3 ideas
| 8000 | He who is ignorant of the history of philosophy is doomed to repeat it [Santayana, by MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Santayana remarked that he who is ignorant of the history of philosophy is doomed to repeat it. | |
| From: report of George Santayana (The Life of Reason [1906]) by Alasdair MacIntyre - A Short History of Ethics Ch.1 | |
| A reaction: Santayana's remark seems to have been about history in general, so this is a Macintyre thought. It obviously has a lot of truth, and most great philosophers seem hugely knowledgeable. However, ignorance brings a kind of freedom. |
| 16655 | Different genera are delimited by modes of predication, which rest on modes of being [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Being is delimited into different genera in accord with different modes of predicating, which depend on different modes of being. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (On Aristotle's 'Metaphysics' [1266], V.9.890), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 12.3 | |
| A reaction: I like this. When people say that predication is the way we divide things up, and go all linguistic-relativist about things, they forget how closely language not only describes reality, but arises out of, or is even caused by, reality. 'Grue' is silly. |
| 3102 | Why don't we experience or remember going to sleep at night? [Magee] |
| Full Idea: As a child it was incomprehensible to me that I did not experience going to sleep, and never remembered it. When my sister said 'Nobody remembers that', I just thought 'How does she know?' | |
| From: Bryan Magee (Confessions of a Philosopher [1997], Ch.I) | |
| A reaction: This is actually evidence for something - that we do not have some sort of personal identity which is separate from consciousness, so that "I am conscious" would literally mean that an item has a property, which it can lose. |