5 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!). |
| 8463 | Maths can be reduced to logic and set theory [Quine] |
| Full Idea: Researches in the foundations of mathematics have made it clear that all of (interpreted) mathematics can be got down to logic and set theory, and the objects needed for mathematics can be got down to the category of classes (and classes of classes..). | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Scope and Language of Science [1954], §VI) | |
| A reaction: This I take to be a retreat from pure logicism, presumably influenced by Gödel. So can set theory be reduced to logic? Crispin Wright is the one the study. |
| 8461 | The category of objects incorporates the old distinction of substances and their modes [Quine] |
| Full Idea: The category of objects embraces indiscriminately what would anciently have been distinguished as substances and as modes or states of substances. | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Scope and Language of Science [1954], §6) | |
| A reaction: This nicely captures Quine's elimination of properties, by presenting them as inseparable from their objects/substances. Armstrong calls this 'Ostrich Nominalism' (for refusing to address the universals problem) but Quineans are unshaken. |
| 16618 | Intellectual and moral states, and even the soul itself, depend on prime matter for their existence [Blasius, by Pasnau] |
| Full Idea: Blasius argued that prime matter is the subject of all our intellectual and moral states. This implies that such states cannot exist apart from the body, which seems to imply further that the soul itself cannot exist apart from the body. | |
| From: report of Blasius of Parma (Les quaestiones de anima (lectures on the soul) [1385], I.8 p.65) by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 06.3 | |
| A reaction: It seems that, under pressure, Blasius recanted this view in lectures given eleven years later. |
| 8462 | A hallucination can, like an ague, be identified with its host; the ontology is physical, the idiom mental [Quine] |
| Full Idea: A physical ontology has a place for states of mind. An inspiration or a hallucination can, like the fit of ague, be identified with its host for the duration. It leaves our mentalistic idioms fairly intact, but reconciles them with a physical ontology. | |
| From: Willard Quine (The Scope and Language of Science [1954], §VI) | |
| A reaction: Quine is employing the same strategy that he uses for substances and properties (Idea 8461): take the predication as basic, rather than reifying the thing being predicated. The ague analogy suggests that Quine is an incipient functionalist. |