23 ideas
| 23367 | Even pointing a finger should only be done for a reason [Epictetus] |
| Full Idea: Philosophy says it is not right even to stretch out a finger without some reason. | |
| From: Epictetus (fragments/reports [c.57], 15) | |
| A reaction: The key point here is that philosophy concerns action, an idea on which Epictetus is very keen. He rather despise theory. This idea perfectly sums up the concept of the wholly rational life (which no rational person would actually want to live!). |
| 12056 | An ancestral relation is either direct or transitively indirect [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: x bears to y the 'ancestral' of the relation R just if either x bears R to y, or x bears R to some w that bears R to y, or x bears R to some w that bears R to some z that bears R to y, or..... | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.10.1) | |
| A reaction: A concept invented by Frege (1879). |
| 12050 | Substances contain a source of change or principle of activity [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Substances are things that have a source of change or principle of activity within them. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.4.1) | |
| A reaction: A vey significant concession. I think we can talk of 'essences' and 'powers', and drop talk of 'substances'. 'Powers' is a much better word, because it immediately pushes the active ingredient to the forefront. |
| 12052 | We never single out just 'this', but always 'this something-or-other' [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: What is singled out is never a bare this or that, but this or that something or other. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.5.1) | |
| A reaction: I like, in ontological speculation, to contemplate the problem of the baffling archaeological find. 'This thing I have dug up - what the hell IS it?'. Wiggins is contemptuous of the term 'thisness', and the idea of bare particulars. |
| 12055 | Sortal predications are answers to the question 'what is x?' [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Predications which answer the question 'what is x?' are often called 'sortal predications' in present-day philosophy. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.10.1) | |
| A reaction: The word 'sortal' comes from Locke. Wiggins is the guru of 'sortal essentialism'. I just can't believe that in answer to the question 'what really is David Wiggins?' that he would be happy with a sequence of categorisations. |
| 12059 | A river may change constantly, but not in respect of being a river [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: To say that the river is changing constantly in every respect is not to say that it is changing in respect of being a river. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.11.2) | |
| A reaction: Can't a river become a lake, or a mere stream? Wiggins's proposal does not help with the problem of a river which sometimes dries up (as my local river sometimes does). At what point do we decide it is no longer a river? |
| 12063 | Sortal classification becomes science, with cross reference clarifying individuals [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: The sense of the sortal term under which we pick out an individual expands into the scientific account of things of that kind, where the account clarifies what is at issue in questions of sameness and difference of specimens of that kind. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.13.1) | |
| A reaction: This is how the sortal approach is supposed to deal with individuals. So the placid tiger reveals much by falling under 'tiger', and a crucial extra bit by falling under 'placid'. See Idea 12053 for problems with this proposal. |
| 12051 | If the kinds are divided realistically, they fall into substances [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Substance are what the world is articulated into when the segments of kinds corresponds to the real divisions in reality. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.5.1) | |
| A reaction: This is very helpful in clarifying Wiggins's very obscurely expressed views. He appears to be saying that if we divide the sheep from the goats correctly, we reveal sheep-substance and goat-substance (one substance per species). Crazy! |
| 12053 | 'Human being' is a better answer to 'what is it?' than 'poet', as the latter comes in degrees [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: One person can be more or less of a poet than another, so 'poet' is not a conclusory answer to the question 'What is it that is singled out here?' 'Poet' rides on the back of the answer 'human being'. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.5.1) | |
| A reaction: So apparently one must assign a natural kind, and not just a class. Wiggins lacks science fiction imagination. In the genetic salad of the far future, being a poet may be more definitive than being a human being. See Idea 12063. |
| 12054 | Secondary substances correctly divide primary substances by activity-principles and relations [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: A system of secondary substances with a claim to separate reality into its genuine primary substances must arise from an understanding of a set of principles of activity on the basis of which identities can be glossed in terms of determinate relations. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.5.1) | |
| A reaction: I translate this as saying that individual essences are categorised according to principles which explain behaviour and relations. I'm increasingly bewildered by the 'secondary substances' Wiggins got from 'Categories', and loves so much. |
| 12047 | We refer to persisting substances, in perception and in thought, and they aid understanding [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: A substance is a persisting and somehow basic object of reference that is there to be discovered in perception and thought, an object whose claim to be recognized as a real entity is a claim on our aspirations to understand the world. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: A lot of components are assigned by Wiggins to the concept, and the tricky job, inititiated by Aristotle, is to fit all the pieces together nicely. Personally I am wondering if the acceptance of 'essences' implies dropping 'substances'. |
| 12057 | Matter underlies things, composes things, and brings them to be [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Matter ex hypothesi is what ultimately underlies (to huperkeimenon) a thing; it is that from which something comes to be and which remains as a non-coincidental component in the thing's make-up. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 192a30) | |
| A reaction: This is an interesting prelude to the much more comprehensive discussion of matter in Metaphysics, where he crucially adds the notion of 'form', and gives it priority over the underlying matter. |
| 6230 | If the soul were a tabula rasa, with no innate ideas, there could be no moral goodness or justice [Cudworth] |
| Full Idea: The soul is not a mere rasa tabula, a naked and passive thing, with no innate furniture of its own, nor any thing in it, but what was impressed upon it without; for then there could not possibly be any such thing as moral good and evil, just and unjust. | |
| From: Ralph Cudworth (On Eternal and Immutable Morality [1688], Bk IV Ch 6.4) | |
| A reaction: He goes on to quote Hobbes saying there is no good in objects themselves. I don't see why we must have an innate moral capacity, provided that we have a capacity to make judgements. |
| 6228 | Senses cannot judge one another, so what judges senses cannot be a sense, but must be superior [Cudworth] |
| Full Idea: The sight cannot judge of sounds, nor the hearing of light and colours; wherefore that which judges of all the senses and their several objects, cannot be itself any sense, but something of a superior nature. | |
| From: Ralph Cudworth (On Eternal and Immutable Morality [1688], Ch.II.VI.1) | |
| A reaction: How nice to find a seventeenth century English writer rebelling against empiricism! |
| 12064 | The category of substance is more important for epistemology than for ontology [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: For us the importance of the category of substance, if it has any importance, is not so much ontological as relative to our epistemological circumstances and the conditions under which we have to undertake inquiry. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.13.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a rather significant concession. Wiggins has revived the notion of substance in recent times, but he is not quite adding it to the furniture of the world. Personally I increasingly think we can dump it, in ontology and epistemology. |
| 12049 | Naming the secondary substance provides a mass of general information [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: Answering 'what is it?' with the secondary substance identifies an object with a class of continuants which survive certain changes, come into being in certain ways, are qualified in certain ways, behave in certain ways, and cease to be in certain ways. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.3.3) | |
| A reaction: Thus the priority of this sort of answer is that a huge range of explanations immediately flow from it. I take the explanation to be prior, and the primary substance to be prior, since secondary substance is inductively derived from it. |
| 12065 | Seeing a group of soldiers as an army is irresistible, in ontology and explanation [Wiggins] |
| Full Idea: It seems mandatory to an observer of soldiers to give 'the final touch of unity' to their aggregate entity (the army). ...Similar claims arise with the ontological and explanatory claims of other corporate entities. | |
| From: David Wiggins (Substance [1995], 4.13.3) | |
| A reaction: Wiggins must say (following Leibniz Essays II.xxiv,1) that we add the unity, but I take the view that an army has powers, and hence offers explanations, which are lacking in a merely group of disparate soldiers. So an army has an essence and identity. |
| 6229 | Sense is fixed in the material form, and so can't grasp abstract universals [Cudworth] |
| Full Idea: Sense which lies flat and grovelling in the individuals, and is stupidly fixed in the material form, is not able to rise up or ascend to an abstract universal notion. | |
| From: Ralph Cudworth (On Eternal and Immutable Morality [1688], Ch.III.III.2) | |
| A reaction: This still strikes me as being one of the biggest problems with reductive physicalism, that a lump of meat in your head can grasp abstractions (whatever they are) and universal concepts. Personally I am a physicalist, but it is weird. |
| 6227 | Keeping promises and contracts is an obligation of natural justice [Cudworth] |
| Full Idea: To keep faith and perform covenants is that which natural justice obligeth to absolutely. | |
| From: Ralph Cudworth (On Eternal and Immutable Morality [1688], Ch.II.4) | |
| A reaction: A nice example of an absolute moral intuition, but one which can clearly be challenged. Covenants (contracts) wouldn't work unless everyone showed intense commitment to keeping them, even beyond the grave, and we all benefit from good contracts. |
| 6225 | Obligation to obey all positive laws is older than all laws [Cudworth] |
| Full Idea: Obligation to obey all positive laws is older than all laws. | |
| From: Ralph Cudworth (On Eternal and Immutable Morality [1688], Ch.II.3) | |
| A reaction: Clearly villains can pass wicked laws, so there can't be an obligation to obey all laws (even if they are 'positive', which seems to beg the question). Nevertheless this is a good reason why laws cannot be the grounding of morality. |
| 6224 | An omnipotent will cannot make two things equal or alike if they aren't [Cudworth] |
| Full Idea: Omnipotent will cannot make things like or equal one to another, without the natures of likeness and equality. | |
| From: Ralph Cudworth (On Eternal and Immutable Morality [1688], Ch.II.I) | |
| A reaction: This is one of the many classic 'paradoxes of omnipotence'. The best strategy is to define omnipotence as 'being able to do everything which it is possible to do'. Anything beyond that is inviting paradoxical disaster. |
| 6223 | If the will and pleasure of God controls justice, then anything wicked or unjust would become good if God commanded it [Cudworth] |
| Full Idea: If the arbitrary will and pleasure of God is the first and only rule of good and justice, it follows that nothing can be so grossly wicked or unjust but if it were commanded by this omnipotent Deity, it must forthwith become holy, just and righteous. | |
| From: Ralph Cudworth (On Eternal and Immutable Morality [1688], Ch.I.I.5) | |
| A reaction: This is the strong (Platonic) answer to the Euthyphro Question (Idea 336). One answer is that God would not command in such a way - but why not? We may say that God and goodness merge into one, but we are interested in ultimate authority. |
| 6226 | The requirement that God must be obeyed must precede any authority of God's commands [Cudworth] |
| Full Idea: If it were not morally good and just in its own nature before any positive command of God, that God should be obeyed by his creatures, the bare will of God himself could not beget any obligation upon anyone. | |
| From: Ralph Cudworth (On Eternal and Immutable Morality [1688], Ch.II.3) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as a self-evident truth, and a big problem for anyone who wants to make God the source of morality. You don't have to accept anyone's authority just because they are powerful or clever (though they do bestow a certain natural authority!). |