12 ideas
| 15567 | Some events involve no change; they must, because causal histories involve unchanges [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Not all events involve change. We cannot afford to count the unchanges as nonevents, for the unchanges may be needed to complete causal histories. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], VI) | |
| A reaction: You end up calling non-changes 'events' if you commit to a simplistic theory that all causal histories consist of events. Why not allow conditions as well as events? Lewis concedes that he may be abusing language. |
| 15561 | The events that suit semantics may not be the events that suit causation [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: There is no guarantee that events made for semantics are the same as events that are causes and effects. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], I) | |
| A reaction: This little cri de couer could be a motto for a huge amount of analytic philosophy, which (for some odd reason) thought that mathematics, logic, set theory and formal semantics were good tools for explaining nature. |
| 15565 | Events have inbuilt essences, as necessary conditions for their occurrence [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Events have their essences built in, in the form of necessary conditions for their occurrence. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], III) | |
| A reaction: Revealing. He thinks the essence of an event is something which precedes the event. I take it as obvious that if an event has an essence, it will be some features of the event that occur in it and during it. They need to be intrinsic. |
| 15566 | Events are classes, and so there is a mereology of their parts [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: If events are classes, as I propose, then they have a mereology in the way that all classes do: the parts of a class are its subclasses. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], V) | |
| A reaction: Lewis says events are properties, which he regards as classes. It is not clear that events are strictly mereological. Could one happening be two events? Is WWII a simple sum of its parts? [see p.260] |
| 15564 | An event is a property of a unique space-time region [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: I propose to identify an event with a property, or in other words with a class, a unique spatio-temporal region corresponding to where that event occurs. | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], II) | |
| A reaction: [I've run together two separate bits, on p.244 and 245] Lewis cites Montague's similar view, that events are properties of times. |
| 15563 | Properties are very abundant (unlike universals), and are used for semantics and higher-order variables [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Properties are abundant, numbering at least beth-3 for properties of individuals alone; they are suited to serve as semantic values of arbitrarily complex predicates and gerunds, and higher-order variables. (If there are universals, they are sparse). | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], II n2) | |
| A reaction: To me this is an outrageous hijacking of the notion of property which is needed for explaining the natural world. He seems to be talking about predicates. He wants to leave me with his silly universals - well I don't want them, thank you. |
| 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 |
| 5122 | Maybe consequentialism is a critique of ordinary morality, rather than describing it [Harman] |
| Full Idea: Consequentialism may be put forward not as an attempt to capture intuitive folk morality but rather as a critique of ordinary tuitions. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Moral Philosophy meets social psychology [1999], 10.1) | |
| A reaction: It is certainly true that most people are concerned with why an action was performed, and (after initial anger) are prepared to forgive an unintended disaster. We have no moral objections to earthquakes, which have bad consequences. |
| 5123 | Maybe there is no such thing as character, and the virtues and vices said to accompany it [Harman] |
| Full Idea: It may be the case that there is no such thing as character, no ordinary character traits of the sort people think there are, none of the usual moral virtues and vices. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Moral Philosophy meets social psychology [1999], 10.1) | |
| A reaction: This would be a devastating fact for virtue theory, if it were true. I don't believe it. He thinks patterns of behaviour result from circumstances, but we give accurate and detailed pictures of people's characters (esp. in novels). |
| 5124 | If a person's two acts of timidity have different explanations, they are not one character trait [Harman] |
| Full Idea: If Herbert is disposed to not speak in history class (but not other subjects), and explanation of this is different from his avoidance of roller coaster rides, then these two dispositions are not special cases of a single character trait. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Moral Philosophy meets social psychology [1999], 10.2) | |
| A reaction: A basic Harman argument for denying the existence of character (and hence of virtues). I just say that character traits are more complex than his caricature of them. If I keep imagining disaster and humiliation for myself, that is a character trait. |
| 5125 | Virtue ethics might involve judgements about the virtues of actions, rather than character [Harman] |
| Full Idea: There are variants of virtue ethics that do not require character traits in the ordinary sense. For example, moral thinking might be explicated by appeal to judgements about whether particular actions are just or courageous or whatever. | |
| From: Gilbert Harman (Moral Philosophy meets social psychology [1999], 10.7.1.1) | |
| A reaction: A very interesting proposal (from Judith Jarvis Thomson). This would flatly reject Aristotle, and one presumes that the judgement about the virtue of the action would largely be a matter of pondering cultural conventions (or, perhaps, consequences). |
| 15562 | Causation is a general relation derived from instances of causal dependence [Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Causation is the ancestral of causal dependence: event c causes event e iff either e depends on c, or e depends on an intermediate event which in turn depends on c, or.... | |
| From: David Lewis (Events [1986], I) | |
| A reaction: This is Lewis making sure that we don't postulate some huge bogus thing called 'Causation' which is supposed to be in charge of Nature. Good point. |