6 ideas
| 23877 | Most people won't question an idea's truth if they depend on it [Weil] |
| Full Idea: The majority of human beings do not question the truth of an idea without which they would literally be unable to live. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Is There a Marxist Doctrine? [1943], p.163) | |
| A reaction: I assume that this inability grows stronger with age, as the dependence on the idea runs deeper. Hence for most people the beliefs which sustain them have a higher value than truth. Obviously we should all make love of truth our guiding idea! |
| 13128 | 'Ultimate sortals' cannot explain ontological categories [Westerhoff on Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: 'Ultimate sortals' are said to be non-subordinated, disjoint from one another, and uniquely paired with each object. Because of this, the ultimate sortal cannot be a satisfactory explication of the notion of an ontological category. | |
| From: comment on David Wiggins (Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity [1971], p.75) by Jan Westerhoff - Ontological Categories §26 | |
| A reaction: My strong intuitions are that Wiggins is plain wrong, and Westerhoff gives the most promising reasons for my intuition. The simplest point is that objects can obviously belong to more than one category. |
| 23878 | Weakness of will is the inadequacy of the original impetus to carry through the action [Weil] |
| Full Idea: It is naïve to be astonished when we do not stick to firm resolutions. Something stimulated the resolution, but that something was not powerful enough to bring us to the point of carrying it out. Making the resolution may even have exhausted the stimulus. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Is There a Marxist Doctrine? [1943], p.169) | |
| A reaction: Socrates says it is a change of belief. Aristotle says it is a desire overcoming a belief. Weil gives a third way: that it is a fading in the strength of the original belief/desire impetus. |
| 8113 | Art is like understanding a natural language, and needs a grasp of a symbol system [Goodman, by Gardner] |
| Full Idea: In Goodman's account, knowing what a painting represents is logically like understanding a sentence in a natural language. It requires a grasp of the 'symbol system' to which the painting belongs. | |
| From: report of Nelson Goodman (The Languages of Art [1976]) by Sebastian Gardner - Aesthetics 2.3.2 | |
| A reaction: This may fit some pictures well (e.g. early Flemish painting, with its complex iconography), but others hardly at all. You can enjoy a first experience of (say) ballet long before you get the hang of the 'symbol system' involved. |
| 23879 | In a violent moral disagreement, it can't be that both sides are just following social morality [Weil] |
| Full Idea: If two men are in violent disagreement about good and evil, it is hard to believe that both of them are blindly subject to the opinion of the society around them. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Is There a Marxist Doctrine? [1943], p.171) | |
| A reaction: What a beautifully simple observation. Simone would have become a major figure if she had lived longer. No philosopher has ever written better prose. |
| 23880 | When war was a profession, customary morality justified any act of war [Weil] |
| Full Idea: At the time when war was a profession, fighting men had a morality whereby any act of war, in accordance with the customs of war, and contributing to victory, was legitimate and right. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Is There a Marxist Doctrine? [1943], p.173) | |
| A reaction: Note the caveat about 'customs', which were largely moral. See the discussion of killing the non-combatant prisoners in Shakespeare's 'Henry V'. |