48 ideas
21757 | Philosophy is the conceptual essence of the shape of history [Hegel] |
Full Idea: Philosophy is the supreme blossom - the concept - of the entire shape of history, the consciousness and the spiritual essence of the whole situation, the spirit of the age as the spirit present and aware of itself in thought. | |
From: Georg W.F.Hegel (Lectures on the History of Philosophy [1830], p.25), quoted by Stephen Houlgate - An Introduction to Hegel 01 | |
A reaction: This sees philosophy as intrinsically historical, which is a founding idea for 'continental' philosophy. Analysis is tied to science, in which the history of the subject is seen as irrelevant to its truth. Does this mean we can't go back to Aristotle? |
9449 | The plausible Barcan formula implies modality in the actual world [Bird] |
Full Idea: Modality in the actual world is the import of the Barcan formula, and there are good reasons for accepting the Barcan formula. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 1.2) | |
A reaction: If you thought logic was irrelevant to metaphysics, this should make you think twice. |
9501 | If all existents are causally active, that excludes abstracta and causally isolated objects [Bird] |
Full Idea: If one says that 'everything that exists is causally active', that rules out abstracta (notably sets and numbers), and it rules out objects that are causally isolated. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.5) | |
A reaction: I like the principle. I take abstracta to be brain events, so they are causally active, within highly refined and focused brains, and if your physics is built on the notion of fields then I would think a 'causally isolated' object incoherent. |
16554 | Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: Activities can be identified spatiotemporally, and individuated by rate, duration, and types of entity and property that engage in them. They also have modes of operation, directionality, polarity, energy requirements and a range. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
A reaction: This is their attempt at making 'activity' one of the two central concepts of ontology, along with 'entity'. A helpful analysis. It just seems to be one way of slicing the cake. |
9500 | If naturalism refers to supervenience, that leaves necessary entities untouched [Bird] |
Full Idea: If one's naturalistic principles are formulated in terms of supervenience, then necessary entities are left untouched. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.5) | |
A reaction: I take this to be part of the reason why some people like supervenience - that it leaves a pure 'space of reasons' which is unreachable from the flesh and blood inside a cranium. Personall I like the space of reasons, but I drop the 'pure'. |
9502 | There might be just one fundamental natural property [Bird] |
Full Idea: The thought that there might be just one fundamental natural property is not that strange. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 6.3) | |
A reaction: A nice variation on the Parmenides idea that only the One exists. Bird's point would refer to a possible unification of modern physics. We see, for example, the forces of electricity and of magnetism turning out to be the same force. |
9477 | Categorical properties are not modally fixed, but change across possible worlds [Bird] |
Full Idea: Categorical properties do not have their dispositional characters modally fixed, but may change their dispositional characters (and their causal and nomic behaviour more generally) across different worlds. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1) | |
A reaction: This is the key ground for Bird's praiseworth opposition to categorical propertie. I take it to be a nonsense to call the category in which we place something a 'property' of that thing. A confusion of thought with reality. |
9490 | The categoricalist idea is that a property is only individuated by being itself [Bird] |
Full Idea: In the categoricalist view, the essential properties of a natural property are limited to its essentially being itself and not some distinct property. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.1) | |
A reaction: He associates this view with Lewis (modern regularity view) and Armstrong (nomic necessitation), and launches a splendid attack against it. I have always laughed at the idea that 'being Socrates' was one of the properties of Socrates. |
9495 | If we abstractly define a property, that doesn't mean some object could possess it [Bird] |
Full Idea: The possibility of abstract definition does not show that we have defined a property that we can know, independently of any theory, that it is physically possible for some object to possess. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.3.1) | |
A reaction: This is a naturalist resisting the idea that there is no more to a property than set-membership. I strongly agree. We need a firm notion of properties as features of the actual world; anything else should be called something like 'categorisations'. |
9492 | Categoricalists take properties to be quiddities, with no essential difference between them [Bird] |
Full Idea: The categoricalist conception of properties takes them to be quiddities, which are primitive identities between fundamental qualities, having no difference with regard to their essence. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.5) | |
A reaction: Compare 'haecceitism' about indentity of objects, though 'quidditism' sounds even less plausible. Bird attributes this view to Lewis and Armstrong, and makes it sound well daft. |
9503 | To name an abundant property is either a Fregean concept, or a simple predicate [Bird] |
Full Idea: It isn't clear what it is to name an abundant property. One might reify them, as akin to Fregean concepts, or it might be equivalent to a simple predication. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 7.1.2) | |
A reaction: 'Fregean concepts' would make them functions that purely link things (hence relational?). One suspects that people who actually treat abundant properties as part of their ontology (Lewis) are confusing natural properties with predicates. |
16556 | Penicillin causes nothing; the cause is what penicillin does [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: It is not the penicillin that causes the pneumonia to disappear, but what the penicillin does. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.1) | |
A reaction: This is a very neat example for illustrating how we slip into 'entity' talk, when the reality we are addressing actually concerns processes. Without the 'what it does', penicillin can't participate in causation at all. |
14540 | Only real powers are fundamental [Bird, by Mumford/Anjum] |
Full Idea: Bird says only real powers are fundamental. | |
From: report of Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007]) by S.Mumford/R.Lill Anjum - Getting Causes from Powers 1.5 | |
A reaction: They disagree, and want higher-level properties in their ontology. I'm with Bird, except that something must exist to have the powers. Powers are fundamental to all the activity of nature, and are intrinsic to the stuff which constitutes nature. |
9450 | If all properties are potencies, and stimuli and manifestation characterise them, there is a regress [Bird] |
Full Idea: Potencies are characterized in terms of their stimulus and manifestation properties, then if potencies are the only properties then these properties are also potencies, and must be characterized by yet further properties, leading to a vicious regress. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 1.2) | |
A reaction: This is cited as the most popular objection to the dispositional account of properties. |
9498 | The essence of a potency involves relations, e.g. mass, to impressed force and acceleration [Bird] |
Full Idea: The essence of a potency involves a relation to something else; if inertial mass is a potency then its essence involves a relation to a stimulus property (impressed force) and a manifestation property (acceleration). | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.3.3) | |
A reaction: It doesn't seem quite right to say that the relations are part of the essence, if they might not occur, but some other relations might happen in their place. An essence is what makes a relation possible (like being good-looking). |
9474 | A disposition is finkish if a time delay might mean the manifestation fizzles out [Bird] |
Full Idea: Finkish dispositions arise because the time delay between stimulus and manifestation provides an opportunity for the disposition to go out of existence and so halt the process that would bring about the manifestation. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.2.3) | |
A reaction: This is a problem for the conditional analysis of dispositions; there may be a disposition, but it never reaches manifestation. Bird rightly points us towards actual powers rather than dispositions that need manifestation. |
9475 | A robust pot attached to a sensitive bomb is not fragile, but if struck it will easily break [Bird] |
Full Idea: If a robust iron pot is attached to a bomb with a sensitive detonator. If the pot is struck, the bomb will go off, so they counterfactual 'if the pot were struck it would break' is true, but it is not a fragile pot. This is a 'mimic' of the disposition. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.2.5.1) | |
A reaction: A very nice example, showing that a true disposition would have to be an internal feature (a power) of the pot itself, not a mere disposition to behave. The problem is these pesky empiricists, who want to reduce it all to what is observable. |
9499 | Megarian actualists deny unmanifested dispositions [Bird] |
Full Idea: The Megarian actualist denies that a disposition can exist without being manifested. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 5.4) | |
A reaction: I agree with Bird that this extreme realism seems wrong. As he puts it (p.109), "unrealized possibilities must be part of the actual world". This commitment is beginning to change my understanding of the world I am looking at. |
9486 | Why should a universal's existence depend on instantiation in an existing particular? [Bird] |
Full Idea: An instantiation condition seems to be a failure of nerve as regards realism about universals. If universals really are entities in their own right, why should their existence depend upon a relationship with existing particulars? | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.2.2) | |
A reaction: I like this challenge, which seems to leave fans of universals no option but full-blown Platonism, which most of them recognise as being deeply implausible. |
9472 | Resemblance itself needs explanation, presumably in terms of something held in common [Bird] |
Full Idea: The realist view of resemblance nominalism is that it is resemblance that needs explaining. When there is resemblance it is natural to want to explain it, in terms of something held in common. Explanations end somewhere, but not with resemblance. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.1.2) | |
A reaction: I smell a regress. If a knife and a razor resemble because they share sharpness, you have to see that the sharp phenomenon falls within the category of 'sharpness' before you can make the connection, which is spotting its similarity. |
9482 | If the laws necessarily imply p, that doesn't give a new 'nomological' necessity [Bird] |
Full Idea: It does not add to the kinds of necessity to say that p is 'nomologically necessary' iff (the laws of nature → p) is metaphysically necessary. That trick of construction could be pulled for 'feline necessity' (true in all worlds that contain cats). | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1.2) | |
A reaction: I love it! Bird seems to think that the only necessity is 'metaphysical' necessity, true in all possible worlds, and he is right. The question arises in modal logic, though, of the accessibility between worlds (which might give degrees of necessity?). |
9481 | Logical necessitation is not a kind of necessity; George Orwell not being Eric Blair is not a real possibility [Bird] |
Full Idea: I do not regard logical necessitation as a kind of necessity. It is logically possible that George Orwell is not Eric Blair, but in what sense is this any kind of possibility? It arises from having two names, but that confers no genuine possibility. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1.2) | |
A reaction: How refreshing. All kinds of concepts like this are just accepted by philosophers as obvious, until someone challenges them. The whole undergrowth of modal thinking needs a good flamethrower taken to it. |
9505 | Empiricist saw imaginability and possibility as close, but now they seem remote [Bird] |
Full Idea: Whereas the link between imaginability and possibility was once held, under the influence of empiricism, to be close, it is now widely held to be very remote. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 8) | |
A reaction: Tim Williamson nicely argues the opposite - that assessment of possibility is an adjunct of our ability to think counterfactually, which is precisely an operation of the imagination. Big error is possible, but how else could we do it? |
9491 | Haecceitism says identity is independent of qualities and without essence [Bird] |
Full Idea: The core of haecceitism is the view that the transworld identity of particulars does not supervene on their qualitative features. ...The simplest expression of it is that particulars lack essential properties. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.1) | |
A reaction: This seems to be something the 'bare substratum' account of substance (associated with Locke). You are left with the difficulty of how to individuate an instance of the haecceity, as opposed to the bundle of properties attached to it. |
16562 | We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: The intelligibility of a phenomenon consists in the mechanisms being portrayed in terms of a field's bottom out entities and activities. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
A reaction: In other words, we understand complex things by reducing them to things we do understand. It would, though, be illuminating to see a nest of interconnected activities, even if we understood none of them. |
9487 | We can't reject all explanations because of a regress; inexplicable A can still explain B [Bird] |
Full Idea: Some regard the potential regress of explanations as a reason to think that the very idea of explanation is illusory. This is a fallacy; it is not a necessary condition on A's explaining B that we have an explanation for A also. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.2.4) | |
A reaction: True, though to say 'B is explained by A, but A is totally baffling' is not the account we are dreaming of. And the explanation would certainly fail if we could say nothing at all about A, apart from naming it. |
16563 | The explanation is not the regularity, but the activity sustaining it [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: It is not regularities that explain but the activities that sustain the regularities. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
A reaction: Good, but we had better not characterise the 'activities' in terms of regularities. |
16555 | Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: It is common to speak of functions as properties 'had by' entities, …but they should rather be understood in terms of the activities by virtue of which entities contribute to the workings of a mechanism. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
A reaction: I'm certainly quite passionately in favour of cutting down on describing the world almost entirely in terms of entities which have properties. An 'activity', though, is a bit of an elusive concept. |
16528 | Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: One should not think of mechanisms as exclusively mechanical (push-pull) systems. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
A reaction: The difficulty seems to be that you could broaden the concept of 'mechanism' indefinitely, so that it covered history, mathematics, populations, cultural change, and even mathematics. Where to stop? |
16529 | Mechanisms are systems organised to produce regular change [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular change from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
A reaction: This is their initial formal definition of a mechanism. Note that a mere 'activity' can be included. Presumably the mechanism might have an outcome that was not the intended outcome. Does a random element disqualify it? Are hands mechanisms? |
16530 | A mechanism explains a phenomenon by showing how it was produced [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: To give a description of a mechanism for a phenomenon is to explain that phenomenon, i.e. to explain how it was produced. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
A reaction: To 'show how' something happens needs a bit of precisification. It is probably analytic that 'showing how' means 'revealing the mechanism', though 'mechanism' then becomes the tricky concept. |
16553 | Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: We emphasise the activities in mechanisms. This is explicitly dualist. Substantivalists speak of entities with dispositions to act. Process ontologists reify activities and try to reduce entities to processes. We try to capture both intuitions. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
A reaction: [A quotation of selected fragments] The problem here seems to be the raising of an 'activity' to a central role in ontology, when it doesn't seem to be primitive, and will typically be analysed in a variety of ways. |
16559 | Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: Nested hierachical descriptions of mechanisms typically bottom out in lowest level mechanisms. …Bottoming out is relative …the explanation comes to an end, and description of lower-level mechanisms would be irrelevant. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.1) | |
A reaction: This seems to me exactly the right story about mechanism, and it is a story I am associating with essentialism. The relevance is ties to understanding. The lower level is either fully understood, or totally baffling. |
16564 | There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: There are four bottom-out kinds of activities: geometrico-mechanical, electro-chemical, electro-magnetic and energetic. These are abstract means of production that can be fruitfully applied in particular cases to explain phenomena. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
A reaction: I like that. It gives a nice core for a metaphysics for physicalists. I suspect that 'mechanical' can be reduced to something else, and that 'energetic' will disappear in the final story. |
16561 | We can abstract by taking an exemplary case and ignoring the detail [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: Abstractions may be constructed by taking an exemplary case or instance and removing detail. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.3) | |
A reaction: I love 'removing detail'. That's it. Simple. I think this process is the basis of our whole capacity to formulate abstract concepts. Forget Frege - he's just describing the results of the process. How do we decide what is 'detail'? Essentialism! |
9493 | We should explain causation by powers, not powers by causation [Bird] |
Full Idea: The notion of 'causal power' is not to be analysed in terms of causation; if anything, the relationship is the reverse. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.1 n71) | |
A reaction: It is a popular view these days to take causation as basic (as opposed to the counterfactual account), but I prefer this view. If anything is basic in nature, it is the dynamic force in the engine room, which is the active powers of substances. |
9494 | Singularism about causes is wrong, as the universals involved imply laws [Bird] |
Full Idea: While singularists about causation might think that a particular has its causal powers independently of law, it is difficult to see how a universal could have or confer causal powers without generating what we would naturally think of as a law. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.2.1 n71) | |
A reaction: This is a middle road between the purely singularist account (Anscombe) and the fully nomological account. We might say that a caused event will be 'involved in law-like behaviour', without attributing the cause to a law. |
9507 | Laws are explanatory relationships of things, which supervene on their essences [Bird] |
Full Idea: The laws of a domain are the fundamental, general explanatory relationships between kinds, quantities, and qualities of that domain, that supervene upon the essential natures of those things. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 10.1) | |
A reaction: This is the scientific essentialist view of laws [see entries there, in 'Laws of Nature']. There seems uncertainty between 'kinds' and 'qualities' (with 'quantities' looking like a category mistake). I vote, with Ellis, for natural kinds as the basis. |
9488 | Laws are either disposition regularities, or relations between properties [Bird] |
Full Idea: Instead of viewing laws as regular relationships between dispositional properties and stimulus-manifestation, they can be conceived of as a relation between properties. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.4) | |
A reaction: Bird offers these as the two main views, with the first coming from scientific essentialism, and the second from Armstrong's account of universals. Personally I favour the first, but Bird suggests that powers give the best support for both views. |
9496 | That other diamonds are hard does not explain why this one is [Bird] |
Full Idea: The fact that some other diamonds are hard does not explain why this diamond is hard. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 4.3.2) | |
A reaction: A very nice aphorism! It pinpoints the whole error of trying to explain the behaviour of the world by citing laws. Why should this item obey that law? Bird prefers 'powers', and so do I. |
9479 | Dispositional essentialism says laws (and laws about laws) are guaranteed regularities [Bird] |
Full Idea: For the regularity version of dispositional essentialism about laws, laws are those regularities whose truth is guaranteed by the essential dispositional nature of one or more of the constituents. Regularities that supervene on such laws are also laws. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.1.2) | |
A reaction: Even if you accept necessary behaviour resulting from essential dispositions, you still need to distinguish the important regularities from the accidental ones, so the word 'guarantee' is helpful, even if it raises lots of difficulties. |
9473 | Laws cannot offer unified explanations if they don't involve universals [Bird] |
Full Idea: Laws, or what flow from them, are supposed to provide a unified explanation of the behaviours of particulars. Without universals the explanation of the behaviours of things lacks the required unity. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 2.1.2) | |
A reaction: Sounds a bit question-begging? Gravity seems fairly unified, whereas the frequency of London buses doesn't. Maybe I could unify bus-behaviour by positing a few new universals? The unity should first be in the phenomena, not in the explanation. |
9484 | If the universals for laws must be instantiated, a vanishing particular could destroy a law [Bird] |
Full Idea: If universals exist only where and when they are instantiated, this make serious trouble for the universals view of laws. It would be most odd if a particular, merely by changing its properties, could cause a law to go out of existence. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.2.2) | |
A reaction: This sounds conclusive. He notes that this is probably why Armstrong does not adopt this view (though Lowe seems to favour it). Could there be a possible property (and concomitant law) which was never ever instantiated? |
9506 | Salt necessarily dissolves in water, because of the law which makes the existence of salt possible [Bird] |
Full Idea: We cannot have a world where it is true both that salt exists (which requires Coulomb's Law to be true), and that it fails to dissolve in water (which requires Coulomb's Law to be false). So the dissolving is necessary even if the Law is contingent. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 8.2) | |
A reaction: Excellent. It is just like the bonfire on the Moon (imaginable through ignorance, but impossible). People who assert that the solubility of salt is contingent tend not to know much about chemistry. |
23713 | Most laws supervene on fundamental laws, which are explained by basic powers [Bird, by Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
Full Idea: According to Bird, non-fundamental laws supervene on fundamental laws, and so are ultimately explained by fundamental powers. | |
From: report of Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007]) by Friend/Kimpton-Nye - Dispositions and Powers 3.6.1 | |
A reaction: This looks like the picture I subscribe to. Roughly, fundamental laws are explained by powers, and non-fundamental laws are explained by properties, which are complexes of powers. 'Fundamental' may not be a precise term! |
9489 | Essentialism can't use conditionals to explain regularities, because of possible interventions [Bird] |
Full Idea: The straightforward dispositional essentialist account of laws by subjunctive conditionals is false because dispositions typically suffer from finks and antidotes. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 3.4) | |
A reaction: [Finks and antidotes intervene before a disposition can take effect] This seems very persuasive to me, and shows why you can't just explain laws as counterfactual or conditional claims. Explanation demands what underlies them. |
16558 | Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
Full Idea: The traditional notion of a law of nature has few, if any, applications in neurobiology or molecular biology. | |
From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.2) | |
A reaction: This is a simple and self-evident fact, and bad news for anyone who want to build their entire ontology around laws of nature. I take such a notion to be fairly empty, except as a convenient heuristic device. |
9504 | The relational view of space-time doesn't cover times and places where things could be [Bird] |
Full Idea: The obvious problem with the simple relational view of space and time is that it fails to account for the full range of spatio-temporal possibility. There seem to be times and places where objects and events could be, but are not. | |
From: Alexander Bird (Nature's Metaphysics [2007], 7.3.2) | |
A reaction: This view seems strongly supported by intuition. I certainly don't accept the views of physicists and cosmologists on the subject, because they seem to approach the whole thing too instrumentally. |