7 ideas
3626 | Knowing the attributes is enough to reveal a substance [Descartes] |
Full Idea: I have never thought that anything more is required to reveal a substance than its various attributes. | |
From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 360) |
3630 | Our thinking about external things doesn't disprove the existence of innate ideas [Descartes] |
Full Idea: You can't prove that Praxiteles never made any statues on the grounds that he did not get from within himself the marble from which he sculpted them. | |
From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 362) |
3631 | A blind man may still contain the idea of colour [Descartes] |
Full Idea: How do you know that there is no idea of colour in a man born blind? | |
From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 363) |
19739 | The maxim for suicide is committed to the value of life, and is thus contradictory [Kant] |
Full Idea: If my maxim is to shorten my life if its continuance threatens more evil than pleasure ...it is seen that a system of nature by whose law the feeling intended to further life should actually destroy life would contradict itself, and could not subsist. | |
From: Immanuel Kant (Lectures on Ethics [1780], 422:53) | |
A reaction: [compressed] I take it this means that a potential suicide is assessing what is best for life, and is therefore implicitly committed to life. Not persuasive! Should we not terminate the life of a mass murderer in mid-crime? |
12709 | Motion is not absolute, but consists in relation [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: In reality motion is not something absolute, but consists in relation. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Motion [1677], A6.4.1968), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 3 | |
A reaction: It is often thought that motion being relative was invented by Einstein, but Leibniz wholeheartedly embraced 'Galilean relativity', and refused to even consider any absolute concept of motion. Acceleration is a bit trickier than velocity. |
3639 | Necessary existence is a property which is uniquely part of God's essence [Descartes] |
Full Idea: In the case of God necessary existence is in fact a property in the strictest sense of the term, since it applies to him alone and forms a part of his essence as it does of no other thing | |
From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 383) |
3640 | Possible existence is a perfection in the idea of a triangle [Descartes] |
Full Idea: Possible existence is a perfection in the idea of a triangle, just as necessary existence is a perfection in the idea of God. | |
From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 383) |