38 ideas
| 7973 | There is no longer anything on which there is nothing to say [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: There is no longer anything on which there is nothing to say. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p. 17) | |
| A reaction: Compare Ideas 2937 and 6870. I'm not sure whether Baudrillard is referring to the limits of philosophy, or merely to social taboos. I like Ansell Pearson's view: we should attempt to discuss what appears to be undiscussable. |
| 19335 | Reasonings have a natural ordering in God's understanding, but only a temporal order in ours [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: All reasonings are eminent in God, and they preserve an order among themselves in his understanding as well as in ours; but for him this is just an order and a priority of nature, whereas for us there is a priority of time. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.192), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.III | |
| A reaction: This view is found in Frege, and seems to be the hallmark of rationalist philosophy. There is an apriori assumption that reality has a rational order, so that pure reason is a tool for grasping it. Lewis's 'mosaic' of experiences has no order. |
| 7975 | The task of philosophy is to unmask the illusion of objective reality [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: The task of philosophy is to unmask the illusion of objective reality - a trap that is, in a sense, laid for us by nature. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p. 40) | |
| A reaction: There is a vast gap between this and the Lockean view (Idea 7653) that philosophers are there to help reveal reality, probably via science. I retain the Enlightenment faith that there is a reality to be found. Baudrillard must be taken seriously, though. |
| 7986 | Drunken boat pilots are less likely to collide than clearly focused ones [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: Two boats on Lake Constance in dense fog are in less danger of colliding if their pilots are drunk than if they are attempting to master the situation. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.196) | |
| A reaction: Charming, but I think empirical research would prove it false. At least rational pilots know to keep to the right (?) when a shape looms through the fog. I prefer rational pilots, but then I am one of those sad people who admires the Enlightenment. |
| 7982 | Instead of thesis and antithesis leading to synthesis, they now cancel out, and the conflict is levelled [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: Gone is the dialectic, the play of thesis and antithesis resolving itself in synthesis. The opposing terms now cancel each other out in a levelling of all conflict. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.129) | |
| A reaction: This is from someone who approved of 9/11 (p.137 of this text), and seemed to welcome conflict. His idea, which has plausibility, is that the modern media have become a great warm bath that calmly absorbs every abrasive thrown into it. |
| 15544 | If what is actual might have been impossible, we need S4 modal logic [Armstrong, by Lewis] |
| Full Idea: Armstrong says what is actual (namely a certain roster of universals) might have been impossible. Hence his modal logic is S4, without the 'Brouwersche Axiom'. | |
| From: report of David M. Armstrong (A Theory of Universals [1978]) by David Lewis - Armstrong on combinatorial possibility 'The demand' | |
| A reaction: So p would imply possibly-not-possibly-p. |
| 7974 | Without God we faced reality: what do we face without reality? [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: The eclipse of God left us up against reality. Where will the eclipse of reality leave us? | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004]) | |
| A reaction: Baudrillard's distinctive view is that modern culture is thwarting all our attempts to grasp reality, which itself becomes a fiction. The answer is that you are left in the position of the ancient sceptics. Sextus Empiricus (see) is the saviour. |
| 7987 | Nothing is true, but everything is exact [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: Someone said: everything is true, nothing is exact. I would say the opposite: nothing is true, everything is exact. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.210) | |
| A reaction: In analytical terminology, this appears to say that vagueness is ontological, not epistemological, agreeing with Williamson and others. To say that 'nothing is true', though, just strikes me as silly. What does Baudrillard mean by 'true'? |
| 7024 | Properties are universals, which are always instantiated [Armstrong, by Heil] |
| Full Idea: Armstrong takes properties to be universals, and believes there are no 'uninstantiated' universals. | |
| From: report of David M. Armstrong (A Theory of Universals [1978]) by John Heil - From an Ontological Point of View §9.3 | |
| A reaction: At first glance this, like many theories of universals, seems to invite Ockham's Razor. If they are always instantiated, perhaps we should perhaps just try to talk about the instantiations (i.e. tropes), and skip the universal? |
| 9478 | Even if all properties are categorical, they may be denoted by dispositional predicates [Armstrong, by Bird] |
| Full Idea: Armstrong says all properties are categorical, but a dispositional predicate may denote such a property; the dispositional predicate denotes the categorical property in virtue of the dispositional role it happens, contingently, to play in this world. | |
| From: report of David M. Armstrong (A Theory of Universals [1978]) by Alexander Bird - Nature's Metaphysics 3.1 | |
| A reaction: I favour the fundamentality of the dispositional rather than the categorical. The world consists of powers, and we find ourselves amidst their categorical expressions. I could be persuaded otherwise, though! |
| 10729 | Universals explain resemblance and causal power [Armstrong, by Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Armstrong thinks universals play two roles, namely grounding objective resemblances and grounding causal powers. | |
| From: report of David M. Armstrong (A Theory of Universals [1978]) by Alex Oliver - The Metaphysics of Properties 11 | |
| A reaction: Personally I don't think universals explain anything at all. They just add another layer of confusion to a difficult problem. Oliver objects that this seems a priori, contrary to Armstrong's principle in Idea 10728. |
| 4031 | It doesn't follow that because there is a predicate there must therefore exist a property [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that we reject the notion that just because the predicate 'red' applies to an open class of particulars, therefore there must be a property, redness. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (A Theory of Universals [1978], p.8), quoted by DH Mellor / A Oliver - Introduction to 'Properties' §6 | |
| A reaction: At last someone sensible (an Australian) rebuts that absurd idea that our ontology is entirely a feature of our language |
| 10024 | The type-token distinction is the universal-particular distinction [Armstrong, by Hodes] |
| Full Idea: Armstrong conflates the type-token distinction with that between universals and particulars. | |
| From: report of David M. Armstrong (A Theory of Universals [1978], xiii,16/17) by Harold Hodes - Logicism and Ontological Commits. of Arithmetic 147 n23 | |
| A reaction: This seems quite reasonable, even if you don’t believe in the reality of universals. I'm beginning to think we should just use the term 'general' instead of 'universal'. 'Type' also seems to correspond to 'set', with the 'token' as the 'member'. |
| 10728 | A thing's self-identity can't be a universal, since we can know it a priori [Armstrong, by Oliver] |
| Full Idea: Armstrong says that if it can be proved a priori that a thing falls under a certain universal, then there is no such universal - and hence there is no universal of a thing being identical with itself. | |
| From: report of David M. Armstrong (A Theory of Universals [1978], II p.11) by Alex Oliver - The Metaphysics of Properties 11 | |
| A reaction: This is a distinctively Armstrongian view, based on his belief that universals must be instantiated, and must be discoverable a posteriori, as part of science. I'm baffled by self-identity, but I don't think this argument does the job. |
| 19367 | Saying we must will whatever we decide to will leads to an infinite regress [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: As for volition itself, to say that it is the object of free will is incorrect. We will to act, strictly speaking, and we do not will to will, else we should still say we will to have the will to will, and that would go on to infinity. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.151), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 4.IV | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as an elementary difficulty which most fans of free will appear to evade. Thoughts just arise in us, and some of them are volitions. We can say there is then a 'gap' (Searle) where we choose, but what happens in the gap? |
| 7978 | There is no need to involve the idea of free will to make choices about one's life [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: There is no need to involve the idea of free will to make choices about one's life. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p. 57) | |
| A reaction: Someone who believed that free will was metaphysically possible, but that they themselves lacked it, might feel paralysed, defeated or fatalistic about their decision-making. But that would be like falsely believing you were fatally ill. |
| 19351 | Perfections of soul subordinate the body, but imperfections of soul submit to the body [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Insofar as the soul has perfection ...God has accommodated the body to the soul, and has arranged beforehand that the body is impelled to execute its orders. Insofar as it is imperfect and confused, God accommodates soul to body, swayed by passions. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.159), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 3.IV | |
| A reaction: Perkins says this is the nearest Leibniz gets to the idea of interaction between body and soul. Perfection and confusion are on a continuum for Leibniz. With such speculations I always wonder how these things can be known. How perfect is my mind? |
| 19331 | Will is an inclination to pursue something good [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: One may say that 'will' consists in the inclination to do something in proportion to the good it contains. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.136), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.III | |
| A reaction: This emphasises that the will is faced with options, rather than generating the options. The context is a discussion of the nature of God's will. I think 'will' is a really useful concept, and dislike the Hobbesian rejection of will. |
| 7980 | In modern times, being useless is the essential aesthetic ingredient for an object [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: Since the nineteenth century it has been art's claim that it is useless...so it is enough to elevate any object to uselessness to turn it into a work of art...and obsolete useless objects automatically acquire an aesthetic aura. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.111) | |
| A reaction: Art is 'purposive without purpose' (Kant). An nice summary of the situation, and this seems to explain the role of Duchamp's famous urinal, up on the wall and rendered useless. The obvious rebellion, though, is Arts and Crafts. |
| 19346 | Most people facing death would happily re-live a similar life, with just a bit of variety [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I believe there would be few persons who, being at the point of death, were not content to take up life again, on condition of passing through the same amount of good and evil, provided that it were not the same kind. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.130), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.IV | |
| A reaction: Nice challenge. People who refuse the offer are not necessarily suicidal. He's probably right, but Leibniz doesn't recognise the factor of boredom. Look up the suicide note of the actor George Sanders! One life may be enough. |
| 19340 | Metaphysical evil is imperfection; physical evil is suffering; moral evil is sin [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Evil may be taken metaphysically, physically, and morally. Metaphysical evil consists in mere imperfection, physical evil is suffering, and moral evil is sin. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.136), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.IV | |
| A reaction: There seem to be plenty of imperfections in the world which don't look like evil. Or do you only declare it to be an imperfection because it seems to be evil (by some other standard)? Human evil comes from ignorance, so metaphysical explains moral. |
| 19366 | You can't assess moral actions without referring to the qualities of character that produce them [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: One is more worthy of praise when one owes the action to one's good qualities, and more culpable in proportion as one has been impelled by one's evil qualities; assessing actions without weighing the qualities whence they spring is to talk at random. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.426), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 4.IV | |
| A reaction: Mill tries to separate judgement of the agent from judgement of the consequences of the action, but I think Leibniz has spotted that just judging outcomes ceases to be a 'moral' judgement. |
| 7983 | Good versus evil has been banefully reduced to happiness versus misfortune [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: The ideal opposition between good and evil has been reduced to the idealogical oppositions between happiness and misfortune. The reduction of good to happiness is as baneful as that of evil to misfortune. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.139) | |
| A reaction: A nice example is the use in the media of the word 'tragic' for every misfortune. See the debate over the translation of the Greek 'eudaimonia'. 'Happiness' seems the wrong translation, if it leads to comments like Baudrillard's. |
| 7981 | Whole populations are terrorist threats to authorities, who unite against them [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: One way or another, populations themselves are a terrorist threat to the authorities...and by extension, we can hypothesize a coalition of all governments against all populations. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.120) | |
| A reaction: This may count as left-wing paranoia, but it is a striking thought, which plants an uneasy notion in the mind whenever we see two world leaders disappear behind closed doors for a chat. |
| 7976 | People like democracy because it means they can avoid power [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: If the people puts itself into the hands of the political class, it does so more to be rid of power than out of any desire for representation. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p. 54) | |
| A reaction: Very nice. If we are all in the grips of some biological 'will to power', that needn't be power over huge numbers of other people, merely power over our immediate lives. It can be expressed by building a wall. |
| 7977 | Only in the last 200 years have people demanded the democratic privilege of being individuals [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: Individuality is a recent phenomenon. It is only over the last two centuries that the populations of the civilized countries have demanded the democratic privilege of being individuals. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p. 55) | |
| A reaction: I think Aristotle's ethics and politics imply individuality, given that the only purpose of civic society seems to be to enable individuals to flourish and lead virtuous lives. Society is justified, for example, because it makes friendship possible. |
| 7979 | The arrival of the news media brought history to an end [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: The course of history came to an end with the entry on the scene of the news media. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p. 83) | |
| A reaction: The sort of remark for which Baudrillard became famous. It strikes me as nonsense. The view the British people got of the Battle of Trafalgar was even more distorted than their picture of the Battle of El Alamein. We know what he means, though. |
| 7984 | Suicide is ascribed to depression, with the originality of the act of will ignored [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: Suicide is always ascribed to depressive motivations with no account taken of an originality of, an original will to commit, the act itself. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.153) | |
| A reaction: Apparently research suggests that most suicides are clinically depressed, but even within the depression there is a startling act of will that goes beyond merely feeling bad. |
| 19326 | God must be intelligible, to select the actual world from the possibilities [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The cause of the world must be intelligent: for this existing world being contingent and an infinity of worlds being equally possible, with equal claim to existence, the cause of the world must have regarded all of these worlds to fix on one of them. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.127), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.II | |
| A reaction: A wonderfully Leibnizian way of putting what looks like the design argument. |
| 19327 | The intelligent cause must be unique and all-perfect, to handle all the interconnected possibilities [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The intelligent cause ought to be infinite in all ways, and absolutely perfect in power, in wisdom, and in goodness, since it relates to all that which is possible. Also, since all is connected together, there is no ground for admitting more than one. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.128), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.II | |
| A reaction: Notice that Leibniz's possible worlds seem to be all connected together, unlike David Lewis's worlds, which are discrete. Personally I suspect that all perfections will lead to contradiction, though Leibniz strongly argues against it. |
| 19344 | God prefers men to lions, but might not exterminate lions to save one man [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is certain that God sets greater store by a man than a lion; nevertheless it can hardly be said with certainty that God prefers a single man in all respects to the whole of lion-kind. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.189), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.IV | |
| A reaction: Lovely problems arise when you guess at God's values! We have the same problem. Would you kill a poacher who was wiping out the last remaining lions? How many lions would you kill to save a human? |
| 19330 | If justice is arbitrary, or fixed but not observed, or not human justice, this undermines God [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The three dogmas (1) that the nature of justice is arbitrary, (2) it is fixed, but not certain God will observe it, or (3) the justice we know is not that which God observes, destroy our confidence in the love of God. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.237), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.III | |
| A reaction: Leibniz proceeds to carefully refute these three responses to the dilemma about how justice relates to God. |
| 19325 | God is the first reason of things; our experiences are contingent, and contain no necessity [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: God is the first reason of things: all that we see and experience is contingent and nothing in them renders their existence necessary. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.127), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.II | |
| A reaction: Perkins presents this as the first step in one of Leibniz's arguments for God. They all seem to be variants of the ontological argument. [His 'Theodicy' is the Huggard translation, 1985] This resembles Aquinas's Third Way. |
| 7985 | Pascal says secular life is acceptable, but more fun with the hypothesis of God [Baudrillard] |
| Full Idea: What Pascal says, more or less, is that you can more or less content yourself with a secular existence and its advantages, but it's much more fun with the hypothesis of God. | |
| From: Jean Baudrillard (The Intelligence of Evil [2004], p.155) | |
| A reaction: Pascal will be a bit startled when he reads this, but it is a lovely way to present his idea. It suddenly sounds much more attractive. Life would be much more fun if we lived according to all sorts of startling beliefs. Relating your life to God is one. |
| 19329 | The laws of physics are wonderful evidence of an intelligent and free being [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: These admirable laws [of physics] are wonderful evidence of an intelligent and free being, as opposed to the system of absolute and brute necessity, advocated by Strato and Spinoza. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.332), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.II | |
| A reaction: Note the swipe at Spinoza. Leibniz defends the absolute necessities residing in God, but is too polite to call those 'brute', though personally I can't see the difference. But he says the laws arise from 'perfection and order', not from God's necessity. |
| 19437 | Prayers are useful, because God foresaw them in his great plan [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Not only cares and labours but also prayers are useful; God having had these prayers in view before he regulated things. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], Abridge III) | |
| A reaction: Hm. I'm struggling with this one. So I can't skip prayers today, because God has foreseen them and included them in his great plan? Hard to motivate yourself, like starting a game of chess after you've already been declared the winner. |
| 19337 | How can an all-good, wise and powerful being allow evil, sin and apparent injustice? [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There is this question of natural theology, how a sole Principle, all-good, all-wise and all-powerful, has been able to admit evil, and especially to permit sin, and how it could resolve to make the wicked often happy and the good unhappy? | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.098), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.IV | |
| A reaction: His answer is, roughly, that there is an unavoidable trade-off, which humans cannot fully understand. Personally I would say that if there is a God, the evidence for his benevolence towards humanity is not encouraging. |
| 19345 | Being confident of God's goodness, we disregard the apparent local evils in the visible world [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Being made confident by demonstrations of the goodness and the justice of God, we disregard the appearances of harshness and justice which we see in this small portion of his Kingdom that is exposed to our gaze. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (The Theodicy [1710], p.120), quoted by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.IV | |
| A reaction: Hm. If this locality is full of evils, and the rest of it is much better, how come we are stuck in this miserable corner of things? God is obliged to compromise, but did he select us to get the worst of it? |