the supremely good state of affairs were permanently achieved, would that make morality irrelevant? A community of the exceptionally virtuous would not need the veil of ignorance, or contracts. |
| 22463 | Morality is seen as tacit legislation by the community [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Morality is thought of as a kind of tacit legislation by the community. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Utilitarianism and the Virtues [1985], p.75) | |
| A reaction: Foot presents this as a utilitarian doctrine, because the tacit legislation is felt to produce the best outcomes. This is Nietzsche's good and evil, beyond which he wished to go (presumably following other values). |
| 22459 | For consequentialism, it is irrational to follow a rule which in this instance ends badly [Foot] |
| Full Idea: It would be irrational to obey even the most useful rule if in a particular instance we clearly see that such obedience will not have the best results. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Utilitarianism and the Virtues [1985], p.62) | |
| A reaction: This is the simple reason why attempts at rule utilitarianism always lead back to act utilitarianism. Another way of putting it is that a good rule can only be assessed by the outcomes of individual acts that follow it. |
| 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. |