Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Dthat', 'On Hippocrates and Plato' and 'The Mental Life of Some Machines'

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4 ideas

15. Nature of Minds / A. Nature of Mind / 1. Mind / d. Location of mind

6003	Galen showed by experiment that the brain controls the body [Galen, by Hankinson]
	Full Idea: Galen established by experiments in neural anatomy that the brain really is, contra the Stoics and Aristotelians, the body's control centre.
	From: report of Galen (On Hippocrates and Plato [c.170]) by R.J. Hankinson - Galen (damaged)
	A reaction: And about time too. This is one of the most significant events in the development of human understanding. No one has been able to go back to the old view, even Descartes, no matter how much they may long to do so.

17. Mind and Body / C. Functionalism / 2. Machine Functionalism

5495	Instances of pain are physical tokens, but the nature of pain is more abstract [Putnam, by Lycan]
	Full Idea: In machine functionalism, pain tokens (individual instances of pain) are identical with particular neurophysiological states, but pain itself, the kind, universal, or 'type', can be identified only with something more abstract.
	From: report of Hilary Putnam (The Mental Life of Some Machines [1967]) by William Lycan - Introduction - Ontology p.6
	A reaction: This is where the "what is it like?" question seems important. Pain doesn't seem like a physical object, or an abstract idea. Personally I think the former is more likely to be correct than the latter. Causation by pain is not like causation by gravity.

19. Language / B. Reference / 3. Direct Reference / b. Causal reference

14080	Are causal descriptions part of the causal theory of reference, or are they just metasemantic? [Kaplan, by Schaffer,J]
	Full Idea: Kaplan notes that the causal theory of reference can be understood in two quite different ways, as part of the semantics (involving descriptions of causal processes), or as metasemantics, explaining why a term has the referent it does.
	From: report of David Kaplan (Dthat [1970]) by Jonathan Schaffer - Deflationary Metaontology of Thomasson 1
	A reaction: [Kaplan 'Afterthought' 1989] The theory tends to be labelled as 'direct' rather than as 'causal' these days, but causal chains are still at the heart of the story (even if more diffused socially). Nice question. Kaplan takes the meta- version as orthodox.

23. Ethics / C. Virtue Theory / 3. Virtues / a. Virtues

6030	Each part of the soul has its virtue - pleasure for appetite, success for competition, and rectitude for reason [Galen]
	Full Idea: We have by nature these three appropriate relationships, corresponding to each form of the soul's parts - to pleasure because of the appetitive part, to success because of the competitive part, and to rectitude because of the rational part.
	From: Galen (On Hippocrates and Plato [c.170], 5.5.8)
	A reaction: This is a nice combination of Plato's tripartite theory of soul (in 'Republic') and Aristotle's derivation of virtues from functions. Presumably, though, reason should master the other two, and there is nothing in Galen's idea to explain this.