164 ideas
| 20866 | Wise men participate in politics, especially if it shows moral progress [Stoic school, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: The wise man participates in political life, especially in the sort of governments which show some moral progress. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 2.11b | |
| A reaction: Nowadays this would probably involve belonging to a political party which offered moral progress. |
| 20854 | Wise men are never astonished at things which other people take to be wonders [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: The wise man is astonished at none of the things which appear to be wonders, such as the caves of Charon or tidal ebbs or hot springs or fiery exhalations from the earth. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.123 | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to be correct. Wise people will have thought more extensively about what is possible, and when something they had never imagined occurs, they have the humility to recognise their own limitations. |
| 20815 | No wise man has yet been discovered [Stoic school, by Cicero] |
| Full Idea: According to the Stoics the wise man is hitherto undiscovered. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - On the Nature of the Gods ('De natura deorum') 2.133 | |
| A reaction: This could plausibly be axiomatic for the whole of philosophy, since the subject is the 'love of wisdom', and not its acquisition. The subject is the pursuit of wisdom, which would be pointless if we already had it. |
| 20806 | Stoic physics concerns cosmos, elements and causes (with six detailed divisions) [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics divide physics into topics on bodies, principles, elements, gods, limits, place and void. The general division is into three topics, concerning the cosmos, the elements and causal explanations. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.132 | |
| A reaction: Apart from the gods, not much has changed. |
| 20839 | Ethics studies impulse, good, passion, virtue, goals, value, action, appropriateness, encouragement [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoic divisions of ethics: on impulse, on good and bad things, on passions, on virtue, on the goal, on primary value, on actions, on appropriate actions, and on encouragements and discouragements to action. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.84 | |
| A reaction: A substantial part of this is covered by modern Action Theory, rather than by ethics. This describes later stoicism, from Chrysippus onwards. I like the study of 'appropriate actions', which could do with some modern analysis. |
| 20867 | True philosophising is not memorising ideas, but living by them [Stoic school, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: It is not the man who listens eagerly and memorises what philosophers say who is prepared for philosophising, but the man who is prepared to carry into action what is pronounced in philosophy and to live by it. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 2.11k | |
| A reaction: Hence stoicism was seen more as a way of life, and less as theorising. I aim to combine the two. There is a way of life which centres on theorising about life while living it. A life without enquiry is not worth living. |
| 21675 | Some facts are indispensable for an effect, and others actually necessitate the effect [Stoic school, by Cicero] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics declare that there is a difference whether a thing is of such a kind that something cannot be effected without it, or such that something must necessarily be effected by it. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - On Fate ('De fato') 16.36 | |
| A reaction: This points out that causal preconditions can be either necessary or sufficient for their effect. Because it is a very perceptive point, I surmise that it originated with Chrysippus. |
| 7001 | If you begin philosophy with language, you find yourself trapped in it [Heil] |
| Full Idea: If you start with language and try to work your way outwards, you will never get outside language. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This voices my pessimism about the linguistic approach to philosophy (and I don't just mean analysis of ordinary language), though I wonder if the career of (say) John Searle is a counterexample. |
| 20775 | Stoics study canons, criteria and definitions, in order to find the truth [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: They include the study of canons and criteria in order to discover the truth. This is to straighten out the differences among the presentations. And they also include the definitional part for the purposes of recognising the truth. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.42 | |
| A reaction: Might we call this categorisation, justifications and definitions? This is part of the study of logos, which comes first in the stoic view of philosophy. |
| 21393 | Stoics believed that rational capacity in man (logos) is embodied in the universe [Stoic school, by Long] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics believed the faculty in man which enables him to think, to plan and to speak - which they called 'logos' - is literally embodied in the universe at large. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by A.A. Long - Hellenistic Philosophy 4 Intro | |
| A reaction: This is the stage where logos becomes something dramatically more grand than the logos found in Plato's 'Theaetetus' (but see Heraclitus). It is what is meant by St John's 'In the beginning was the logos' (which is straightforward stoicism). |
| 21810 | The Stoics distinguished spoken logos from logos within the mind [Stoic school, by Plotinus] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics distinguished between logos prophorikos ('uttered reasoning') and logos endiathetos ('reason stored within'). | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Plotinus - The Enneads 5.1.03 n7 | |
| A reaction: These seems required, since logos is often the 'giving of an account', but it is also the rational principle that rules nature. |
| 7037 | Parsimony does not imply the world is simple, but that our theories should try to be [Heil] |
| Full Idea: A commitment to parsimony is not a commitment to a conception of the world as simple. The idea, rather, is that we should not complicate our theories about the world unnecessarily. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 13.6) | |
| A reaction: In other words, Ockham's Razor is about us, not about the world. It would be absurd to make the a priori assumption that the world has to be simple. Are we, though, creating bad theories by insisting that they should be simple? |
| 7038 | A theory with few fundamental principles might still posit a lot of entities [Heil] |
| Full Idea: It could well turn out that a simpler theory - a theory with fewer fundamental principles - posits more entities than a more complex competitor. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 13.6) | |
| A reaction: See also Idea 4036. The point here is that you can't simply translate Ockham as 'keep it simple', as there are different types of simplicity. The best theory will negotiate a balance between entities and principles. |
| 20776 | Dialectics is mastery of question and answer form [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Dialectical knowledge is about conversing correctly in speeches of question and answer form. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.42 | |
| A reaction: The whole of ancient Greek philosophy seems to be aimed at speaking well. |
| 20849 | Falsehoods corrupt a mind, producing passions and instability [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Corruption afflicts the intellect because of falsehoods, and from such a mind there arise many passions and causes of instability. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.110 | |
| A reaction: In Dec 2017 this ancient wisdom perfectly fits the current President of the USA. |
| 20823 | The truth bearers are said to be the signified, or the signifier, or the meaning of the signifier [Stoic school, by Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: Some located the true and the false in the thing signified (Dion himself), some located it in the utterance ('Dion'), and some in the motion of the intellect (what foreigners do not undestand when they hear 'Dion').. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Sextus Empiricus - Against the Mathematicians 8.11 | |
| A reaction: [View is attributed to Dogmatists, which also includes Epicureans] I love the definition of what we might call 'meaning' as what foreigners fail to understand when they hear it. I don't think the debate has got any further today. His example is one word. |
| 7004 | The view that truth making is entailment is misguided and misleading [Heil] |
| Full Idea: I argue that the widely held view that truth making is to be understood as entailment is misguided in principle and potentially misleading. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], Intro) | |
| A reaction: If reality was just one particle, what would entail the truths about it? Suppose something appears to be self-evident true about reality, but no one can think of any entailments to derive it? Do we assume a priori that they are possible? |
| 20778 | Stoics like syllogisms, for showing what is demonstrative, which corrects opinions [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say the study of syllogisms is extremely useful; for it indicates what is demonstrative, and this makes a big contribution toward correcting one's opinions; and orderliness and good memory indicate attentive comprehension. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.45 | |
| A reaction: The stoics also developed propositional logic. The main point is that they liked formal logic, which is not true of all the ancient schools. |
| 13520 | A 'tautology' must include connectives [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: 'For every number x, x = x' is not a tautology, because it includes no connectives. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 1.2) |
| 13524 | Deduction Theorem: T∪{P}|-Q, then T|-(P→Q), which justifies Conditional Proof [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: Deduction Theorem: If T ∪ {P} |- Q, then T |- (P → Q). This is the formal justification of the method of conditional proof (CPP). Its converse holds, and is essentially modus ponens. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 1.3) |
| 13522 | Universal Generalization: If we prove P(x) with no special assumptions, we can conclude ∀xP(x) [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: Universal Generalization: If we can prove P(x), only assuming what sort of object x is, we may conclude ∀xP(x) for the same x. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: This principle needs watching closely. If you pick one person in London, with no presuppositions, and it happens to be a woman, can you conclude that all the people in London are women? Fine in logic and mathematics, suspect in life. |
| 13521 | Universal Specification: ∀xP(x) implies P(t). True for all? Then true for an instance [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: Universal Specification: from ∀xP(x) we may conclude P(t), where t is an appropriate term. If something is true for all members of a domain, then it is true for some particular one that we specify. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 1.3) |
| 13523 | Existential Generalization (or 'proof by example'): if we can say P(t), then we can say something is P [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: Existential Generalization (or 'proof by example'): From P(t), where t is an appropriate term, we may conclude ∃xP(x). | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: It is amazing how often this vacuous-sounding principles finds itself being employed in discussions of ontology, but I don't quite understand why. |
| 13529 | Empty Set: ∃x∀y ¬(y∈x). The unique empty set exists [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: Empty Set Axiom: ∃x ∀y ¬ (y ∈ x). There is a set x which has no members (no y's). The empty set exists. There is a set with no members, and by extensionality this set is unique. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: A bit bewildering for novices. It says there is a box with nothing in it, or a pair of curly brackets with nothing between them. It seems to be the key idea in set theory, because it asserts the idea of a set over and above any possible members. |
| 13526 | Comprehension Axiom: if a collection is clearly specified, it is a set [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: The comprehension axiom says that any collection of objects that can be clearly specified can be considered to be a set. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: This is virtually tautological, since I presume that 'clearly specified' means pinning down exact which items are the members, which is what a set is (by extensionality). The naïve version is, of course, not so hot. |
| 7035 | God does not create the world, and then add the classes [Heil] |
| Full Idea: It is hard to see classes as an 'addition of being'; God does not create the world, and then add the classes. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 13.4 n6) | |
| A reaction: This seems right. We may be tempted into believing in the reality of classes when considering maths, but it seems utterly implausible when considering trees or cows. |
| 13534 | In first-order logic syntactic and semantic consequence (|- and |=) nicely coincide [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: One of the most appealing features of first-order logic is that the two 'turnstiles' (the syntactic single |-, and the semantic double |=), which are the two reasonable notions of logical consequence, actually coincide. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: In the excitement about the possibility of second-order logic, plural quantification etc., it seems easy to forget the virtues of the basic system that is the target of the rebellion. The issue is how much can be 'expressed' in first-order logic. |
| 13535 | First-order logic is weakly complete (valid sentences are provable); we can't prove every sentence or its negation [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: The 'completeness' of first order-logic does not mean that every sentence or its negation is provable in first-order logic. We have instead the weaker result that every valid sentence is provable. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: Peter Smith calls the stronger version 'negation completeness'. |
| 21400 | Stoics avoided universals by paraphrasing 'Man is...' as 'If something is a man, then it is...' [Stoic school, by Long] |
| Full Idea: Stoics reduced universals to thoughts or concepts, ...so in order to make universal statements which would not conflict with their metaphysics, they rephrased sentences of the form 'Man is...' as conditionals: 'If something is a man, then it is...' | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by A.A. Long - Hellenistic Philosophy 4.3.3 | |
| A reaction: [reference to Sextus, Adv Math 9.8] Predicate logic handles this with ease. It is something like the strategy of Ramsey sentences, for eliminating metaphysical properties. |
| 20788 | The contradictory of a contradictory is an affirmation [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: A double contradictory is the contradictory of a contradictory, for example, 'It s not the case that it is not day'. It posits that it is day. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.69 | |
| A reaction: Seems like common sense to the stoics, but verifying the double negative may be a different procedure to verifying the affirmative. 'Are you happy?' 'Well ….I'm not unhappy'. 'Is it day yet?' 'Well, it's not night'. |
| 13519 | Model theory uses sets to show that mathematical deduction fits mathematical truth [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: Model theory uses set theory to show that the theorem-proving power of the usual methods of deduction in mathematics corresponds perfectly to what must be true in actual mathematical structures. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], Pref) | |
| A reaction: That more or less says that model theory demonstrates the 'soundness' of mathematics (though normal arithmetic is famously not 'complete'). Of course, he says they 'correspond' to the truths, rather than entailing them. |
| 13531 | Model theory reveals the structures of mathematics [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: Model theory helps one to understand what it takes to specify a mathematical structure uniquely. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: Thus it is the development of model theory which has led to the 'structuralist' view of mathematics. |
| 13532 | Model theory 'structures' have a 'universe', some 'relations', some 'functions', and some 'constants' [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: A 'structure' in model theory has a non-empty set, the 'universe', as domain of variables, a subset for each 'relation', some 'functions', and 'constants'. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 5.2) |
| 13533 | First-order model theory rests on completeness, compactness, and the Löwenheim-Skolem-Tarski theorem [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: The three foundations of first-order model theory are the Completeness theorem, the Compactness theorem, and the Löwenheim-Skolem-Tarski theorem. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: On p.180 he notes that Compactness and LST make no mention of |- and are purely semantic, where Completeness shows the equivalence of |- and |=. All three fail for second-order logic (p.223). |
| 13537 | An 'isomorphism' is a bijection that preserves all structural components [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: An 'isomorphism' is a bijection between two sets that preserves all structural components. The interpretations of each constant symbol are mapped across, and functions map the relation and function symbols. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 5.4) |
| 13539 | The LST Theorem is a serious limitation of first-order logic [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: The Löwenheim-Skolem-Tarski theorem demonstrates a serious limitation of first-order logic, and is one of primary reasons for considering stronger logics. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 5.7) |
| 13538 | If a theory is complete, only a more powerful language can strengthen it [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: It is valuable to know that a theory is complete, because then we know it cannot be strengthened without passing to a more powerful language. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 5.5) |
| 13525 | Most deductive logic (unlike ordinary reasoning) is 'monotonic' - we don't retract after new givens [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: Deductive logic, including first-order logic and other types of logic used in mathematics, is 'monotonic'. This means that we never retract a theorem on the basis of new givens. If T|-φ and T⊆SW, then S|-φ. Ordinary reasoning is nonmonotonic. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: The classic example of nonmonotonic reasoning is the induction that 'all birds can fly', which is retracted when the bird turns out to be a penguin. He says nonmonotonic logic is a rich field in computer science. |
| 13530 | An ordinal is an equivalence class of well-orderings, or a transitive set whose members are transitive [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: Less theoretically, an ordinal is an equivalence class of well-orderings. Formally, we say a set is 'transitive' if every member of it is a subset of it, and an ordinal is a transitive set, all of whose members are transitive. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], 2.4) | |
| A reaction: He glosses 'transitive' as 'every member of a member of it is a member of it'. So it's membership all the way down. This is the von Neumann rather than the Zermelo approach (which is based on singletons). |
| 13518 | Modern mathematics has unified all of its objects within set theory [Wolf,RS] |
| Full Idea: One of the great achievements of modern mathematics has been the unification of its many types of objects. It began with showing geometric objects numerically or algebraically, and culminated with set theory representing all the normal objects. | |
| From: Robert S. Wolf (A Tour through Mathematical Logic [2005], Pref) | |
| A reaction: His use of the word 'object' begs all sorts of questions, if you are arriving from the street, where an object is something which can cause a bruise - but get used to it, because the word 'object' has been borrowed for new uses. |
| 7017 | The reductionist programme dispenses with levels of reality [Heil] |
| Full Idea: The reductionist programme dispenses with levels of reality. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 04.3) | |
| A reaction: Fodor, for example, claims that certain causal laws only operate at high levels of reality. I agree with Heil's idea - the notion that there are different realities around here that don't connect properly to one another is philosopher's madness. |
| 7003 | There are levels of organisation, complexity, description and explanation, but not of reality [Heil] |
| Full Idea: We should accept levels of organisation, levels of complexity, levels of description, and levels of explanation, but not the levels of reality favoured by many anti-reductionists. The world is then ontologically, but not analytically, reductive. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This sounds right to me. The crunch questions seem to be whether the boundaries at higher levels of organisation exist lower down, and whether the causal laws of the higher levels can be translated without remainder into lower level laws. |
| 7045 | Realism says some of our concepts 'cut nature at the joints' [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Realism is sometimes said to involve a commitment to the idea that certain of our concepts, those with respect to which we are realists, 'carve reality at the joints'. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 14.11) | |
| A reaction: Clearly not all concepts cut nature at the joints (e.g. we have concepts of things we know to be imaginary). Personally I am committed to this view of realism. I try very hard to use concepts that cut accurately; why shouldn't I sometimes succeed? |
| 7065 | Anti-realists who reduce reality to language must explain the existence of language [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Anti-realist philosophers, and those who hope to reduce metaphysics to (or replace it with) the philosophy of language, owe the rest of us an account of the ontology of language. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 20.6) | |
| A reaction: A nice turning-the-tables question. In all accounts of relativism, x is usually said to be relative to y. You haven't got proper relativism if you haven't relativised both x and y. But relativised them to what? Nietzsche's 'perspectivism' (Idea 4420)? |
| 21594 | Stoics applied bivalence to sorites situations, so everyone is either vicious or wholly virtuous [Stoic school, by Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics were prepared to apply bivalence to sorites reasoning, and swallow the consequences. ...For example, they denied that there are degrees of virtue, holding that one is either vicious or perfectly virtuous. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Timothy Williamson - Vagueness 1.2 | |
| A reaction: Williamson sympathises with this view, but the virtue example suggests to me that it is crazy. One of my objections to traditional religion is the sharp (and wickedly unjust) binary judgement between those who go to heaven and those who go to hell. |
| 20824 | Stoics have four primary categories: substrates, qualities, dispositions, relative dispositions [Stoic school, by Simplicius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics reduce the number of primary categories, some of them new. They divide them into four: substrates [underlying things], qualities [qualified things], dispositions [things in a certain state], and relative dispositions [with respect to something]. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Simplicius - On Aristotle's 'Categories' 1b25 8.66.32 | |
| A reaction: [a precious rare quote on stoic categories] Not sure of the status of the glosses in square brackets. I very much like 'dispositions' as a basic category. Substrates are elusive beasts. Is this list 'objects, qualities, dispositions, relations'? |
| 7020 | Concepts don't carve up the world, which has endless overlooked or ignored divisions [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Concepts do not 'carve up' the world; the world already contains endless divisions, most of which we remain oblivious to or ignore. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 05.3) | |
| A reaction: Concepts could still carve up the world, without ever aspiring to do a complete job. We carve up the aspects that interest us, but the majority of the carving is in response to natural divisions, not whimsical conventions. |
| 7007 | I think of properties as simultaneously dispositional and qualitative [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers who accept that properties are intrinsic features of objects regard them as pure powers, pure dispositionalities; I prefer to think of properties as simultaneously dispositional and qualitative. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I am uneasy about 'qualitative' as a category, and am inclined to reduce it to being a dispositional power to cause primary and secondary qualities in observers. Roughness is only a power, not a quality, if there are no observers. |
| 7015 | A predicate applies truly if it picks out a real property of objects [Heil] |
| Full Idea: When a predicate applies truly to an object, it does so in virtue of designating a property possessed by that object and by every object to which the predicate truly applies (or would apply). | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 03.3) | |
| A reaction: I am sympathetic to Heil's aim of shifting our attention from arbitrary predicates to natural properties, but it won't avoid Fodor's problem (Idea 7014) that all kinds of whimsical predicates will apply 'truly', but fail to pick out anything significant. |
| 7042 | A theory of universals says similarity is identity of parts; for modes, similarity is primitive [Heil] |
| Full Idea: The friend of universals has an account of similarity relations as relations of identity and partial identity; the friend of modes must regard similarity relations as primitive and irreducible. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 14.5) | |
| A reaction: We always seem to be able to ask 'in what respect' a similarity occurs. If similarity is 'primitive and irreducible', we should not be able to analyse and explain a similarity, yet we seem able to. I conclude that Heil is wrong. |
| 7023 | Powers or dispositions are usually seen as caused by lower-level qualities [Heil] |
| Full Idea: The modern default position on dispositionality is that powers or dispositions are higher-level properties objects possess by virtue of those objects' possession of lower-level qualitative (categorical) properties. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 09.2) | |
| A reaction: The new idea which is being floated by Heil, and which I prefer, is that dispositions or powers are basic. A 'quality' is a much more dubious entity than a power. |
| 7025 | Are a property's dispositions built in, or contingently added? [Heil] |
| Full Idea: There is a dispute over whether a property's dispositionality is built into the property or whether it is a contingent add-on. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 09.4) | |
| A reaction: Put that way, the idea that it is built in seems much more plausible. If it is an add-on, an explanation of why that disposition is added to that particular property seems required. If it is built in, it seems legitimate to accept it as a brute fact. |
| 7034 | Universals explain one-over-many relations, and similar qualities, and similar behaviour [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Universals can explain the one-over-many problem, and easily explain similarity relations between objects, and explain the similar behaviour of similar objects. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 13.1) | |
| A reaction: A useful summary. If you accept it, you seem to be faced with a choice between Plato (who has universals existing independently of particulars) and Armstrong (who makes them real, but existing only in particulars). |
| 7039 | How could you tell if the universals were missing from a world of instances? [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Imagine a pair of worlds, one in which there are the universals and their instances and one in which there are just the instances (a world of modes). How would the absence of universals make itself felt? | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 13.7) | |
| A reaction: A nice question for Plato, very much in the spirit of Aristotle's string of questions. Compare 'suppose the physics remained, but someone removed the laws'. Either chaos ensues, or you realise they were redundant. Same with Forms. |
| 20817 | Platonic Forms are just our thoughts [Stoic school, by Ps-Plutarch] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics said that the Ideas [Platonic forms] are our own thoughts. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Pseudo-Plutarch - On the Doctrine of the Philosophers 882a | |
| A reaction: That's Plato deftly kicked into touch. I'm with the Stoics. |
| 7009 | Similarity among modes will explain everthing universals were for [Heil] |
| Full Idea: My contention is that similarity among modes can do the job universals are conventionally postulated to do. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], Intro) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 4441 for Russell's nice objection to this view. The very process by which we observes similarities (as assess their degrees) needs to be explained by any adequate theory of properties or universals. |
| 7041 | Similar objects have similar properties; properties are directly similar [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Objects are similar by virtue of possessing similar properties; properties, in contrast, are not similar in virtue of anything. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 14.2) | |
| A reaction: I am not sure if I can understand the concept of similarity if there is no answer to the question 'In what respect?' I suppose David Hume is happy to take resemblance as given and basic, but it could be defined as 'sharing identical properties'. |
| 7032 | Objects join sets because of properties; the property is not bestowed by set membership [Heil] |
| Full Idea: The set of red objects is the set of objects possessing a property: being red. Objects are members of the set in virtue of possessing this property; they do not possess the property in virtue of belonging to the set. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 12.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a very effective denial of the claim that universals are sets. However, if 'being a Londoner' counts as a property, you can only have it by joining the London set. Being tall is more fundamental than being a Londoner. |
| 7008 | Trope theorists usually see objects as 'bundles' of tropes [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers identifying themselves as trope theorists have, by and large, accepted some form of the 'bundle theory' of objects: an object is a bundle of compresent tropes. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This view eliminates anything called 'matter' or 'substance' or a 'bare particular'. I think I agree with Heil that this doesn't give a coherent picture, as properties seem to be 'of' something, and bundles always raise the question of what unites them. |
| 7018 | Objects are substances, which are objects considered as the bearer of properties [Heil] |
| Full Idea: I think of objects as substances, and a substance is an object considered as a bearer of properties. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 04.2) | |
| A reaction: This is an area of philosophy I always find disconcerting, where an account of how we should see objects seems to have no connection at all to what physicists report about objects. 'Considered as' seems to make substances entirely conventional. |
| 6037 | Stoics say matter has qualities, and substance underlies it, with no form or qualities [Stoic school, by Chalcidius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics distinguish matter and substance; they say that matter is that which underlies those things which have qualities; however, the primary matter of all things or their most primeval foundation is substance, which is without qualities and unformed. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Chalcidius - Commentary on Plato's 'Timaeus' 290 | |
| A reaction: In this account, substance begins to sound like Kant's 'noumenon', which is a theoretical concept which has retreated beyond all experience. Stoics were under pressure to cover everything for which the Atomists offered explanations. |
| 7019 | Maybe there is only one substance, space-time or a quantum field [Heil] |
| Full Idea: It would seem distinctly possible that there is but a single substance: space-time or some all-encompassing quantum field. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 05.2) | |
| A reaction: This would at least meet my concern that philosophers' 'substances' don't seem to connect to what physicists talk about. I wonder if anyone knows what a 'quantum field' is? The clash between relativity and quantum theory is being alluded to. |
| 7046 | Rather than 'substance' I use 'objects', which have properties [Heil] |
| Full Idea: I prefer the more colloquial 'object' to the traditional term 'substance'. An object can be regarded as a possessor of properties: as something that is red, spherical and pungent, for instance. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 15.3) | |
| A reaction: A nice move, but it seems to beg the question of 'what is it that has the properties?' Objects and substances do two different jobs in our ontology. Heil is just refusing to discuss what it is that has properties. |
| 7047 | Statues and bronze lumps have discernible differences, so can't be identical [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Applications of the principle of the indiscernibility of identicals apparently obliges us to distinguish the statue and the lump of bronze making it up. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 16.3) | |
| A reaction: In other words, statues and lumps of bronze have different properties. It is a moot point, though, whether there are any discernible differences between that statue at time t and its constituting lump of bronze at time t. |
| 7048 | Do we reduce statues to bronze, or eliminate statues, or allow statues and bronze? [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Must we choose between reductionism (the statue is the lump of bronze), eliminativism (there are no statues, only statue-shaped lumps of bronze), and a commitment to coincident objects? | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 16.5) | |
| A reaction: (Heil goes on to offer his own view). Coincident objects sounds the least plausible view. Modern statues are only statues if we see them that way, but a tree is definitely a tree. Trenton Merricks is good on eliminativism. |
| 20826 | How is separateness possible, if separated things are always said to be united? [Alexander on Stoic school] |
| Full Idea: How could one avoid the inconsistency of saying that adjacent objects that can easily be separated are all the same united with each other, being coherent and never able o be separated from each other without division? | |
| From: comment on Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Alexander - On Mixture 2.2 | |
| A reaction: In general my sympathies are with Alexander on this. If you abandon all principles of unity apart from unrestricted mereological composition, you save yourself a lot of bother, but you abandon the most useful concepts in ontology. |
| 20825 | How is divisibility possible, if stoics say things remain united when they are divided? [Alexander on Stoic school] |
| Full Idea: How could the divisibility of bodies be preserved if division is the separation of what is united, and according to them all things stay united with each other, all the same even when they are divided? | |
| From: comment on Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Alexander - On Mixture 2.2 | |
| A reaction: Evidently the stoics were committed to unrestricted mereological composition (that any parts make a whole, no matter how scattered). Alexander points out that this makes the concept of 'division' of an entity meaningless. |
| 20872 | Stoics say wholes are more than parts, but entirely consist of parts [Stoic school, by Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say the wholes are not the same as their parts, for a human being is not his hand, nor are they other than their parts, for they do not exist without the parts. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Sextus Empiricus - Outlines of Pyrrhonism 3.170 | |
| A reaction: 'A human being is not his hand' is not much of a reason. Surely some holistic claim is needed here? The conflict of these two ideas was spotted by Plato. |
| 20790 | A proposition is possible if it is true when nothing stops it being true [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: That proposition is possible which admits of being true, if external factors do not prevent it from being true, for example, 'Diocles is alive'. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.75 | |
| A reaction: Well that's different. So every unprevented possibility will occur tomorrow. Any possibility that does not occur tomorrow must have been prevented in some way. Whatever does occur prevents innumerable other things from occurring. Your turn… |
| 20789 | Conditionals are false if the falsehood of the conclusion does not conflict with the antecedent [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: A conditional is true if the opposite of the conclusion conflicts with the antecedent, and false if it doesn't conflict. Thus 'If it is day, Dion is walking' is false, because 'Dion is not walking' does not conflict with 'It is day'. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.73 | |
| A reaction: For the two to conflict there must be some connection in subject matter, which is not the case if the mere falsehood of the conclusion (from a true premise) falsifies the conditional. This seems like a rather good account. |
| 20783 | Knowledge is a secure grasp of presentations which cannot be reversed by argument [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Knowledge itself, say the stoics, is either a secure grasp or a disposition in the reception of presentations not reversible by argument. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.47 | |
| A reaction: Helpful, but not enough. Fools hold secure grasps which cannot be refuted, as far as they are concerned. Consensus needed. Falsification? The truth-bearer is a 'presentation' (an appearance), which is different from modern accounts. |
| 20868 | Two sorts of opinion: either poorly grounded belief, or weak belief [Stoic school, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: There are two kinds of opinion: one is assent to something which is not graspable; the other is weak belief. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 2.11m | |
| A reaction: Strong belief usually qualifies as knowledge. The Greek 'opinion' and 'belief' don't exactly map onto the modern words. This idea covers both the subjective aspect of belief (its strength) and its objective aspect (its grounding). |
| 20784 | There are non-sensible presentations, which come to us through the intellect [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say some presentations are sensible, some non-sensible. Those received through the sense organs are sensible; non-sensible are those which come through the intellect, for example, presentations of incorporeals and other things grasped by reason. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.51 | |
| A reaction: The a priori used to be metaphysics (a world of truths), and in modern times is epistemology (a mode of justification), but here it is just a mode of experience, which is not, it seems, necessarily true. |
| 20803 | Stoics say we are born like a blank sheet of paper; the first concepts on it are sensations [Stoic school, by Ps-Plutarch] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics say when a human being is born, the leading part of his soul is like a sheet of paper ready for being written on. On this he inscribes every one of his conceptions. The first manner of writing on it is through the senses. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Pseudo-Plutarch - On the Doctrine of the Philosophers 900a | |
| A reaction: This may not be dogmatic empiricism, because later inscriptions on the sheet could be purely a priori. |
| 6025 | At birth the soul is a blank sheet ready to be written on [Stoic school, by Aetius] |
| Full Idea: When a man is born, the Stoics say, he has the commanding-part of his soul like a sheet of paper reading for writing upon; on this he inscribes each one of his conceptions. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Aetius - fragments/reports 4.11 | |
| A reaction: This appears to be the origin of the concept of the 'tabula rasa', which resurfaces in empirical thought, in Locke and elsewhere. Notice that 'he' inscribes on the paper, rather than raw experience doing the job. The natural light of reason can do it. |
| 7028 | If properties were qualities without dispositions, they would be undetectable [Heil] |
| Full Idea: A pure quality, a property altogether lacking in dispositionality, would be undetectable and would, in one obvious sense, make no difference to its possessor. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 11.4) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a very forceful and simple reason why we cannot view properties simply as qualities of things. Heil wants properties to be dispositions and qualities; personally I would vote for them just being dispositions or powers. |
| 7029 | Can we distinguish the way a property is from the property? [Heil] |
| Full Idea: It is not clear to me that we easily distinguish ways a property is from the property itself. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 11.6) | |
| A reaction: To defend properties as qualities, he is confusing ontology and epistemology. Presumably he means by 'ways a property is' what I would prefer to call 'ways a property seems to be'. I don't believe a smell is simply what it seems to be. |
| 7030 | Properties don't possess ways they are, because that just is the property [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Objects possess properties, but I am sceptical of the idea that properties possess properties; just as a property is a way some object is, a property of a property would be a way a property is, but that is just the property itself. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 12.1) | |
| A reaction: This is quite a good defence of the idea that properties are qualities as well as dispositions. However, if we make the qualities of properties into secondary qualities, and the dispositions into primary qualities, the absurdity melts away. |
| 7051 | Objects only have secondary qualities because they have primary qualities [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Secondary qualities are not distinct from primary qualities: an object's possession of a given secondary quality is a matter of its possession of certain complex primary qualities. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 17.3) | |
| A reaction: The bottom line here is that, if essentialism is right, colours are not properties at all (see Idea 5456). Heil wants to subsume secondary properties within primary properties. I think we should sharply distinguish them. |
| 20781 | Non-graspable presentations are from what doesn't exist, or are not clear and distinct [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: The non-graspable presentation is either not from an existing object or from an existing object but not in accordance with it; it is neither clear nor well stamped (i.e. distinct). | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.46 | |
| A reaction: This sounds exactly like Locke's account of secondary qualities, at least as interpreted by Peter Alexander. That is, they are genuine qualities of things, but misleading, in a way that primary qualities are not. |
| 7044 | Secondary qualities are just primary qualities considered in the light of their effect on us [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Secondary qualities are just ordinary properties - roughly, Locke's primary qualities - considered in the light of their effects on us. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 14.10) | |
| A reaction: Unconvincing. If they only acquire their ontological status as primary qualities if they have to be considered in relation to something (us), then that is not a primary quality. |
| 7052 | Colours aren't surface properties, because of radiant sources and the colour of the sky [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Theories that take colours to be properties of the surfaces of objects have difficulty accounting for a host of phenomena including coloured light emitted by radiant sources and so-called film colours (the colour of the sky, for instance). | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 17.4) | |
| A reaction: Personally I never thought that colours might be actual properties of surfaces, but it is nice to have spelled out a couple of instances that make it very implausible. Neon and sodium lights I take to be examples of the first case. |
| 7053 | Treating colour as light radiation has the implausible result that tomatoes are not red [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Theories that tie colours to features of light radiation deal with radiant and diffused colours, but yield implausible results for objects; tomatoes are not red, on such a view, but merely reflect red light. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 17.4) | |
| A reaction: I see absolutely no problem with the philosophical denial that tomatoes are actually red, while continuing to use 'red' of tomatoes in the normal way. When we analyse our processes of knowledge acquisition, we must give up 'common sense'. |
| 20792 | Stoic perception is a presentation to which one voluntarily assents [Stoic school, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics did not make sense-perception consist in presentation alone but made its substance depend on assent; for perception is an assent to a perceptual presentation, the assent being voluntary. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.49.25 | |
| A reaction: [Stobaeus cites Porphyry's De Anima] Thus you only perceive a hallucination if you do not realise that it is false. This is more subjective than I would want to be. If you only think you perceive, but you are wrong, then I say you don't perceive. |
| 20805 | All our concepts come from experience, directly, or by expansion, reduction or compounding [Stoic school, by Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: In general one can find nothing in our conceptions that is not known to oneself in direct experience. For it is grasped either by similarity to what is revealed in direct experience, or by expansion or reduction or compounding. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Sextus Empiricus - Against the Mathematicians 8.58 | |
| A reaction: Although the stoics allow for purely a priori knowledge, this quotation sounds comprehensively empirical. |
| 20782 | Dialectic is a virtue which contains other virtues [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Dialectic itself is necessary, and is a virtue which contains other virtues. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.46 | |
| A reaction: Presumable the virtues which are 'contained' are the whole panoply of other intellectual virtues. These will be virtues of intellectual character (Zagzebski), not virtues of processes (Sosa). |
| 1772 | For Stoics knowledge is an assertion which never deviates from the truth [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics define knowledge as an assertion or safe comprehension or habit, which, in the perception of what is seen, never deviates from the truth. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.1.25 | |
| A reaction: Sounds somewhere between Nozick's 'tracking the truth' and Goldman's 'reliable source'. If the world is a flux, then presumably it is right that knowledge should fluctuate too. |
| 7066 | If the world is just texts or social constructs, what are texts and social constructs? [Heil] |
| Full Idea: For those who regard the world as text or a social construct, are texts and social constructs real entities? If they are, what are they? | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 20.6) | |
| A reaction: A nice turn-the-tables question. The oldest attacks of all on scepticism and relativism consist of showing that the positions themselves rest on knowledge or truth. Nietzsche may be the best model for relativists. E.g. Idea 4420. |
| 20779 | Demonstration derives what is less clear from what is clear [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Demonstration is an argument which by means of things more clearly grasped concludes to something that is less clearly grasped. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.45 | |
| A reaction: In Aristotle demonstration seems to concern physical sciences, but this stoic account makes it sound like pure logic proof. This is why all logic tends to start from atomic sentences, because they are clearest. |
| 7021 | If the world is theory-dependent, the theories themselves can't be theory-dependent [Heil] |
| Full Idea: If the world is somehow theory-dependent, this implies, on pain of a regress, that theories are not theory-dependent. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 06.4) | |
| A reaction: I am not sure where this puts the ontology of theories, but this is a nice question, of a type which never seems to occur to your more simple-minded relativist. |
| 7026 | Science is sometimes said to classify powers, neglecting qualities [Heil] |
| Full Idea: The sciences are sometimes said to be in the business of identifying and classifying powers; the mass of an electron, its spin and charge, could be regarded as powers possessed by the electron; science is silent on an electron's qualities. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 11.2) | |
| A reaction: Heil raises the possibility that qualities are real, despite the silence of science; he wants colour to be a real quality. I like the simpler version of science. Qualities are the mental effects of powers; there exist substances, powers and effects. |
| 7060 | One form of explanation is by decomposition [Heil] |
| Full Idea: One form of explanation is by decomposition. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 19.8) | |
| A reaction: This is a fancy word for taking it apart, presumably to see how it works, which implies a functional explanation, rather than to see what it is made of, which seeks an ontological explanation. Simply 'decomposing' something wouldn't in itself explain. |
| 23251 | The Stoics think that soul in the narrow sense is nothing but reason [Stoic school, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics think that we are exclusively moved by reason, because the soul in a narrow sense is nothing but reason. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Michael Frede - Intro to 'Rationality in Greek Thought' p.8 | |
| A reaction: Presumably that means that desires and perceptions are not part of the 'narrow' soul. This is the culmination of Socratic intellectualism. |
| 20809 | Eight parts of the soul: five senses, seeds, speech and reason [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: The stoics say there are eight parts of the soul: the five senses, the spermatic principle is us, the vocal part, and the reasoning part. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.155 |
| 23267 | Stoics say the soul is a mixture of air and fire [Stoic school, by Galen] |
| Full Idea: The Stoic view is clear: the substance of soul comes about through some mixture of air and fire. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Galen - The soul's dependence on the body Kiv.4.784 | |
| A reaction: Most accounts seem to neglect the role of air (whatever that might be). |
| 23321 | Division of the soul divides a person, reducing responsibility for the nonrational part [Stoic school, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: According to the Stoics, the division of the soul threatens the unity of the person and obscures the responsibility we have for our supposedly nonrational desires. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Michael Frede - A Free Will 3 | |
| A reaction: Does this imply the concept of a 'person', if it places great store by unity? Disagreement over mental unity is one of the great threads running through philosophy. See Nietzsche on 'drives' for the rival view. |
| 7010 | Dispositionality provides the grounding for intentionality [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Dispositionality provides the grounding for intentionality. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This is a view with which I am sympathetic, though I am not sure if it explains anything. It would be necessary to identify a disposition of basic matter that could be built up into the disposition of a brain to think about things. |
| 7054 | Intentionality now has internalist (intrinsic to thinkers) and externalist (environment or community) views [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Nowadays philosophers concerned with intentionality divide into two camps. Internalists epitomise a traditional approach to thought, as intrinsic features of thinkers; externalists say it depends on contextual factors (environment or community). | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 18.2) | |
| A reaction: This is basic to understanding modern debates (those that grow out of Putnam's Twin Earth). Externalism is fashionable, but I am reluctant to shake off my quaint internalism. Start by separating strict and literal meaning from speaker's meaning. |
| 7011 | Qualia are not extra appendages, but intrinsic ingredients of material states and processes [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Properties of conscious experience, the so-called qualia, are not dangling appendages to material states and processes but intrinsic ingredients of those states and processes. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Personally I am inclined to the view that qualia are intrinsic to the processes and NOT to the 'states'. Heil must be right, though. I am sure qualia are not just epiphenomena - they are too useful. |
| 20785 | Our conceptions arise from experience, similarity, analogy, transposition, composition and opposition [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Some conceptions are conceived on the basis of direct experience, some on the basis of similarity, some on the basis of analogy, some on the basis of transposition, some on the basis of composition, and some on the basis of opposition. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.52 | |
| A reaction: These are examples of what I think of as 'philosophical faculties', probably not mentioned by either psychologists or neuro-scientists, but seen by philosophers as necessary preconditions for certain basic operations of thought. |
| 7502 | For Stoics the true self is defined by what I can be master of [Stoic school, by Foucault] |
| Full Idea: For the Stoics, the true self is defined only by what I can be master of. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Michel Foucault - On the Genealogy of Ethics | |
| A reaction: Interesting. This ties the self to the will - indeed, it almost identifies the self with the will. Why is the self the parts that are mastered, rather than the part that does the mastering? I master my shoes, but they are not me. |
| 23327 | Stoics expanded the idea of compulsion, and contracted what counts as one's own actions [Stoic school, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: With Stoics, and in its wake, we get an enormous expansion of what counts as being forced [biazesthai] or compelled or made to do something, and correspondingly an enormous contraction of what counts as an action of one's own. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Michael Frede - A Free Will 5 | |
| A reaction: The key idea seems to be setting the bar higher for being in control, which eventually leads to the idea of free will. Frede says this does not contract responsibility, because what controls us can be our own fault. |
| 7672 | The free will problem was invented by the Stoics [Stoic school, by Berlin] |
| Full Idea: The free-will problem was invented by the Stoics. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Isaiah Berlin - The Roots of Romanticism Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: Compare Ideas 6018 and 7814. There is no sign of the problem in Book 3 of Aristotle's Ethics. This is crucial, since I consider the problem to be totally bogus. |
| 23315 | The nearest to ancient determinism is Stoic fate, but that is controlled by a sympathetic God [Stoic school, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: The doctrine of antiquity nearest to physical determinism was the Stoic doctrine of fate. But their fate is the work of an agent, and is predetermined in part with regard to us, and even seems be contingent on anticipated human choices. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Michael Frede - A Free Will Intro | |
| A reaction: [compressed] The gist is that this is the most determinist the ancients ever get (e.g. the swerve of Epicurus), and it is not very determinist at all, in comparison with modern Laplacean physical determinism. Late antiquity determinism was stronger. |
| 7061 | Philosophers' zombies aim to show consciousness is over and above the physical world [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers' zombies (invented by Robert Kirk) differ from the zombies of folklore; they are intended to make clear the idea that consciousness is an addition of being, something 'over and above' the physical world. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 20.1 n1) | |
| A reaction: The famous defender of zombies is David Chalmers. You can't believe in zombies if you believe (as I do) that 'the physical entails the mental'. Could there be redness without something that is red? If consciousness is extra, what is conscious? |
| 7063 | Zombies are based on the idea that consciousness relates contingently to the physical [Heil] |
| Full Idea: The possibility of zombies is founded on the idea that consciousness is related contingently to physical states and processes. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 20.3) | |
| A reaction: The question is, how do you decide whether the relationship is contingent or necessary? Hence the interest in whether conceivability entails possibility. Kripke attacks the idea of contingent identity, pointing towards necessity, and away from zombies. |
| 7064 | Functionalists deny zombies, since identity of functional state means identity of mental state [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Functionalists deny that zombies are possible since states of mind (including conscious states) are purely functional states. If two agents are in the same functional state, regardless of qualitative difference, they are in the same mental state. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 20.5) | |
| A reaction: In its 'brief' form this idea begins to smell of tautology. Only the right sort of functional state would entail a mental state, and how else can that functional state be defined, apart from its leading to a mental state? |
| 7027 | Functionalists say objects can be the same in disposition but differ in quality [Heil] |
| Full Idea: A central tenet of functionalism is that objects can be dispositionally indiscernible but differ qualitatively as much as you please. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 11.3) | |
| A reaction: This refers to the multiple realisability of functions. Presumably we reconcile essentialism with the functionalist view by saying that dispositions result from combinations of qualities. A unique combination of qualities will necessitate a disposition. |
| 7062 | Functionalism cannot explain consciousness just by functional organisation [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Functionalism has been widely criticized on the grounds that it is implausible to think that functional organization alone could suffice for conscious experience. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 20.2) | |
| A reaction: He cites Block's 'Chinese Mind' as an example. The obvious reply is that you can't explain consciousness with a lump of meat, or with behaviour, or with an anomalous property, or even with a non-physical substance. |
| 7059 | The 'explanatory gap' is used to say consciousness is inexplicable, at least with current concepts [Heil] |
| Full Idea: The expression 'explanatory gap' was coined by Joseph Levine in 1983. McGinn and Chalmers have invoked it in defence of the view that consciousness is physically inexplicable, and Nagel that it is inexplicable given existing conceptual resources. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 19.8 n14) | |
| A reaction: Coining a few concepts isn't going to help, but discovering more about the brain might. With computer simulations we will 'see' more of the physical end of thought. Psychologists may break thought down into physically more manageable components. |
| 7012 | If a car is a higher-level entity, distinct from its parts, how could it ever do anything? [Heil] |
| Full Idea: If we regard a Volvo car as a higher-level entity with its own independent reality, something distinct from its constituents (arranged in particular ways and variously connected to other things), we render mysterious how Volvos could do anything at all. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 02.3) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me perhaps the key reason why we have to be reductionists. The so-called 'bridge laws' from mind to brain are not just needed to explain the mind, they are also essential to show how a mind would cause behaviour. |
| 7043 | Multiple realisability is actually one predicate applying to a diverse range of properties [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Cases of multiple realisability are typically cases in which some predicate ('is red', 'is in pain') applies to an object in virtue of that object's possession of any of a diverse range of properties. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 14.8) | |
| A reaction: If the properties are diverse, why does one predicate apply to them? I take it that in the case of the pain, the predicate is ambiguous in applying to the behaviour or the phenomenal property. Same behaviour is possible with many qualia. |
| 4014 | Stoics classify passions according to the opinion of good and bad which they imply [Stoic school, by Taylor,C] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics classified the passions according to the implicit (and erroneous) opinions about the good and bad that they contained. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Charles Taylor - Sources of the Self §8 | |
| A reaction: This doesn't sound very promising, since nearly all emotions can be put to either a good or a bad use |
| 23988 | There are four basic emotions: pleasure or delight, distress, appetite, and fear [Stoic school, by Cicero] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics named four basic emotions: pleasure or delight, distress, appetite, and fear | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by M. Tullius Cicero - Tusculan Disputations iv.13-15 | |
| A reaction: 'Distress' sounds too vague to do the job of explaining anything. Getting them down to four suggests an extreme desire to simplify such things. |
| 6594 | Stoics said that correct judgement needs an invincible criterion of truth [Stoic school, by Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: Stoic epistemologists held that to judge correctly, one must be in possession of a proper criterion of truth - a test that provides invincible evidence of the truth of some belief. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.4 | |
| A reaction: It seems that the Stoics were the first to 'set the bar too high', and inevitably drew the sceptical response that there is no such criterion. The polarisation might go further back, to Parmenides' One (known for certain by reason) and Heraclitus's Flux. |
| 7058 | Externalism is causal-historical, or social, or biological [Heil] |
| Full Idea: Some externalists focus on causal-historical connections, others emphasise social matters (especially thinkers' linguistic communities), still others focus on biological function. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 18.5 n6) | |
| A reaction: Helpful. The social view strikes me as the one to take most seriously (allowing for contextual views of justification, and for the social role of experts). The problem is to combine the social view with realism and a robust view of truth. |
| 7057 | Intentionality is based in dispositions, which are intrinsic to agents, suggesting internalism [Heil] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that intentionality is grounded in the dispositionalities of agents. Dispositions are intrinsic to agents, so this places me on the side of the internalists and against the externalists. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 18.4) | |
| A reaction: I think this is a key idea, and the right view. The key question is whether we see intentionality as active or passive. The externalist view seems to see the brain as a passive organ which the world manipulates. If the brain is active, what is it doing? |
| 20804 | Concepts are intellectual phantasms [Stoic school, by Ps-Plutarch] |
| Full Idea: A concept is a phantasm of the intellect of a rational animal. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Pseudo-Plutarch - On the Doctrine of the Philosophers 900c | |
| A reaction: No doubt they assume that the brutes are devoid of all concepts, but that makes it hard to explain their behaviour. |
| 7013 | The Picture Theory claims we can read reality from our ways of speaking about it [Heil] |
| Full Idea: The theory of language which I designate the 'Picture Theory' says that language pictures reality in roughly the sense that we can 'read off' features of reality from our ways of speaking about it. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 03.2) | |
| A reaction: Heil, quite rightly, attacks this view very strongly. I think of it as the great twentieth century philosophical heresy, that leads to shocking views like relativism and anti-realism. |
| 20786 | Predicates are incomplete 'lekta' [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics place predicates among the incomplete 'lekta'. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.63 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the modern Fregean logician's concept of a predicate. |
| 7002 | If propositions are states of affairs or sets of possible worlds, these lack truth values [Heil] |
| Full Idea: When pressed, philosophers will describe propositions as states of affairs or sets of possible worlds. But wait! Neither sets of possible worlds nor states of affairs - electrons being negatively charged, for instance - have truth values. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure that I see a problem. A pure proposition, expressed as, say "there is a giraffe on the roof" only acquires a truth value at the point where you assert it or believe it. There IS a possible world where there is a giraffe on the roof. |
| 23322 | Humans have rational impressions, which are conceptual, and are true or false [Stoic school, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: For Stoics, all human impressions differ from animals in that they are rational. …They are impressions that something is the case, and hence are true or false. Their formation involves the use of concepts, and are thus also called 'thoughts' [noeseis]. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Michael Frede - A Free Will 3 | |
| A reaction: This is a pretty accurate account of my notion of a 'proposition'. Since many animals make judgements, I take them to entertain non-verbal propositions. I assume there are also propositions which are more internal, and thus not 'impressions'. |
| 20777 | Rhetoric has three types, four modes, and four sections [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say rhetoric is tripartite. Part is deliberative, part forensic, part encomiastic. It is divided into invention, diction, organisation, and delivery. Rhetorical speech is divided into the introduction, exposition, counterargument and conclusion. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.42-3 | |
| A reaction: The last bit is quite a good guide for a philosophical paper. |
| 23323 | Earlier Stoics speak of assent, but not of choice, let alone of a will [Stoic school, by Frede,M] |
| Full Idea: Stoics [before Epictetus] have a notion of assent, and hence the appropriate notion of a willing, but we do not yet have a notion of a choice [prohairesis], let alone of a will. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Michael Frede - A Free Will 3 | |
| A reaction: The assent is just giving in to a desire, which is either rational or irrational. Choice implies a second-level thinking, of weighing the two desires. The will would then be a faculty which can do this (which seems to be the invention of Epictetus). |
| 23305 | Stoics said responsibility depends on rationality [Stoic school, by Sorabji] |
| Full Idea: It is the Stoics who made responsibility depend on rationality. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Richard Sorabji - Rationality 'Ethical' | |
| A reaction: Aristotle's account of responsibility in 'Ethics' needs a high degree of rationality, far beyond even a rational non-human animal. And no one thinks small children are responsible. |
| 1907 | Stoics use 'kalon' (beautiful) as a synonym for 'agathon' (good) [Bury on Stoic school] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics used 'kalon' [fair, i.e. beautiful] as a synonym for 'agathon' [good] | |
| From: comment on Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by R.G.Bury - notes on Sextus Empiricus 69:245 | |
| A reaction: I consider this to be a very important idea, which has been lost in modern moral philosophy - even in modern virtue theory. I've seen the suggestion that the best translation of 'kalon' is 'Wow!'. Imagine deeds that elicit 'Wow!'. |
| 22757 | Stoics say that folly alone is evil [Stoic school, by Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics say that folly alone is evil. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Sextus Empiricus - Against the Ethicists (one book) II.90 | |
| A reaction: This is Socrates' intellectualist view of weakness of will. Is the evil in the succumbing to a temptation, or in the intellectual error that leads to it? 'Folly' in English is stupid action, not just stupid belief. |
| 20846 | Prime values apply to the life in agreement; useful values apply to the natural life [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say one sort of value is a contribution to the life in agreement, which applies to every good. Another is an intermediate potential or usefulness (such as wealth or health) contributing to the life according to nature. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.105 | |
| A reaction: Assessing value by what it contributes to is interesting. There is also the appraiser's value. |
| 20847 | The appraiser's value is what is set by someone experienced in the facts [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Another sense of value is the appraiser's value, which someone experienced in the facts would set, as when one says that wheat is exchanged for barley with a mule thrown in. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.105 | |
| A reaction: No relativist nonsense here. Conventional values are set by experts, not by hoi polloi. |
| 20870 | The goal is to live consistently with the constitution of a human being [Stoic school, by Clement] |
| Full Idea: More recent stoics defined the goal as to live consistently with the constitution of a human being. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Clement - Stromates 2.21.129.6 | |
| A reaction: This sounds more Aristotelian than the classic stoics. The obvious problem is the nasty side of human nature. At least Aristotle adds something like 'when it is functioning well, particularly in social situations'. |
| 22238 | Stoics said health is an 'indifferent', but they still considered it preferable [Stoic school, by Pormann] |
| Full Idea: For the Stoics bodily health belongs in the 'indifferent [adiaphoron]' category: it does not matter if one is healthy. And yet, they created a subcategory of the 'preferable indifferent [adiaphoron proegmenon]', under which health falls. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Peter E. Pormann - Medical Conceptions of Health pre-Renaissance p.45 | |
| A reaction: You have to be pretty tough to consider ill-health as an indifferent. The only good may be virtue, but the platonic tradition says virtue is a sort of mental health. |
| 20861 | The health of the soul is a good blend of beliefs [Stoic school, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: The health of the soul is a good blend of the beliefs in the soul. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 2.05b04 | |
| A reaction: When I write my great book, this may well be its epigraph. I presume it means 'wisdom is the health of the soul'. |
| 3553 | Stoic morality says that one's own happiness will lead to impartiality [Stoic school, by Annas] |
| Full Idea: Stoics begin ethics with concern for one's own happiness, and end up claiming that in morality one will be indifferent between one's own interests and those of 'the remote Mysian'. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Julia Annas - The Morality of Happiness 2.7 | |
| A reaction: Makes sense, if pursuing our own happiness is doomed, and the best we can manage is indifference. |
| 20851 | Virtuous men do not feel sexual desire, which merely focuses on physical beauty [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Sexual love is a desire which does not afflict virtuous men, for it is an effort to gain love resulting from the appearance of physical beauty. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.113 | |
| A reaction: That is a surprising interpretation of the slogan 'live according to nature'. I would have thought it was factually incorrect, since many objects of human lust rank fairly low in the scale of beauty. Sex is a tough duty if you don't desire it. |
| 7499 | Stoicism was an elitist option to lead a beautiful life [Stoic school, by Foucault] |
| Full Idea: Stoicism offered a personal choice for a small elite. The reason for making this choice was the will to live a beautiful life, and to leave to others memories of a beautiful existence. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Michel Foucault - On the Genealogy of Ethics p.254 | |
| A reaction: This resurfaces in the late nineteenth century aesthetic movement ("Forget living - our servants can do that for us"). I see no reason why this should not be an ideal held up for all human beings, though pleasure-seekers will probably reject it. |
| 20843 | Final goods: confidence, prudence, freedom, enjoyment and no pain, good spirits, virtue [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say that confidence and prudence and freedom and enjoyment and good spirits and freedom from pain and every virtuous action are final (as opposed to instrumental) goods. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.96 | |
| A reaction: An interesting and unusual list. I've never seen 'confidence' or 'good spirits' mentioned. 'Freedom' is also unusual, but probably just means not being enslaved. |
| 22753 | Happiness for the Stoics was an equable flow of life [Stoic school, by Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: Happiness is defined by Zeno and Cleanthes and Chrysippus as 'an equable flow of life'. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Sextus Empiricus - Against the Ethicists (one book) II.30 | |
| A reaction: These are the great Stoics. Sounds a bit dull. The old Chinese curse: 'may you live in interesting times'. An equable life could be achieve by never attempting anything, and never getting involved in anything. I don't agree with this idea. |
| 20865 | Happiness is the end and goal, achieved by living virtuously, in agreement, and according to nature [Stoic school, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say that being happy is the goal for the sake of which everything else is done, for the sake of nothing else; and this consists in living according to virtue, in living in agreement, and (which is the same thing) in living according to nature. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 2.06e | |
| A reaction: The best summary I have found of the main stoic goal. Stoics are eudaimonists. The full stoic story must explain how virtue, agreement and nature fit together into a coherent whole. |
| 20840 | Stoics say pleasure is at most a byproduct of finding what is suitable for us [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say that pleasure is, if anything, a byproduct which supervenes when nature itself, on its own, seeks out and acquires what is suitable to the animal's constitution. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.86 | |
| A reaction: It would be nice if pleasure were just an indicator that you are successfully living according to nature. Human refinement of alcohol and opium have rather undermined that view (but note 'on its own'). Note also the parenthetical 'if anything'. |
| 20852 | Rapture is a breakdown of virtue [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Rapture is a breakdown of virtue. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.114 | |
| A reaction: I take rapture to be judged as the highest good by many romantics. Could rapture be confined and ring-fenced by virtue? Does rapture include great art? |
| 6895 | If humans are citizens of the world (not just a state) then virtue is all good human habits [Stoic school, by Mautner] |
| Full Idea: If, as in Stoic and later systems, human beings are regarded as citizens of the world and not only of a city-state, general justice will include all the habits and dispositions of a good human being. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Thomas Mautner - Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy p.289 | |
| A reaction: I like this a lot, because it addresses the key problem of virtue theory, the problem of 'the Nazi virtues'. The Nazis might be seen (by some) as 'good' Germans, but they were obviously appalling Europeans, and that is what matters. |
| 20848 | An appropriate action is one that can be defended, perhaps by its consistency. [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: An appropriate action, say the stoics, is that which, when done, admits of a reasonable defence, such as what is consistent in life, and this extends also to plants and animals. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.107 | |
| A reaction: I love [Zeno's] word 'appropriate' here, since that strikes me as greatly clarifying the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean. In fact I love the whole of this idea. Appropriate actions can be defended. Cf T.Scanlon. Consistency is a good defence. |
| 20844 | Honour is just, courageous, orderly or knowledgeable. It is praiseworthy, or functions well [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Four forms of the honourable: just, courageous, orderly, knowledgeable. The honourable means what makes it possessor praiseworthy; or what is naturally suited for its function; or what adorns its possessor, since we say only the wise man is honourable. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.100 | |
| A reaction: Thus we honour successful judges, soldiers, administrators and scholars. Oh, and footballers. Paul Macartney said 'show me someone famous, and I'll show you someone who is good at their job. |
| 4012 | The Stoics rejected entirely the high value that had been placed on contemplation [Stoic school, by Taylor,C] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics broke with both Plato and Aristotle by rejecting altogether the value of contemplation. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Charles Taylor - Sources of the Self §6.3 | |
| A reaction: Interesting. This affects the status of philosophy, and rejects the aspiration of humans to become like gods. |
| 5073 | Stoics do not despise external goods, but subject them to reason, and not to desire [Taylor,R on Stoic school] |
| Full Idea: Unlike the Cynics, the Stoics did not carry their indifference to conventional goods to outright scorn and rejection of them. They only insisted that such goods should not be the object of desire, since desire is something opposed to reason. | |
| From: comment on Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Richard Taylor - Virtue Ethics: an Introduction Ch.8 | |
| A reaction: The Stoic view would appear to be derived from Aristotle, who only wants external goods insofar as they can support the life of virtue (as in needing money to be generous). Perhaps the Cynics made the Stoics a bit more puritanical than Aristotle. |
| 20862 | Crafts like music and letters are virtuous conditions, and they accord with virtue [Stoic school, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: Stoics call 'practices' the love of music, letters, horses, hunting and crafts. They are not knowledge, but virtuous conditions, and they say that only the wise man is a music lover and a lover of letters. Crafts lead to what accords with virtue. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 2.05b11 | |
| A reaction: I like the distinction between virtue and 'virtuous conditions'. It might correspond to the eighteenth century idea of good taste, or the later idea of having a liberal education. |
| 5072 | For Stoics, obligations are determined by social role [Taylor,R on Stoic school] |
| Full Idea: In keeping with what was generally assumed in their culture, Stoics thought obligations are determined by role or function. | |
| From: comment on Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Richard Taylor - Virtue Ethics: an Introduction Ch.8 | |
| A reaction: We still recognise our obligations as partly in what-we-are-paid-to-do, but that is a contractual obligation. We also accept obligations arising from a family role, such as 'parent'. We are merely no longer impressed by traditional aristocratic hierarchy. |
| 21396 | Man is distinguished by knowing conditional truths, because impressions are connected [Stoic school, by Long] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say man differs from irrational animals because of internal speech ...and in virtue of impressions created by inference and combination. Because of this man grasps 'signal', of the form 'If this, then that', which follows from the nature of man. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by A.A. Long - Hellenistic Philosophy 4.3.1 | |
| A reaction: [In Sextus, Adv.Math 8.275-] This is unusual. The distinctive feature of humans is their ability to assert conditionals (because they see connections - or associations - among their impressions). Nice thought. |
| 1781 | Stoics favour a mixture of democracy, monarchy and aristocracy [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say the best political constitution is a mixed one, combined of democracy, and kingly power, and aristocracy. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.Ze.66 |
| 21384 | The Stoics saw the whole world as a city [Stoic school, by Long] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics conceived of the world itself as a kind of city. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by A.A. Long - Hellenistic Philosophy 1 | |
| A reaction: Interesting. Not the same as a cosmopolitan acceptance of a multitude of varied cultures. The most remote and unusual culture is seen as a distant suburb of our culture. |
| 20859 | The best government blends democracy, monarchy and aristocracy [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say the best form of government is a blend of democracy and monarchy and aristocracy. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.131 | |
| A reaction: Sounds like nineteenth century Britain, when democracy was more limited, and the aristocracy richer and more influential. Presumably they want rule by an elite, but with some democratic restraints. |
| 3561 | Stoics originated the concept of natural law, as agreed correct reasoning [Stoic school, by Annas] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics are the originators of one of the most influential concepts in political philosophy, that of natural law. …It is simply correct moral reasoning, thought of as being prescriptive. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Julia Annas - The Morality of Happiness 13.3 |
| 20858 | Suicide is reasonable, for one's country or friends, or because of very bad health [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: The wise man will commit suicide, for a good reason, both on behalf of his fatherland and on behalf of his friends, and if he should be in very severe pain or is mutilated or has an incurable disease. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.130 | |
| A reaction: Being in a state of despair or depression doesn't seem to figure on the list. Suicide for friends, but not for family? |
| 3046 | Stoics say a wise man will commit suicide if he has a good enough reason [Stoic school, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say that a wise man will very rationally take himself out of life, either for the sake of his country or of his friends, or if he suffers from bitter pain, mutilation or incurable disease. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 07.1.66 |
| 3556 | Stoic 'nature' is deterministic, physical and teleological [Stoic school, by Annas] |
| Full Idea: 'The nature of things' matters for the Stoics because they hold strong theses about the way things are: they are determinists, physicalists, teleologists. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Julia Annas - The Morality of Happiness Ch.5 |
| 22743 | Unlike Epicurus, Stoics distinguish the Whole from the All, with the latter including the void [Stoic school, by Sext.Empiricus] |
| Full Idea: The Stoic school say that the Whole is the Cosmos, whereas the All is the external void together with the Cosmos, so the Whole is limited but the All is unlimited. (Epicurus gives the two names indifferently to both). | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Sextus Empiricus - Against the Physicists (two books) I.332 | |
| A reaction: Epicurus needed the void as part of the Cosmos, into which the atoms can move. Presumably the Stoic void is infinite, but how far does the Stoic Cosmos extend? |
| 7016 | The standard view is that causal sequences are backed by laws, and between particular events [Heil] |
| Full Idea: The notion that every causal sequence if backed by a law, like the idea that causation is a relation among particular events, forms a part of philosophy's Humean heritage. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 04.3) | |
| A reaction: This nicely pinpoints a view that needs to come under attack. I take the view that there are no 'laws' - other than the regularities in behaviour that result from the interaction of essential dispositional properties. Essences don't need laws. |
| 13296 | The cosmos has two elements - passive matter, and active cause (or reason) which shapes it [Stoic school, by Seneca] |
| Full Idea: Stoics say there are two elements in the cosmos, cause and matter. Matter lies inert and inactive, a substance of unlimited potential, but destined to remain idle if no one sets it in motion; it is cause (the same as reason) that fashions matter. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Seneca the Younger - Letters from a Stoic 065 | |
| A reaction: [compressed] It take this to be anti-essentialist, because the point of a scientific essence is to be the source of the activities and structures of the matter. Seneca must think matter lacks essence, in order to be moulded like this. Note 'unlimited'. |
| 20827 | The cosmos is regularly consumed and reorganised by the primary fire [Stoic school, by Aristocles] |
| Full Idea: At certain fated times the entire cosmos goes up in flames and then is organised again. And the primary fire is like a kind of seed, containing the rational principles and cause of all things and events, past, present and future. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Aristocles - works | |
| A reaction: [in Eusebius] I wonder why the stoics thought this? Is it just spring cleaning? So is each cycle different? Does that mean that the primary fire was different at each seminal event? What made it different? Or is it eternal recurrence? |
| 7036 | The real natural properties are sparse, but there are many complex properties [Heil] |
| Full Idea: I am sympathetic to the idea that the real properties are 'sparse'; ...but if, in counting kinds of property, we include complex properties as well as simple properties, the image of sparseness evaporates. | |
| From: John Heil (From an Ontological Point of View [2003], 13.4) | |
| A reaction: This seems right to me, and invites the obvious question of which are the sparse real properties. Presumably we let the physicists tell us that, though Heil wants to include qualities like phenomenal colour, which physicists ignore. |
| 7815 | Early Stoics called the logos 'god', meaning not a being, but the principle of the universe [Stoic school] |
| Full Idea: Logos was also called 'god' or 'Zeus' by the early Stoics, but they did not think of this deity as a separate being, but as a principle of organization of things. As the soul is the principle of an individual life, so 'god' is the soul of the universe. | |
| From: Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]), quoted by A.C. Grayling - What is Good? Ch.3 | |
| A reaction: This sounds not too far from Spinoza's pantheism. Interestingly, the Stoics were making God more impersonal, and it is Jesus who reverts to the much more popularly appealing personal image. |
| 6038 | Stoics say god is matter, or an inseparable quality of it, or is the power within it [Stoic school, by Chalcidius] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics say that god is that which matter is or that god is the inseparable quality of matter and that he moves through matter just as semen moves through the genital organs. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Chalcidius - Commentary on Plato's 'Timaeus' 294 | |
| A reaction: This actually offers three different theories - of identity, of supervenience, and of omnipresence. It certainly seems close to pantheism. Such theories invite Ockham's Razor, which would shift talk to 'nature', and leave out 'god'. |
| 20829 | Virtuous souls endure till the end, foolish souls for a short time, animal souls not at all [Stoic school, by Eusebius] |
| Full Idea: They say the soul of the virtuous man lasts until the breakdown of everything into fire, but that of fools only for a certain length of time. But the souls of the imprudent and irrational animals ae destroyed with their bodies. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by Eusebius - Preparation for the Gospel 15.20.6-7 | |
| A reaction: We are half way to the Christian heaven as the reward for the good life. We just need to add hell…. |
| 6039 | Stoics say virtuous souls last till everything ends in fire, but foolish ones fade away [Stoic school, by ] |
| Full Idea: The Stoics say the soul of the virtuous man lasts until the breakdown of everything into fire, but that of fools only for a certain length of time. | |
| From: report of Stoic school (fragments/reports [c.200 BCE]) by - fr 39 | |
| A reaction: This implies the existence of divine justice (such as King Lear hoped for). It is a shame that rational philosophers just invent doctrines because they would be rather nice. It brings out the logical positivist in me. |