8 ideas
16789 | Only supernatural means could annihilate anything once it had being [Hobbes] |
Full Idea: A being cannot naturally go out of existence. For even if a ship or a plank ceases to be a ship or a plank, it never naturally ceases to be a being. For a being, unless it is annihilated, does not cease to be a being. To annihilate is a supernatural task. | |
From: Thomas Hobbes (De Mundo (On the World) [1642], 12.5) | |
A reaction: This idea was becoming an orthodoxy in Hobbes's time, and leads to the various conservation laws in physics. |
4483 | If abstract terms are sets of tropes, 'being a unicorn' and 'being a griffin' turn out identical [Loux] |
Full Idea: If trope theorists say abstract singular terms name sets of tropes, what is the referent of 'is a unicorn'? The only candidate is the null set (with no members), but there is just one null set, so 'being a unicorn' and 'being a griffin' will be identical. | |
From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.86) | |
A reaction: Not crucial, I would think, given that a unicorn is just a horse with a horn. Hume explains how we do that, combining ideas which arose from actual tropes. |
4481 | Austere nominalists insist that the realist's universals lack the requisite independent identifiability [Loux] |
Full Idea: Austere nominalists insist that the realist's universals lack the requisite independent identifiability. | |
From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.60) | |
A reaction: Plato's view seems to be that we don't identify universals independently. We ascend The Line, or think about the shadows in The Cave, and infer the universals from an array of particulars (by dialectic). |
4477 | Universals come in hierarchies of generality [Loux] |
Full Idea: Universals come in hierarchies of generality. | |
From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.24) | |
A reaction: If it is possible to state facts about universals, this obviously encourages a rather Platonic approach to them, as existent things with properties. But maybe the hierarchies are conventional, not natural. |
4482 | Austere nominalism has to take a host of things (like being red, or human) as primitive [Loux] |
Full Idea: In return for a one-category ontology (with particulars but no universals), the austere nominalist is forced to take a whole host of things (like being red, or triangular, or human) as unanalysable or primitive. | |
From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.68) | |
A reaction: I see that 'red' might have to be primitive, but being human can just be a collection of particulars. It is no ontologically worse to call them 'primitive' than to say they exist. |
4478 | Nominalism needs to account for abstract singular terms like 'circularity'. [Loux] |
Full Idea: Nominalists have been very concerned to provide an account of the role of abstract singular terms (such as 'circularity'). | |
From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.34) | |
A reaction: Whether this is a big problem depends on our view of abstraction. If it only consists of selecting one property of an object and reifying it, then we can give a nominalist account of properties, and the problem is solved. |
4480 | Times and places are identified by objects, so cannot be used in a theory of object-identity [Loux] |
Full Idea: Any account of the identity of material objects which turns on the identity of places and times must face the objection that the identity of places and times depends, in turn, on the identities of the objects located at them. | |
From: Michael J. Loux (Metaphysics: contemporary introduction [1998], p.56) | |
A reaction: This may be a benign circle, in which we concede that there are two basic interdependent concepts of objects and space-time. If you want to define identity - in terms of what? |
16764 | The soul conserves the body, as we see by its dissolution when the soul leaves [Toletus] |
Full Idea: Every accident of a living thing, as well as all its organs and temperaments and its dispositions are conserved by the soul. We see this from experience, since when that soul recedes, all these dissolve and become corrupted. | |
From: Franciscus Toletus (Commentary on 'De Anima' [1572], II.1.1), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 24.5 | |
A reaction: A nice example of observing a phenemonon, but not being able to observe the dependence relation the right way round. Compare Descartes in Idea 16763. |