6 ideas
| 579 | Cratylus said you couldn't even step into the same river once [Cratylus, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Cratylus was appalled that Heraclitus said you could not step twice into the same river, because it was already going too far to admit stepping into the same river once. | |
| From: report of Cratylus (fragments/reports [c.425 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 1010a | |
| A reaction: Compare Idea 427. |
| 578 | Cratylus decided speech was hopeless, and his only expression was the movement of a finger [Cratylus, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Cratylus thought speech of any kind was radically inappropriate and that expression should be restricted exclusively to the movement of the finger. | |
| From: report of Cratylus (fragments/reports [c.425 BCE]) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 1010a |
| 5121 | Basing ethics on flourishing makes it consequentialist, as actions are judged by contributing to it [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Basing ethics on human flourishing tends towards utilitarianism or consequentialism; actions, character traits, laws, and so on are to be assessed with reference to their contributions to human flourishing. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Human Flourishing, Ethics and Liberty [1983], 9.2.2) | |
| A reaction: This raises the question of whether only virtue can contribute to flourishing, or whether a bit of vice might be helpful. This problem presumably pushed the Stoics to say that virtue itself is the good, rather than the resulting flourishing. |
| 5120 | What counts as 'flourishing' must be relative to various sets of values [Harman] |
| Full Idea: If we base our ethics on human flourishing, one implication would seem to be moral relativism, since what counts as 'flourishing' seems inevitably relative to one or other set of values. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Human Flourishing, Ethics and Liberty [1983], 9.2.1) | |
| A reaction: This remark seems to make the relativist assumption that all value systems are equal. For Aristotle, flourishing is no more relative than health is. No one can assert that illness has an intrinsically high value in human life. |
| 21995 | Must production determine superstructure, or could it be the other way round? [Singer on Marx] |
| Full Idea: Once the 'interaction' between the superstructure and the productive forces is admitted, is it still possible to maintain that production determines the superstructure, rather than the other way round? | |
| From: comment on Karl Marx (Capital Vol. 1 [1867]) by Peter Singer - Marx 7 | |
| A reaction: It is much harder to defend historical determinism if Singer is right about this. Modern capitalism won't admit of the sort of simple distinctions that mark was looking for. |
| 20577 | Even decently paid workers still have their produce bought with money stolen from them [Marx] |
| Full Idea: Even if the workers are paid a fair wage, the whole thing still remains the age-old activity of the conqueror, who buys commodities from the conquered with the money has has stolen from them, | |
| From: Karl Marx (Capital Vol. 1 [1867], p.728), quoted by Johanna Oksala - Political Philosophy: all that matters Ch.8 | |
| A reaction: [Penguin edition cited] The word 'stolen' is obviously dubious here. 'Exploitation' is a much more accurate word. One might talk of 'blackmail' or 'extortion' rather than theft. |