12 ideas
| 13917 | Metaphysics aims to identify categories of being, and show their interdependency [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The central task of metaphysics is to chart the possibilities of existence by identifying the categories of being and the relations of ontological dependency in which beings of different categories stand to one another. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I am beginning to think that he is right about the second one, and that dependency and grounding relations are the name of the game. I don't have Lowe's confidence that philosophers can parcel up reality in neat and true ways. |
| 13919 | Philosophy aims not at the 'analysis of concepts', but at understanding the essences of things [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The central task of philosophy is the cultivation of insights into natures or essences, and not the 'analysis of concepts', with which it is apt to be confused. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 1) | |
| A reaction: This immediately strikes me as a false dichotomy. I like the idea of trying to understand the true natures of things, but how are we going to do it in our armchairs? |
| 13918 | Holes, shadows and spots of light can coincide without being identical [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Holes are things of such a kind that they can coincide without being identical - as are, for example, shadows and spots of light. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 1) | |
| A reaction: His point is that they thereby fail one of the standard tests for being an 'object'. |
| 13921 | All things must have an essence (a 'what it is'), or we would be unable to think about them [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Things must have an essence, in the sense of 'what it is to be the individual of that kind', or it would make no sense to say we can talk or think comprehendingly about things at all. If we don't know what it is, how can we think about it? | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 2) | |
| A reaction: Lowe presents this as a sort of Master Argument for essences. I think he is working with the wrong notion of essence. All he means is that things must have identities to be objects of thought. Why equate identity with essence, and waste a good concept? |
| 13922 | Knowing an essence is just knowing what the thing is, not knowing some further thing [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: To know something's essence is not to be acquainted with some further thing of a special kind, but simply to understand what exactly that thing is. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 2) | |
| A reaction: I think he is wrong about this, or at least is working with an unhelpful notion of essence. Identity is one thing, and essence is another. I take essences to be certain selected features of things, which explain their nature. |
| 13920 | Each thing has to be of a general kind, because it belongs to some category [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Any individual thing must be a thing of some general kind - because, at the very least, it must belong to some ontological category. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 2) | |
| A reaction: Where does the law that 'everything must have a category' come from? I'm baffled by remarks of this kind. Where do we get the categories from? From observing the individuals. So which has priority? Not the categories. Is God a kind? |
| 15473 | How does anything get outside itself? [Fodor, by Martin,CB] |
| Full Idea: Fodor asks the stirring and basic question 'How does anything get outside itself?' | |
| From: report of Jerry A. Fodor (works [1986]) by C.B. Martin - The Mind in Nature 03.6 | |
| A reaction: Is this one of those misconceived questions, like major issues concerning 'what's it like to be?' In what sense am I outside myself? Is a mind any more mysterious than a shadow? |
| 2981 | Is intentionality outwardly folk psychology, inwardly mentalese? [Lyons on Fodor] |
| Full Idea: For Fodor the intentionality of the propositional-attitude vocabulary of our folk psychology is the outward expression of the inward intentionality of the language of the brain. | |
| From: comment on Jerry A. Fodor (works [1986]) by William Lyons - Approaches to Intentionality p.39 | |
| A reaction: I would be very cautious about this. Folk psychology works, so it must have a genuine basis in how brains work, but it breaks down in unusual situations, and might even be a total (successful) fiction. |
| 2985 | Are beliefs brains states, but picked out at a "higher level"? [Lyons on Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Fodor holds that beliefs are brain states or processes, but picked out at a 'higher' or 'special science' level. | |
| From: comment on Jerry A. Fodor (works [1986]) by William Lyons - Approaches to Intentionality p.82 | |
| A reaction: I don't think you can argue with this. Levels of physical description exist (e.g. pure physics tells you nothing about the weather), and I think 'process' is the best word for the mind (Idea 4931). |
| 3135 | Is thought a syntactic computation using representations? [Fodor, by Rey] |
| Full Idea: The modest mentalism of the Computational/Representational Theory of Thought (CRTT), associated with Fodor, says mental processes are computational, defined over syntactically specified entities, and these entities represent the world (are also semantic). | |
| From: report of Jerry A. Fodor (works [1986]) by Georges Rey - Contemporary Philosophy of Mind Int.3 | |
| A reaction: This seems to imply that if you built a machine that did all these things, it would become conscious, which sounds unlikely. Do footprints 'represent' feet, or does representation need prior consciousness? |
| 2983 | Maybe narrow content is physical, broad content less so [Lyons on Fodor] |
| Full Idea: Fodor is concerned with producing a realist and physicalist account of 'narrow content' (i.e. wholly in-the-head content). | |
| From: comment on Jerry A. Fodor (works [1986]) by William Lyons - Approaches to Intentionality p.54 | |
| A reaction: The emergence of 'wide' content has rather shaken Fodor's game plan. We can say "Oh dear, I thought I was referring to H2O", so there must be at least some narrow aspect to reference. |
| 5470 | The idea of laws of nature arose in the Middle Ages [Hall,AR, by Ellis] |
| Full Idea: According to A.R. Hall, the idea that nature is governed by laws does not appear to have existed in the ancient Greek, Roman or Far Eastern traditions of science, but arose from religious, philosophical and legal ideas in medieval Europe. | |
| From: report of A.R. Hall (The Scientific Revolution 1500-1800 [1954]) by Brian Ellis - The Philosophy of Nature: new essentialism Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: This is a very illuminating point, which gives good circumstantial support for questioning the existence of external laws which are imposed on a passive nature. Modern essentialism suggest the 'laws' are the intrinsic results of properties. |