4 ideas
| 9100 | Our intellect only assents to what we believe to be true [William of Ockham] |
| Full Idea: Our intellect does not assent to anything unless we believe it to be true. | |
| From: William of Ockham (Prologue to Ordinatio [1320], Q 1 N sqq) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a much more accurate and commonsense view of belief than that of Hume, who simply views it phenomenologically. ...But then the remark appears to be circular. Belief requires a belief that it is true. Hm. |
| 9101 | Abstractive cognition knows universals abstracted from many singulars [William of Ockham] |
| Full Idea: Abstractive cognition (in one sense) relates to something abstracted from many singulars; and in this sense abstractive cognition is nothing else but cognition of a universal which can be abstracted from many things. | |
| From: William of Ockham (Prologue to Ordinatio [1320], Q 1 N sqq) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being correct common sense, even though it has become deeply unfashionable since Frege. We may not be able to see quite how the mind manages to see universals in a bunch of objects, but there is no better story. |
| 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. |
| 23565 | Our obedience to the king erases any crimes we commit for him [Shakespeare] |
| Full Idea: We know enough if we know we are the king's men. Our obedience to the king wipes the crime of it out of us. | |
| From: William Shakespeare (Henry V [1599]), quoted by Michael Walzer - Just and Unjust Wars 03 | |
| A reaction: He is referring to the slaughter of the French servants behind the lines at Agincourt. A classic expression of 'I was just obeying orders', which was rejected at Nurnberg in 1946. Depends on the seriousness of the crime. |