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13193
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Active force is not just potential for action, since it involves a real effort or striving [Leibniz]
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Full Idea:
Active force should not be thought of as the simple and common potential [potentia] or receptivity to action of the schools. Rather, active force involves an effort [conatus] or striving [tendentia] toward action.
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From:
Gottfried Leibniz (On Body and Force, Against the Cartesians [1702], p.252)
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A reaction:
This is why Leibniz is lured into making his active forces more and more animistic, till they end up like proto-minds (though never, remember, conscious and willing minds).
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7517
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I could take a healthy infant and train it up to be any type of specialist I choose [Watson,JB]
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Full Idea:
Give me a dozen healthy infants, and my own specified world to bring them up in, and I'll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select - doctor, artist, beggar, thief - regardless of his ancestry.
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From:
J.B. Watson (Behaviorism [1924], Ch.2), quoted by Steven Pinker - The Blank Slate
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A reaction:
This was a famous pronouncement rejecting the concept of human nature as in any way fixed - a total assertion of nurture over nature. Modern research seems to be suggesting that Watson is (alas?) wrong.
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23279
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It is important that a person can change their character, and not just be successive 'selves' [Williams,B]
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Full Idea:
I want to emphasise the basic importance of the ordinary idea of a self or person which undergoes changes of character, as opposed to dissolving a changing person into a series of 'selves'.
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From:
Bernard Williams (Persons, Character and Morality [1976], II)
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A reaction:
[compressed] He mentions Derek Parfit for the rival view. Williams has the Aristotelian view, that a person has an essential nature, which endures through change, and explains that change. But that needs some non-essential character traits.
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23278
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For utilitarians states of affairs are what have value, not matter who produced them [Williams,B]
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Full Idea:
The basic bearer of value for Utilitarianism is the state of affairs, and hence, when the relevant causal differences have been allowed for, it cannot make any further difference who produces a given state of affairs.
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From:
Bernard Williams (Persons, Character and Morality [1976], I)
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A reaction:
Which is morally better, that I water your bed of flowers, or that it rains? Which is morally better, that I water them from love, or because you threaten me with a whip?
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13194
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God's laws would be meaningless without internal powers for following them [Leibniz]
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Full Idea:
To say that, in creation, God gave bodies a law for acting means nothing, unless, at the same time, he gave them something by means of which it could happen that the law is followed.
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From:
Gottfried Leibniz (On Body and Force, Against the Cartesians [1702], p.253)
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A reaction:
This is the beginning of the modern rebellion against the medieval view of laws as imposed from outside on passive matter. Unfortunately for Leibniz, once you have postulated active internal powers, the external laws become redundant.
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13192
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Power is passive force, which is mass, and active force, which is entelechy or form [Leibniz]
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Full Idea:
The dynamicon or power [potentia] in bodies is twofold, passive and active. Passive force [vis] constitutes matter or mass [massa], and active force constitutes entelechy or form.
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From:
Gottfried Leibniz (On Body and Force, Against the Cartesians [1702], p.252)
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A reaction:
This is explicitly equating the innate force understood in physics with Aristotelian form. The passive force is to explain the resistance of bodies. I like the equation of force with power. He says the entelechy is 'analogous' to a soul.
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