3 ideas
| 19695 | The devil was wise as an angel, and lost no knowledge when he rebelled [Whitcomb] |
| Full Idea: The devil is evil but nonetheless wise; he was a wise angel, and through no loss of knowledge, but, rather, through some sort of affective restructuring tried and failed to take over the throne. | |
| From: Dennis Whitcomb (Wisdom [2011], 'Argument') | |
| A reaction: ['affective restructuring' indeed! philosophers- don't you love 'em?] To fail at something you try to do suggests a flaw in the wisdom. And the new regime the devil wished to introduce doesn't look like a wise regime. Not convinced. |
| 12702 | Causes can be inferred from perfect knowledge of their effects [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Whoever understands some effect perfectly will also arrive at the knowledge of its cause. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Meditatio de principio individui [1676], A6.3.490), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 2 | |
| A reaction: This sounds highly improbable, given that you would have thought that there could be lots of ways to bring about the same effect. Predicting effects is rather more plausible. I suppose if you can record all the ripples in the pond before they fade... |
| 9425 | Lewis later proposed the axioms at the intersection of the best theories (which may be few) [Mumford on Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Later Lewis said we must choose between the intersection of the axioms of the tied best systems. He chose for laws the axioms that are in all the tied systems (but then there may be few or no axioms in the intersection). | |
| From: comment on David Lewis (Subjectivist's Guide to Objective Chance [1980], p.124) by Stephen Mumford - Laws in Nature |