Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Homeostasis, Species and Higher Taxa' and 'Symposium'

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4 ideas

13. Knowledge Criteria / E. Relativism / 2. Knowledge as Convention

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

22. Metaethics / B. Value / 2. Values / h. Fine deeds

5845	Niceratus learnt the whole of Homer by heart, as a guide to goodness [Xenophon]
	Full Idea: Niceratus said that his father, because he was concerned to make him a good man, made him learn the whole works of Homer, and he could still repeat by heart the entire 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey'.
	From: Xenophon (Symposium [c.391 BCE], 3.5)
	A reaction: This clearly shows the status which Homer had in the teaching of morality in the time of Socrates, and it is precisely this acceptance of authority which he was challenging, in his attempts to analyse the true basis of virtue

26. Natural Theory / B. Natural Kinds / 4. Source of Kinds

15150	The properties of an electron can't be explained just as 'clustering' [Chakravartty on Boyd]
	Full Idea: Boyd's homeostatic mechanisms are not responsible for the co-instantiation of the mass, charge and spin of an electron.
	From: comment on Richard Boyd (Homeostasis, Species and Higher Taxa [1999]) by Anjan Chakravarrty - Inessential Aristotle: Powers without Essences 3
	A reaction: I would have thought that no one has the foggiest idea (unless I have missed something?) about why electrons have those three properties. What is it about electrons that makes them do that? Explanations always run out somewhere. Substratum!

15149	Properties cluster together, either because of intrinsic relations, or because of an underlying process [Boyd, by Chakravartty]
	Full Idea: Boyd analyses 'sociability' between properties in terms of 'homeostasis', as causal relations between properties that favour clustering, or underlying processes that favour coinstantiation, or both.
	From: report of Richard Boyd (Homeostasis, Species and Higher Taxa [1999]) by Anjan Chakravarrty - Inessential Aristotle: Powers without Essences 3
	A reaction: Chakravarty criticises this claim, by Boyd is clearly onto something. If, like me, you think natural kinds are overrated, you have to like his view.