Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Noneism or Allism?', 'Letters to Varignon' and 'Letters to Lelong'

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6 ideas

5. Theory of Logic / G. Quantification / 4. Substitutional Quantification

15533	We can quantify over fictions by quantifying for real over their names [Lewis]
	Full Idea: Substitutionalists simulate quantification over fictional characters by quantifying for real over fictional names.
	From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.159)
	A reaction: I would say that a fiction is a file of conceptual information, identified by a label. The label brings baggage with it, and there is no existence in the label.

5. Theory of Logic / G. Quantification / 7. Unorthodox Quantification

15534	We could quantify over impossible objects - as bundles of properties [Lewis]
	Full Idea: We can quantify over Meinongian objects by quantifying for real over property bundles (such as the bundle of roundness and squareness).
	From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.159)

7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 1. Nature of Existence

15532	'Allists' embrace the existence of all controversial entities; 'noneists' reject all but the obvious ones [Lewis]
	Full Idea: An expansive friend of the controversial entities who says they all exist may be called an 'allist'; a tough desert-dweller who says that none of them exist may be called a 'noneist'.
	From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.152)
	A reaction: Lewis gives examples of the obvious and the controversial entities. Lewis implies that he himself is in between. The word 'desert' is a reference to Quine.

7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 2. Types of Existence

15535	We can't accept a use of 'existence' that says only some of the things there are actually exist [Lewis]
	Full Idea: If 'existence' is understood so that it can be a substantive thesis that only some of the things there are exist, we will have none of it.
	From: David Lewis (Noneism or Allism? [1990], p.163)
	A reaction: Lewis is a strong advocate, following Quine, of the univocal sense of the word 'exist', and I agree with them.

27. Natural Reality / A. Classical Physics / 1. Mechanics / c. Forces

13097	Force in substance makes state follow state, and ensures the very existence of substance [Leibniz]
	Full Idea: By the force I give to substances, I understand a state from which another state follows, if nothing prevents it. ...I dare say that without force, there would be no substance.
	From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Lelong [1712], 1712), quoted by Cover,J/O'Leary-Hawthorne,J - Substance and Individuation in Leibniz 7.1
	A reaction: [the whole quote is interesting] This remark, more than any other I have found, places force at the centre of Leibniz's metaphysics. He is using it to resist Spinoza's one-substance view.

27. Natural Reality / G. Biology / 3. Evolution

19414	Men are related to animals, which are related to plants, then to fossils, and then to the apparently inert [Leibniz]
	Full Idea: Men are related to animals, these to plants, and the latter directly to fossils which will be linked in their turn to bodies which the senses and the imagination represent to us as perfectly dead and formless.
	From: Gottfried Leibniz (Letters to Varignon [1702], 1702)
	A reaction: Leibniz would be a bit surprised to find the way in which this has turned out to be largely true, since he is basing it on his picture of a hierarchy of monads. Nevertheless, the idea that we are all related wasn't invented in 1859.