8 ideas
1556 | By nature people are close to one another, but culture drives them apart [Hippias] |
Full Idea: I regard you all as relatives - by nature, not by convention. By nature like is akin to like, but convention is a tyrant over humankind and often constrains people to act contrary to nature. | |
From: Hippias (fragments/reports [c.430 BCE]), quoted by Plato - Protagoras 337c8 |
8353 | Freedom involves acting according to an idea [Anscombe] |
Full Idea: Freedom at least involves the power of acting according to an idea. | |
From: G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], §2) | |
A reaction: Since 'you' presumably have to sit above the idea and pass a judgement on it, then the same principle should apply to acting on a desire, which presumably 'you' could reject because it just wasn't attractive enough. |
8352 | To believe in determinism, one must believe in a system which determines events [Anscombe] |
Full Idea: 'The ball's path is determined' must mean 'there is only one possible path for the ball (assuming no air currents)', but what ground could one have for believing this, if one does not believe in some system for which it is a consequence? | |
From: G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], §2) | |
A reaction: This seems right, but it doesn't follow that one has to know the full details of the system. The system might just be the best explanation, or even a matter of vague faith. It might, though, be just that you can't imagine any other outcome. |
20957 | We don't choose our characters, yet we still claim credit for the actions our characters perform [Schelling] |
Full Idea: Nobody has chosen their character; and yet this does not stop anybody attributing the action which follows from his character to themself as a free action. | |
From: Friedrich Schelling (The Ages of the World [1810], I.93) | |
A reaction: This pinpoints a very nice ambivalence about our attitudes to our own characters. We all have some pride and shame about who we are, without having chosed who we are. At least when we are young. But we make the bed we lie in. |
8351 | With diseases we easily trace a cause from an effect, but we cannot predict effects [Anscombe] |
Full Idea: It is much easier to trace effects back to causes with certainty than to predict effects from causes. If I have one contact with someone with a disease and I get it, we suppose I got it from him, but a doctor cannot predict a disease from one contact. | |
From: G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], §1) | |
A reaction: An interesting, and obviously correct, observation. Her point is that we get more certainty of causes from observing a singular effect than we get certainty of effects from regularities or laws. |
4777 | The word 'cause' is an abstraction from a group of causal terms in a language (scrape, push..) [Anscombe] |
Full Idea: The word "cause" can be added to a language in which are already represented many causal concepts; a small selection: scrape, push, wet, carry, eat, burn, knock over, keep off, squash, make, hurt. | |
From: G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], p.93) | |
A reaction: An interesting point, perhaps reinforcing the Humean idea of causation as a 'natural belief', or the Kantian view of it as a category of thought. Or maybe causation is built into language because it is a feature of reality… |
10363 | Causation is relative to how we describe the primary relata [Anscombe, by Schaffer,J] |
Full Idea: Anscombe has inspired the view that causation is an intensional relation, and takes it to be relative to the descriptions of the primary relata. | |
From: report of G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], 1) by Jonathan Schaffer - The Metaphysics of Causation 1 | |
A reaction: It seems too linguistic to say that there is nothing more to it. It seems relevant in human examples, but if a landslide crushes a tree, what difference does the description make? 'It was just a few rocks and some miserable little tree'. No excuse! |
8350 | Since Mill causation has usually been explained by necessary and sufficient conditions [Anscombe] |
Full Idea: Since Mill it has been fairly common to explain causation one way or another in terms of 'necessary' and 'sufficient' conditions. | |
From: G.E.M. Anscombe (Causality and Determinism [1971], §1) | |
A reaction: Interesting to see what Hume implies about these criteria. Anscombe is going to propose that causal events are fairly self-evident and self-explanatory, and don't need analyses of conditions. Another approach is regularities and laws. |