5 ideas
| 23900 | Chance is compatible with necessity, and the two occur together [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Chance is not the contrary of necessity; it is not incompatible with necessity. On the contrary, it never appears except at the same time as necessity. | |
| From: Simone Weil (The Scientific Image [1941], p.175) | |
| A reaction: She illustrates it with the six terminating results of a die throw, and the innumerabe ways the throw can occur. This thought strikes me as relevant to discussions of free will. …But I'm not sure I fully understand it. |
| 18088 | Intentionality is the mark of dispositions, not of the mental [Place] |
| Full Idea: My thesis is that intentionality is the mark, not of the mental, but of the dispositional. | |
| From: Ullin T. Place (Intentionality and the Physical: reply to Mumford [1999], 1) | |
| A reaction: An idea with few friends, but I really like it, because it offers the prospect of a unified account of physical nature and the mind/brain. It seems reasonable to say my mind is essentially a bunch of dispositions. Mind is representations + dispositions. |
| 23899 | The secret of art is that beauty is a just blend of unity and its opposite [Weil] |
| Full Idea: A just blend of unity and that which opposes it is the condition of the beautiful, and it is the secret of art. | |
| From: Simone Weil (The Scientific Image [1941], p.169) | |
| A reaction: Rather sweeping, but the observation strikes me as fairly accurate. It seems to work for most novels, paintings and music, though more recent art may provide counterexamples. |
| 19739 | The maxim for suicide is committed to the value of life, and is thus contradictory [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If my maxim is to shorten my life if its continuance threatens more evil than pleasure ...it is seen that a system of nature by whose law the feeling intended to further life should actually destroy life would contradict itself, and could not subsist. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Lectures on Ethics [1780], 422:53) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] I take it this means that a potential suicide is assessing what is best for life, and is therefore implicitly committed to life. Not persuasive! Should we not terminate the life of a mass murderer in mid-crime? |
| 18089 | Dispositions are not general laws, but laws of the natures of individual entities [Place] |
| Full Idea: Dispositions are the substantive laws, not, as for Armstrong, of nature in general, but of the nature of individual entities whose dispositional properties they are. | |
| From: Ullin T. Place (Intentionality and the Physical: reply to Mumford [1999], 6) | |
| A reaction: [He notes that Nancy Cartwright 1989 agrees with him] I like this a lot. I tend to denegrate 'laws', because of their dubious ontological status, but this restores laws to the picture, in the place where they belong, in the stuff of the world. |