10 ideas
| 22115 | Wise people should contemplate and discuss the truth, and fight against falsehood [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: The role of the wise person is to meditate on the truth, especially the truth regarding the first principle, and to discuss it with others, but also to fight against the falsity that is its contrary. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (Summa Contra Gentiles [1268], I.1.6), quoted by Kretzmann/Stump - Aquinas, Thomas 14 | |
| A reaction: So nice to hear someone (from no matter how long ago) saying that wisdom is concerned with truth. If you lose your grip on truth (which many thinkers seem to have done) you must also abandon wisdom. Then fools rule. |
| 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? |
| 18946 | Unreflectively, we all assume there are nonexistents, and we can refer to them [Reimer] |
| Full Idea: As speakers of the language, we unreflectively assume that there are nonexistents, and that reference to them is possible. | |
| From: Marga Reimer (The Problem of Empty Names [2001], p.499), quoted by Sarah Sawyer - Empty Names 4 | |
| A reaction: Sarah Swoyer quotes this as a good solution to the problem of empty names, and I like it. It introduces a two-tier picture of our understanding of the world, as 'unreflective' and 'reflective', but that seems good. We accept numbers 'unreflectively'. |
| 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? |
| 20700 | Without God's influence every operation would stop, so God causes everything [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: If God's divine influence stopped, every operation would stop. Every operation, therefore, of everything is traced back to him as cause. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (Summa Contra Gentiles [1268], III.67), quoted by Brian Davies - Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion 3 'Freedom' | |
| A reaction: If the systematic interraction of mind and body counts as an 'operation', then this seems to imply Occasionalism. |
| 15202 | Eternity coexists with passing time, as the centre of a circle coexists with its circumference [Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: The centre of a circle is directly opposite any designated point on the circumference. In this way, whatever is in any part of time coexists with what is eternal as being present to it even though past or future with respect to another part of time. | |
| From: Thomas Aquinas (Summa Contra Gentiles [1268], I.66), quoted by Robin Le Poidevin - Past, Present and Future of Debate about Tense 2 c | |
| A reaction: A nice example of a really cool analogy which almost gets you to accept something which is actually completely incomprehensible. |