17 ideas
| 23664 | Powers are quite distinct and simple, and so cannot be defined [Reid] |
| Full Idea: Power is a thing so much of its own kind, and so simple in its nature, as to admit of no logical definition. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 1) | |
| A reaction: True. And this makes Powers ideally suited for the role of primitives in a metaphysics of nature. |
| 23669 | Thinkers say that matter has intrinsic powers, but is also passive and acted upon [Reid] |
| Full Idea: Those philosophers who attribute to matter the power of gravitation, and other active powers, teach us, at the same time, that matter is a substance altogether inert, and merely passive; …that those powers are impressed on it by some external cause. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 6) | |
| A reaction: This shows the dilemma of the period, when 'laws of nature' were imposed on passive matter by God, and yet gravity and magnetism appeared as inherent properties of matter. |
| 23666 | It is obvious that there could not be a power without a subject which possesses it [Reid] |
| Full Idea: It is evident that a power is a quality, and cannot exist without a subject to which it belongs. That power may exist without any being or subject to which that power may be attributed, is an absurdity, shocking to every man of common understanding. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is understandble in the 18th C, when free-floating powers were inconceivable, but now that we have fields and plasmas and whatnot, we can't rule out pure powers as basic. However, I incline to agree with Reid. Matter is active. |
| 19347 | Substance needs independence, unity, and stability (for individuation); also it is a subject, for predicates [Perkins] |
| Full Idea: For individuation, substance needs three properties: independence, to separate it from other things; unity, to call it one thing, rather than an aggregate; and permanence or stability over time. Its other role is as subject for predicates. | |
| From: Franklin Perkins (Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed [2007], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: Perkins is describing the Aristotelian view, which is taken up by Leibniz. 'Substance' is not a controversial idea, if we see that it only means that the world is full of 'things'. It is an unusual philosopher wholly totally denies that. |
| 23665 | Consciousness is the power of mind to know itself, and minds are grounded in powers [Reid] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is that power of the mind by which it has an immediate knowledge of its own operations. …Every operation of the mind is the exertion of some power of the mind. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 1) | |
| A reaction: I strongly favour this account of the mind and consciousness in terms of powers, because they give the best basis for their dynamic nature, and seem to be primitives which terminate all of our explanations. Science identifies the powers for us. |
| 23668 | Our own nature attributes free determinations to our own will [Reid] |
| Full Idea: Every man is led by nature to attribute to himself the free determination of his own will, and to believe those events to be in his power which depend upon his will. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 5) | |
| A reaction: I'm happy to say we are all responsible for those actions which are caused by the conscious decisions of our own will (our mental decision mechanisms), but personally I would drop the word 'free', which adds nothing. We are not 'ultimately' responsible. |
| 20051 | Reid said that agent causation is a unique type of causation [Reid, by Stout,R] |
| Full Idea: Thomas Reid said that an agent's causing something involves a fundamentally different kind of causation from inanimate causing. | |
| From: report of Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788]) by Rowland Stout - Action 4 'Agent' | |
| A reaction: I'm afraid the great philosopher of common sense got it wrong on this one. Introducing a new type of causation into our account of nature is crazy. |
| 3785 | You can't separate acts from the people performing them [Glover] |
| Full Idea: A mistake of consequentialists is to treat actions as though they can somehow be isolated from the people performing them. | |
| From: Jonathan Glover (Introductions to Utilitarianism and its Critics [1990], Pt Five) | |
| A reaction: I agree. The weather produces consequences. Morality is about people. Crocodiles, for example, are exempt. |
| 3786 | Aggression in defence may be beneficial but morally corrupting [Glover] |
| Full Idea: Forming the intention to use nuclear retaliation if attacked may both be the best way to avoid the catastrophe of nuclear war and at the same time be morally corrupting. | |
| From: Jonathan Glover (Introductions to Utilitarianism and its Critics [1990], Pt Five) | |
| A reaction: A famous moment in 2017 when Jeremy Corbyn refused to say he would be willing to use the weapons, if elected. It would be hard to sustain a determination to do it, and then reject it at the crucial moment. |
| 3784 | Duty prohibits some acts, whatever their consequences [Glover] |
| Full Idea: The deontological view is that some acts are absolutely prohibited, regardless of consequences. | |
| From: Jonathan Glover (Introductions to Utilitarianism and its Critics [1990], Pt Five) |
| 3782 | Satisfaction of desires is not at all the same as achieving happiness [Glover, by PG] |
| Full Idea: Objections to utilitarianism as maximisation of preferences: faded past desires or the desires of the dead; obtaining desires and happiness are different; fewer desires are easier to satisfy; pain is good if it can be removed. | |
| From: report of Jonathan Glover (Introductions to Utilitarianism and its Critics [1990], Pt Two) by PG - Db (ideas) |
| 3787 | Rule-utilitarianism is either act-utilitarianism, or not really utilitarian [Glover] |
| Full Idea: Rule-utilitarianism seems either to collapse into act-utilitarianism, or else it is only partly utilitarian. | |
| From: Jonathan Glover (Introductions to Utilitarianism and its Critics [1990], Pt Six) |
| 3783 | How can utilitarianism decide the ideal population size? [Glover] |
| Full Idea: There are deep problems for utilitarianism in trying to work out what the ideal population size would be. | |
| From: Jonathan Glover (Introductions to Utilitarianism and its Critics [1990], Pt Four) |
| 8383 | Day and night are constantly conjoined, but they don't cause one another [Reid, by Crane] |
| Full Idea: A famous example of Thomas Reid: day regularly follows night, and night regularly follows day. There is therefore a constant conjunction between night and day. But day does not cause night, nor does night cause day. | |
| From: report of Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788]) by Tim Crane - Causation 1.2.2 | |
| A reaction: Not a fatal objection to Hume, of course, because in the complex real world there are huge numbers of nested constant conjunctions. Night and the rotation of the Earth are conjoined. But how do you tell which constant conjunctions are causal? |
| 23667 | Regular events don't imply a cause, without an innate conviction of universal causation [Reid] |
| Full Idea: A train of events following one another ever so regularly, could never lead us to the notion of a cause, if we had not, from our constitution, a conviction of the necessity of a cause for every event. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 5) | |
| A reaction: Presumably a theist like Reid must assume that the actions of God are freely chosen, rather than necessities. It's hard to see why this principle should be innate in us, and hard to see why it must thereby be true. A bit Kantian, this idea. |
| 23670 | Scientists don't know the cause of magnetism, and only discover its regulations [Reid] |
| Full Idea: A Newtonian philosopher …confesses his ignorance of the true cause of magnetic motion, and thinks that his business, as a philosopher, is only to find from experiment the laws by which it is regulated in all cases. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 6) | |
| A reaction: Since there is a 'true cause', that implies that the laws don't actively 'regulate' the magnetism, but only describe its regularity, which I think is the correct view of laws. |
| 23671 | Laws are rules for effects, but these need a cause; rules of navigation don't navigate [Reid] |
| Full Idea: The laws of nature are the rules according to which the effects are produced; but there must be a cause which operates according to these rules. The rules of navigation never navigated a ship. | |
| From: Thomas Reid (Essays on Active Powers 1: Active power [1788], 6) | |
| A reaction: Very nice. No enquirer should be satisfied with merely discovering patterns; the point is to explain the patterns. |