7 ideas
| 21336 | Crates lived in poverty, and treated his whole life as a joke [Crates of Thebes, by Plutarch] |
| Full Idea: Crates, with his bag and threadbare cloak, spent his whole life laughing and joking as though he were on holiday. | |
| From: report of Crates (Theb) (fragments/reports [c.325 BCE]) by Plutarch - 30: Quiet of Mind 266e | |
| A reaction: Crates sounds a little less alarming than Diogenes, while living a similar life. Was Crates the first ancestor of post-modernism? |
| 1767 | Everyone should study philosophy until they see all people in the same light [Crates of Thebes, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: A man should study philosophy up to the point of looking on generals and donkey-drivers in the same light. | |
| From: report of Crates (Theb) (fragments/reports [c.325 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 06.Cr.9 | |
| A reaction: This seems to reject Aristote's idea that some people are clearly superior to others. |
| 14633 | How do we tell a table's being contingently plastic from its being essentially plastic? [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: On a friendly reading of Quine, there is nothing to make the difference between a table's being contingently plastic and its being essentially plastic. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is, of course, the dreaded modern usage of 'essential' to just mean 'necessary' and nothing more. In my view, there may be a big problem with knowing whether a problem is necessary, but knowing whether it is essential is much easier. |
| 14635 | An x is essentially F if it is F in every possible world in which it appears [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: On the possible world's account, x's being essentially F is nothing more nor less than x's being F in every world in which it appears. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 6) | |
| A reaction: There you go - 'true in every possible world' is the definition of metaphysical necessity, not the definition of essence. Either get back to Aristotle, or stop (forever!) talking about 'essence'! |
| 14632 | Quine may have conflated de re and de dicto essentialism, but there is a real epistemological problem [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: The unfriendly response to Quine's objection to essentialism is that it conflates the de re and the de dicto. The friendly response is that behind that conflation is a real epistemological problem for essentialism. | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 1) | |
| A reaction: He cites Richard Cartwright 1968 for the friendly response. The epistemological question is how we can know the essentialness of an essence. |
| 14631 | How can you show the necessity of an a posteriori necessity, if it might turn out to be false? [Jackson] |
| Full Idea: If something is offered as a candidate necessary a posteriori truth, how could we show that it is necessary, in the face of the fact that it takes investigation to show that it is true, and so, in some sense, it might have turned out to be false? | |
| From: Frank Jackson (Possible Worlds and Necessary A Posteriori [2010], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is the topic of his paper, which he compares with how we can know that essences are essential. |
| 22307 | Propositions don't name facts, because two opposed propositions can match one fact [Russell] |
| Full Idea: It is perfectly evident that a proposition is not the name for a fact, from the mere circumstance that there are two propositions corresponding to each fact. 'Socrates is dead' and 'Socrates is not dead' correspond to the same fact. | |
| From: Bertrand Russell (Papers of 1918 [1918], VIII.136), quoted by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 42 'Prop' | |
| A reaction: He finally reaches in 1918 what now looks fairly obvious. The idea that a proposition is part of the world is absurd. We should call the parts of the world 'facts' (despite vagueness and linguistic dependence in such things). Propositions are thoughts. |