Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Aspects of the Theory of Syntax' and 'What is an Idea?'

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3 ideas

18. Thought / C. Content / 2. Ideas
By an 'idea' I mean not an actual thought, but the resources we can draw on to think [Leibniz]
     Full Idea: What I mean by an idea is not a certain act of thinking, but a power or faculty such that we have an idea of a thing even if we are not thinking about it but know that we can think it when the occasion arises.
     From: Gottfried Leibniz (What is an Idea? [1676], p.281)
     A reaction: 'Idea' tends to be used in the seventeenth century to mean an actual mental event. It is because Leibniz believes in the unconscious mind that he can offer this rather different, and probably superior, notion of an 'idea'.
19. Language / C. Assigning Meanings / 1. Syntax
Chomsky's 'interpretative semantics' says syntax comes first, and is then interpreted [Chomsky, by Magidor]
     Full Idea: Chomsky and his followers (whose position was labelled 'interpretative semantics') claimed that a sentence is first assigned a syntactic structure by an autonomous syntactic module, and this structure is then provided as input for semantic interpretation.
     From: report of Noam Chomsky (Aspects of the Theory of Syntax [1965]) by Ofra Magidor - Category Mistakes 1.3
     A reaction: This certainly doesn't fit the experience of introspecting speech, but then I suppose good pianists focus entirely on the music, and overlook the finger movements which have obvious priority. But I don't know the syntax of the sentence when I begin it.
21. Aesthetics / C. Artistic Issues / 7. Art and Morality
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?