4 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. |
| 18052 | An assertion aims to add to the content of a context [Stalnaker, by Magidor] |
| Full Idea: Stalnaker starts with the general thesis that the role of a successful assertion of s is to update the context by adding to it the content of s. | |
| From: report of Robert C. Stalnaker (Assertion [1978]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 5.3.2 | |
| A reaction: This is to be compared with criteria of meaningfulness, such as verificationism, and with Grice's rules of conversational implicature. Presumably if you assert what the context presupposes, you fail to assert, without being meaningless. |
| 14718 | An assertion is an attempt to rule out certain possibilities, narrowing things down for good planning [Stalnaker, by Schroeter] |
| Full Idea: Stalnaker's guiding idea is that in making an assertion the speaker is trying to get the audience to rule out certain possibilities. ....If all goes well, further planning will proceed on the basis of a smaller and more accurate range of possibilities. | |
| From: report of Robert C. Stalnaker (Assertion [1978]) by Laura Schroeter - Two-Dimensional Semantics | |
| A reaction: This sounds intuitively rather plausible, and is a nice original thought. This is what we pay clever chaps like Stalnaker to come up with. It seems to imply some notion of verisimilitude (qv. under 'truth'), depending on how much narrowing happens. |
| 468 | Musical performance can reveal a range of virtues [Damon of Ath.] |
| Full Idea: In singing and playing the lyre, a boy will be likely to reveal not only courage and moderation, but also justice. | |
| From: Damon (fragments/reports [c.460 BCE], B4), quoted by (who?) - where? |