42 ideas
| 18290 | But what is the reasoning of the body, that it requires the wisdom you seek? [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom. For who knows for what purpose your body requires precisely your best wisdom? | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.05) | |
| A reaction: Lovely question. For years I've paid lip-service to wisdom as the rough aim of all philosophy. Not quite knowing what wisdom is doesn't bother me, but knowing why I want wisdom certainly does, especially after this idea. |
| 18303 | Reject wisdom that lacks laughter [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Let that wisdom be false to us that brought no laughter with it! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 3.12.23) |
| 18305 | To love truth, you must know how to lie [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Inability to lie is far from being love of truth. ....He who cannot lie does not know what truth is. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 4.13.9) |
| 14064 | If a statue is identical with the clay of which it is made, that identity is contingent [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Under certain conditions a clay statue is identical with the piece of clay of which it is made, and if this is so then the identity is contingent. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This initiated the modern debate about statues, and it is an attack on Kripke's claim that if two things are identical, then they are necessarily identical. Kripke seems right about Hesperus and Phosphorus, but not about the statue. |
| 14066 | A 'piece' of clay begins when its parts stick together, separately from other clay [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: A 'piece' of clay is a portion of clay which comes into existence when all of its parts come to be stuck to each other, and cease to be stuck to any clay which is not a part of the portion. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], I) | |
| A reaction: The sort of gormlessly elementary things that philosophers find themselves having to say, but this is a good basic assertion for a discussion of statue and clay, and I can't think of an objection to it. |
| 14067 | Clay and statue are two objects, which can be named and reasoned about [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: The piece of clay and the statue are 'objects' - that is to say, they can be designated with proper names, and the logic we ordinarily use will still apply. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], I) | |
| A reaction: An interesting indication of the way that 'object' is used in modern analytic philosophy, which may not be the way that it is used in ordinary English. The number 'seven', for example, seems to be an object by this criterion. |
| 14069 | We can only investigate the identity once we have designated it as 'statue' or as 'clay' [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: To ask meaningfully what that thing would be, we must designate it either as a statue or as a piece of clay. What that thing would be, apart from the way it is designated, is a question without meaning. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], III) | |
| A reaction: He obviously has a powerful point, but to suggest that we can only investigate a mysterious object once we have designated it as something sounds daft. It would ruin the fun of archaeology. |
| 14076 | Essentialism is the existence of a definite answer as to whether an entity fulfils a condition [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism for a class of entities is that for one entity and a condition which it fulfills, the question of whether it necessarily fulfills the condition has a definite answer apart from the way the entity is specified. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], VII) | |
| A reaction: Yet another definition of essentialism, but resting, as usual in modern discussions, entirely on the notion of necessity. Kit Fine's challenge is that if you investigate the source of the necessity, it turns out to be an essence. |
| 14077 | Essentialism for concreta is false, since they can come apart under two concepts [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism for the class of concrete things is false, since a statue necessarily fulfils a condition as 'Goliath', but only contingently fulfils it as 'lumpl'. On the other hand, essentialism for the class of individual concepts can be true. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], VII) | |
| A reaction: This rests on his definition of essentialism in Idea 14076. He rests his essentialism about concepts on an account given by Carnap ('Meaning and Necessity' §41). The essence of a statue and the essence of a lump of clay do seem distinct. |
| 14070 | A particular statue has sortal persistence conditions, so its origin defines it [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: A proper name like 'Goliath' denotes a thing in the actual world, and invokes a sortal with certain persistence criteria. Hence its origin makes a statue the statue that it is, and if statues in different worlds have the same beginning, they are the same. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], III) | |
| A reaction: Too neat. There are vague, ambiguous and duplicated origins. Persistence criteria can shift during the existence of a thing (like a club which changes its own constitution). In replicated statues, what is the status of the mould? |
| 14073 | Claims on contingent identity seem to violate Leibniz's Law [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: The most prominent objection to contingent identity (as in the case of the statue and its clay) is that it violates Leibniz's Law. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], V) | |
| A reaction: Depends what you mean by a property. The trickiest one would be that the statue has (right now) a disposition to be worth a lot, but the clay doesn't. But I don't think that is really a property of the statue. Properties are a muddle. |
| 14065 | Two identical things must share properties - including creation and destruction times [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: For two things to be strictly identical, they must have all properties in common. That means, among other things, that they must start to exist at the same time and cease to exist at the same time. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], I) | |
| A reaction: I don't accept that coming into existence at time t is a 'property' of a thing. Coincident objects give you the notion of 'existing as' something, which complicates the whole story. |
| 14074 | Leibniz's Law isn't just about substitutivity, because it must involve properties and relations [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: As a general law of substitutivity of identicals, Leibniz's Law is false. It is a law about properties and relations, that if two things are identical, they have the same properties and relations. It only works in contexts which attribute those. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], V) | |
| A reaction: I'm not convinced about relations, which are not intrinsic properties. Under different descriptions, the relations to human minds might differ. |
| 14072 | Possible worlds identity needs a sortal [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Identity across possible worlds makes sense only with respect to a sortal | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], IV) | |
| A reaction: See Gibbard's other ideas from this paper. I fear that the sortal invoked is too uncertain and slippery to do any useful job, and I can't see any principled difficulty with naming something before you can think of a sortal for it. |
| 14078 | Only concepts, not individuals, can be the same across possible worlds [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: It is meaningless to talk of the same concrete thing in different possible worlds, ...but it makes sense to speak of the same individual concept, which is just a function which assigns to each possible world in a set an individual in that world. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], VII) | |
| A reaction: A lovely bold response to the problem of transworld identity, but one which needs investigation. It sounds very promising to me. 'Aristotle' is a cocept, not a name. There is no separate category of 'names'. Wow. (Attach dispositions to concepts?). |
| 14079 | Kripke's semantics needs lots of intuitions about which properties are essential [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: To use Kripke's semantics, one needs extensive intuitions that certain properties are essential and others accidental. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], X) | |
| A reaction: As usual, we could substitute the word 'necessary' for 'essential' without changing his meaning. If we are always referring to 'our' Hubert Humphrey is speculations about him, then nearly all of his properties will be necessary ones. |
| 20757 | The powerful self behind your thoughts and feelings is your body [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Behind your thoughts and feelings stands a powerful commander, an unknown wise man - he is called a self. He lives in your body; he is your body. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], I.4), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 5 'Creature' | |
| A reaction: I find Nietzsche's view of the self very congenial, though I tend to see the self as certain central functions of the brain. The brain is enmeshed in the body (as in the location of pains). |
| 18289 | Forget the word 'I'; 'I' is performed by the intelligence of your body [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: You say 'I' and you are proud of this word. But greater than this - although you will not believe in it - is your body and its great intelligence, which does not say 'I' but performs 'I'. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.05) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure if I understand this, but I offer it as a candidate for the most profound idea ever articulated about personal identity. |
| 14071 | Naming a thing in the actual world also invokes some persistence criteria [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: The reference of a name in the actual world is fixed partly by invoking a set of persistence criteria which determine what thing it names. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], III) | |
| A reaction: This is offered as a modification to Kripke, to deal with the statue and clay. I fear that the 'persistence criteria' may be too vague, and too subject to possible change after the origin, to do the job required. |
| 18299 | The will is constantly frustrated by the past [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Powerless against that which has been done, the will is an angry spectator of all things past. The will cannot will backwards; that it cannot break time and time's desire - that is the will's most lonely affliction. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 2.20) |
| 18297 | We created meanings, to maintain ourselves [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Man first implanted values into things to maintain himself - he first created the meaning of things, a human meaning! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.16) | |
| A reaction: It is certainly hard to see anything resembling values or meaning in the cosmos, if you remove the human beings. We should expect an evolutionary grounding in their explanation. |
| 18293 | The noble man wants new virtues; the good man preserves what is old [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The noble man wants to create new things and a new virtue. The good man wants the old things and that the old things shall be preserved. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.09) | |
| A reaction: There is a limit to how many plausible virtues the noble men can come up with. We may already have run out. Are we going to have to re-run the Iliad? |
| 18301 | We only really love children and work [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: One loves from the very heart only one's child and one's work. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: Very Nietzchean (and masculine?) to cite one's work. Rachmaninov said he was 85% musician and 15% human being, so I guess he loved music from the very heart. |
| 18307 | I want my work, not happiness! [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Do I aspire after happiness? I aspire after my work! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 4.20) | |
| A reaction: I empathise with aspiring to do something, rather than be something. But what do we wish for our children? Happiness first, then achievement? |
| 18291 | Virtues can destroy one another, through jealousy [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Every virtue is jealous of the others, and jealousy is a terrible thing. Even virtues can be destroyed through jealousy. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.07) | |
| A reaction: How much more subtle and plausible than the picture of accumulating virtues, like medals! Zarathustra says it is best to have just one virtue. |
| 18287 | People now find both wealth and poverty too much of a burden [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Nobody grows rich or poor any more: both are too much of a burden. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: True. Most people I know are just puzzled by people who actually seem to want to be extremely wealthy. |
| 18295 | If you want friends, you must be a fighter [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: If you want a friend, you must be willing to wage war for him: and to wage war, you must be capable of being an enemy. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.15) |
| 18286 | The greatest experience possible is contempt for your own happiness, reason and virtue [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: What is the greatest thing you can experience? It is the hour of the great contempt. The hour in which even your happiness grows loathsome to you, and your reason and your virtue also. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: This would be a transient state for Nietzsche, in which you realise the hollowness of those traditional ideas, and begin to seek something else. |
| 18296 | An enduring people needs its own individual values [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: No people could live without evaluating; but if it wishes to maintain itself it must not evaluate as its neighbour evaluates. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.16) | |
| A reaction: Political philosophers say plenty about a 'people', but little about what unifies them, or about what keeps one people distinct from another. Most people's are proud of their local values. |
| 18294 | The state coldly claims that it is the people, but that is a lie [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The state is the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly it lies, too; and this lie creeps from its mouth: 'I, the state, am the people'. It is a lie! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.12) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as just as true even after everyone gets the vote. Rulers can't help gradually forgetting about the people. |
| 18304 | Saints want to live as they desire, or not to live at all [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: 'To live as I desire to live or not to live at all': that is what I want, that is what the most saintly man wants. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 4.09) | |
| A reaction: [spoken by Zarathustra] |
| 18300 | Whenever we have seen suffering, we have wanted the revenge of punishment [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: The spirit of revenge: my friends, that, up to now, has been mankind's chief concern; and where there was suffering, there was always supposed to be punishment. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 2.20) |
| 18302 | Man and woman are deeply strange to one another! [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: Who has fully conceived how strange man and woman are to one another! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 3.10.2) |
| 8430 | Causal statements are used to explain, to predict, to control, to attribute responsibility, and in theories [Kim] |
| Full Idea: The function of causal statements is 1) to explain events, 2) for predictive usefulness, 3) to help control events, 4) with agents, to attribute moral responsibility, 5) in physical theory. We should judge causal theories by how they account for these. | |
| From: Jaegwon Kim (Causes and Counterfactuals [1973], p.207) | |
| A reaction: He suggests that Lewis's counterfactual theory won't do well on this test. I think the first one is what matters. Philosophy aims to understand, and that is achieved through explanation. Regularity and counterfactual theories explain very little. |
| 8396 | Many counterfactuals have nothing to do with causation [Kim, by Tooley] |
| Full Idea: Kim has pointed out that there are a number of counterfactuals that have nothing to do with causation. If John marries Mary, then if John had not existed he would not have married Mary, but that is not the cause of their union. | |
| From: report of Jaegwon Kim (Causes and Counterfactuals [1973], 5.2) by Michael Tooley - Causation and Supervenience | |
| A reaction: One might not think that this mattered, but it leaves the problem of distinguishing between the causal counterfactuals and the rest (and you mustn't mention causation when you are doing it!). |
| 8429 | Counterfactuals can express four other relations between events, apart from causation [Kim] |
| Full Idea: Counterfactuals can express 'analytical' dependency, or the fact that one event is part of another, or an action done by doing another, or (most interestingly) an event can determine another without causally determining it. | |
| From: Jaegwon Kim (Causes and Counterfactuals [1973], p.205) | |
| A reaction: [Kim gives example of each case] Counterfactuals can even express a relation that involves no dependency. Or they might just involve redescription, as in 'If Scott were still alive, then the author of "Waverley" would be too'. |
| 8428 | Causation is not the only dependency relation expressed by counterfactuals [Kim] |
| Full Idea: The sort of dependency expressed by counterfactual relations is considerably broader than strictly causal dependency, and causal dependency is only one among the heterogeneous group of dependency relationships counterfactuals can express. | |
| From: Jaegwon Kim (Causes and Counterfactuals [1973], p.205) | |
| A reaction: In 'If pigs could fly, one and one still wouldn't make three' there isn't even a dependency. Kim has opened up lines of criticism which make the counterfactual analysis of causation look very implausible to me. |
| 4781 | Many counterfactual truths do not imply causation ('if yesterday wasn't Monday, it isn't Tuesday') [Kim, by Psillos] |
| Full Idea: Kim gives a range of examples of counterfactual dependence without causation, as: 'if yesterday wasn't Monday, today wouldn't be Tuesday', and 'if my sister had not given birth, I would not be an uncle'. | |
| From: report of Jaegwon Kim (Causes and Counterfactuals [1973]) by Stathis Psillos - Causation and Explanation §3.3 | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at David Lewis. The objection seems like commonsense. "If you blink, the cat gets it". Causal claims involve counterfactuals, but they are not definitive of what causation is. |
| 18292 | I can only believe in a God who can dance [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: I should believe only in a God who understood how to dance. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.08) |
| 18298 | Not being a god is insupportable, so there are no gods! [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Therefore there are no gods. ...For what would there to be create if gods - existed! | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 2.02) | |
| A reaction: [Zarathustra says this, not Nietzsche!] |
| 18288 | Heaven was invented by the sick and the dying [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: It was the sick and dying who despised the body and the earth and invented the things of heaven and the redeeming drops of blood. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 1.04) |
| 18306 | We don't want heaven; now that we are men, we want the kingdom of earth [Nietzsche] |
| Full Idea: We certainly do not want to enter into the kingdom of heaven: we have become men, so we want the kingdom of earth. | |
| From: Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spake Zarathustra [1884], 4.18.2) |