7 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 |
| 13195 | To explain a house we must describe its use, as well as its parts [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: A house would be badly explained if we were to describe only the arrangement of its parts, but not its use. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Body and Force, Against the Cartesians [1702], p.255) | |
| A reaction: This must partly fall under pragmatics (i.e. what the enquirer is interested in). But function plays a genuine role in artefacts, and also in evolved biological organs. |
| 13193 | Active force is not just potential for action, since it involves a real effort or striving [Leibniz] |
| 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. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Body and Force, Against the Cartesians [1702], p.252) | |
| 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). |
| 15666 | To understand language is to know how to use it to reach shared understandings [Habermas] |
| Full Idea: One simply would not know what it is to understand the meaning of a linguistic expression if one did not know how one could make use of it in order to reach understanding with someone about something. | |
| From: Jürgen Habermas (On the Pragmatics of Communications [1998], p.228), quoted by James Gordon Finlayson - Habermas Ch.3:34 | |
| A reaction: Not offered as a 'theory of meaning', and certainly plausible. Compare a hammer, though: a proper understanding is that it is used to exert a sharp force, but you can take in its structure and nature before you spot its usage. |
| 13194 | God's laws would be meaningless without internal powers for following them [Leibniz] |
| 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. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Body and Force, Against the Cartesians [1702], p.253) | |
| 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. |
| 13196 | All qualities of bodies reduce to forces [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: All qualities of bodies .....are in the end reduced [revoco] to forces. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Body and Force, Against the Cartesians [1702], p.256) | |
| A reaction: The dots conceal a long qualification, but he is essentially standing by this simple remark. If you substitute the word 'powers' for 'forces', I think that is just about right. |
| 13192 | Power is passive force, which is mass, and active force, which is entelechy or form [Leibniz] |
| 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. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Body and Force, Against the Cartesians [1702], p.252) | |
| 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. |