Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'The Value of Science', 'Lysis' and 'Comments on a Certain Broadsheet'

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6 ideas

12. Knowledge Sources / A. A Priori Knowledge / 4. A Priori as Necessities
2602 What experience could prove 'If a=c and b=c then a=b'? [Descartes]
     Full Idea: Please tell me what the corporeal motion is that is capable of forming some common notion to the effect that 'things which are equal to a third thing are equal to each other'.
     From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.366)
18. Thought / D. Concepts / 2. Origin of Concepts / c. Nativist concepts
2600 The mind's innate ideas are part of its capacity for thought [Descartes]
     Full Idea: I have never written or taken the view that the mind requires innate ideas which are something distinct from its own faculty of thinking.
     From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365)
2601 Qualia must be innate, because physical motions do not contain them [Descartes]
     Full Idea: The ideas of pains, colours, sounds etc. must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions.
     From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365)
     A reaction: Simple and brilliant! We know perfectly well that there is no redness zooming through the air from a tomato (or the air would be pink!). Redness occurs when the light arrives, so we add the redness, so it is innate.
22. Metaethics / C. The Good / 1. Goodness / a. Form of the Good
295 The good is beautiful [Plato]
     Full Idea: The good is beautiful.
     From: Plato (Lysis [c.400 BCE], 216d)
     A reaction: also Timaeus 87c
23. Ethics / C. Virtue Theory / 4. External Goods / d. Friendship
294 People say that friendship exists only between good men [Plato]
     Full Idea: People say that friendship exists only between good men.
     From: Plato (Lysis [c.400 BCE], 214d)
26. Natural Theory / D. Laws of Nature / 11. Against Laws of Nature
15877 The aim of science is just to create a comprehensive, elegant language to describe brute facts [Poincaré, by Harré]
     Full Idea: In Poincaré's view, we try to construct a language within which the brute facts of experience are expressed as comprehensively and as elegantly as possible. The job of science is the forging of a language precisely suited to that purpose.
     From: report of Henri Poincaré (The Value of Science [1906], Pt III) by Rom Harré - Laws of Nature 2
     A reaction: I'm often struck by how obscure and difficult our accounts of self-evident facts can be. Chairs are easy, and the metaphysics of chairs is hideous. Why is that? I'm a robust realist, but I like Poincaré's idea. He permits facts.