142 ideas
| 5278 | Philosophy is no more than abstractions concerning observations of human historical development [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: When reality is depicted, philosophy as an independent branch of knowledge loses its medium of existence. At best it is a summing up of general results, abstractions which arise from observation of the historical development of man. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as nonsense, based on a bogus Hegelian notion that history is following some sort of pattern, and that mental reality is fixed by physical conditions. The philosophy of mathematics, for one, won't fit into this definition. |
| 13734 | Modern Quinean metaphysics is about what exists, but Aristotelian metaphysics asks about grounding [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: On the now dominant Quinean view, metaphysics is about what there is (such as properties, meanings and numbers). I will argue for the revival of a more traditional Aristotelian view, on which metaphysics is about what grounds what. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (On What Grounds What [2009], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I find that an enormously helpful distinction, and support the Aristotelian view. Schaffer's general line is that what exists is fairly uncontroversial and dull, but the interesting truths about the world emerge when we grasp its structure. |
| 13751 | If you tore the metaphysics out of philosophy, the whole enterprise would collapse [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: Traditional metaphysics is so tightly woven into the fabric of philosophy that it cannot be torn out without the whole tapestry unravelling. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (On What Grounds What [2009], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: I often wonder why the opponents of metaphysics still continue to do philosophy. I don't see how you address questions of ethics, or philosophy of mathematics (etc) without coming up against highly general and abstract over-questions. |
| 12997 | Analysis is the art of finding the middle term [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The art of finding intermediate terms (the 'middle term') is the art of 'analysis'. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.02) | |
| A reaction: This proposal is straight out of Aristotle's 'Posterior Analytics'. Nowadays we would say there was much more to analysis, the finding of necessary and sufficient conditions being the most obvious way of putting it. |
| 13009 | A reason is a known truth which leads to assent to some further truth [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: A reason is a known truth whose connection with some less well-known truth leads us to give our assent to the latter. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.17) | |
| A reaction: This is plainly false, because you can have a reason for believing something, but still not give your assent to it, presumably because of counter-reasons. And a false belief could also be a reason, even to believe a truth. Tut tut. |
| 12963 | Opposing reason is opposing truth, since reason is a chain of truths [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To speak against reason is to speak against truth, for reason is a chain of truths. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: Truth has a talismanic quality here (which it didn't always have). This is a lovely slogan for defenders of the Enlightenment. It forces modern critics of the Enlightenment (Adorno etc) to launch an attack on truth, which is a doomed line. |
| 19360 | General principles, even if unconscious, are indispensable for thinking [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: General principles enter into our thoughts, serving as their inner core and their mortar. Even if we give no thought to them, they are necessary for thought, as muscles and tendons are for walking. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01.20) | |
| A reaction: Famously, Leibniz identified sufficient reason and non-contradiction as the two foundational principles. Modern logicians seem less keen on this idea, but then they have less interest in how we actually think. |
| 13743 | We should not multiply basic entities, but we can have as many derivative entities as we like [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: Occam's Razor should only be understood to concern substances: do not multiply basic entities without necessity. There is no problem with the multiplication of derivative entities - they are an 'ontological free lunch'. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (On What Grounds What [2009], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: The phrase 'ontological free lunch' comes from Armstrong. This is probably what Occam meant. A few extra specks of dust, or even a few more numbers (thank you, Cantor!) don't seem to challenge the principle. |
| 12983 | A nominal definition is of the qualities, but the real definition is of the essential inner structure [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The essence of gold is what constitutes it and gives it the sensible qualities which let us recognize it and which make its nominal definition; but if we could explain this structure or inner constitution we would possess the real, causal definition. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: This is the view which I am championing, particularly in the role of explanation in the whole game. Explanation and understanding are the hallmarks of the discovery of a real essence. However, a falsehood may explain things well. Tricky. |
| 12982 | One essence can be expressed by several definitions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Although a thing has only one essence, this can be expressed by several definitions. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 12976 and Idea 12977 for a view which seems to conflict with this. He seemed to imply that once you identify the essence, the definitions converge, with multiple definitions being symptomatic of imperfect ideas of things. |
| 12976 | If our ideas of a thing are imperfect, the thing can have several unconnected definitions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The result of having an imperfect idea of something is that the same subject admits of several mutually independent definitions: we shall sometimes be unable to derive one from another, or see in advance that they must belong to a single subject. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.31) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 12975 for imperfect ideas of things. Obviously the idea is that perfect knowledge will converge on a single definition, which will pinpoint the essence of a thing, and then all explanations will flow. A nice addition to the Aristotelian view. |
| 12984 | Real definitions, unlike nominal definitions, display possibilities [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The real definition displays the possibility of the definiendum, and the nominal definition does not. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: This, I take it, is because the real definition indicates the actual powers of the thing, and not just the superficial characteristics. Is knowledge of powers identical with knowledge of possibilities? |
| 12980 | Genus and differentia might be swapped, and 'rational animal' become 'animable rational' [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The genus can very often be turned into the differentia, ...so that in place of saying that man is a 'reasonable animal' we could, if language permitted, say that man is an 'animable rational', a rational substance with animal nature. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: This is a very telling point which rather undermines any dogmatic approach to what Aristotle says about these sorts of definitions. I don't find this account of definitions very helpful anyway. Leibniz links it to the order of cataloguing. |
| 13000 | Truth is correspondence between mental propositions and what they are about [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Let us be content with looking for truth in the correspondence between the propositions which are in the mind and the things which they are about. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.05) | |
| A reaction: In an age when the nature of truth was hardly debated, and theories such as coherence and pragmatism, never mind semantic accounts, were unthought of, it is interesting to see that correspondence seems obvious to Leibniz. Correct! |
| 12992 | Logic teaches us how to order and connect our thoughts [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Logic teaches us how to order and connect our thoughts. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.10) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz had a higher opinion of logic than contemporaries like Locke. The question is whether logic can actually teach us better order than we could otherwise manage, or whether it just describes what most thinkers do. |
| 10056 | At bottom eternal truths are all conditional [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: At bottom eternal truths are all conditional, saying 'granted such a thing, such another thing is'. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.11.14), quoted by Alan Musgrave - Logicism Revisited §4 | |
| A reaction: Thus showing Leibniz to have sympathy with the if-thenist view. He cites geometry as his illustration. |
| 12974 | People who can't apply names usually don't understand the thing to which it applies [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Someone who goes wrong in relating an idea to a name will usually go wrong about the thing he wants the name to stand for. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.29) | |
| A reaction: This seems to give tentative support to a Millian account of names, whose only content is just the thing which is named. Leibniz's observation certainly seems to be right. |
| 13002 | It is always good to reduce the number of axioms [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To reduce the number of axioms is always something gained. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.06) | |
| A reaction: This is rather revealing about the nature of axioms. They don't have any huge metaphysical status - in fact one might say that their status is epistemological, or even pedagogic. They enable us to get out minds round things. |
| 13008 | Geometry, unlike sensation, lets us glimpse eternal truths and their necessity [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: What I value most in geometry, considered as a contemplative study, is its letting us glimpse the true source of eternal truths and of the way in which we can come to grasp their necessity, which is something confused sensory images cannot reveal. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.12) | |
| A reaction: This is strikingly straight out of Plato. We should not underestimate this idea, though nowadays it is with us, but with geometry replaced by mathematical logic. |
| 12956 | Only whole numbers are multitudes of units [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The definition of 'number' as a multitude of units is appropriate only for whole numbers. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.15) | |
| A reaction: One can also define rational numbers by making use of units, but the strategy breaks down with irrational numbers like root-2 and pi. I still say the concept of a unit is the basis of numbers. Without whole numbers, we wouldn't call the real 'numbers'. |
| 12937 | We shouldn't just accept Euclid's axioms, but try to demonstrate them [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Far from approving the acceptance of doubtful principles, I want to see an attempt to demonstrate even Euclid's axioms, as some of the ancients tried to do. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: This is the old idea of axioms, as a bunch of basic self-evident truths, rather than the modern idea of an economical set of propositions from which to make deductions. Demonstration has to stop somewhere. |
| 13741 | If 'there are red roses' implies 'there are roses', then 'there are prime numbers' implies 'there are numbers' [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: We can automatically infer 'there are roses' from 'there are red roses' (with no shift in the meaning of 'roses'). Likewise one can automatically infer 'there are numbers' from 'there are prime numbers'. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (On What Grounds What [2009], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: He similarly observes that the atheist's 'God is a fictional character' implies 'there are fictional characters'. Schaffer is not committing to a strong platonism with his claim - merely that the existence of numbers is hardly worth disputing. |
| 12932 | The idea of being must come from our own existence [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I would like to know how we could have the idea of being if we did not, as beings ourselves, find being within us. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: I could envisage a creature with an entirely 'externa' mind, that just focused on environment, and took its own place in it unthinkingly for granted. I suppose he's right, though. |
| 13748 | Grounding is unanalysable and primitive, and is the basic structuring concept in metaphysics [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: Grounding should be taken as primitive, as per the neo-Aristotelian approach. Grounding is an unanalyzable but needed notion - it is the primitive structuring conception of metaphysics. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (On What Grounds What [2009], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: [he cites K.Fine 1991] I find that this simple claim clarifies the discussions of Kit Fine, where you are not always quite sure what the game is. I agree fully with it. It makes metaphysics interesting, where cataloguing entities is boring. |
| 13747 | Supervenience is just modal correlation [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience is mere modal correlation. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (On What Grounds What [2009], 2.2) |
| 12966 | Objects of ideas can be divided into abstract and concrete, and then further subdivided [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Divide terms, objects of ideas, into abstract and concrete, then the abstract into absolute and relational, the absolute into attributes and modifications, and those two into simple and composite; the concrete are substances and their substantial things. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.22) | |
| A reaction: Make your tree from this: ABSTRACT{absolute[attributes(simple)(composite)][modifications(simple)(composite)],relations}CONCRETE{[substance][substantial form]} |
| 13744 | The cosmos is the only fundamental entity, from which all else exists by abstraction [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: My preferred view is that there is only one fundamental entity - the whole concrete cosmos - from which all else exists by abstraction. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (On What Grounds What [2009], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This looks to me like weak anti-realism - that there are no natural 'joints' in nature - but I don't think Schaffer intends that. I take the joints to be fundamentals, which necessitates that the cosmos has parts. His 'abstraction' is clearly a process. |
| 5287 | Philosophical problems are resolved into empirical facts [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: Every profound philosophical problem is resolved quite simply into an empirical fact. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.B) | |
| A reaction: This shows that empirical accounts of metaphysics are not just a branch of British empiricism, but are a basic fact of any materialist view of the world. The influence of David Hume, however, hovers behind this Marxist doctrine. |
| 12993 | Have five categories - substance, quantity, quality, action/passion, relation - and their combinations [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The scheme of categories is very useful, and it might be that all that is needed are five general headings for beings - namely substance, quantity, quality, action or passion, and relation - with any formed by composition from those. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.10) | |
| A reaction: 'Action or passion' as a single category sounds intriguing. He is very keen on active force in the world of physical objects, which presumably falls into this category. His plan sounds, initially, as good as any I have heard. |
| 12989 | Our true divisions of nature match reality, but are probably incomplete [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It can be said that whatever we truthfully distinguish or compare is also distinguished or made alike by nature, although nature has distinctions and comparisons which are unknown to us and which may be better than ours. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.06) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to be correct, though it is more like the credo of the sensible realist than it is like any sort of argument. |
| 13739 | Maybe categories are just the different ways that things depend on basic substances [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: Maybe the categories are determined by the different grounding relations, ..so that categories just are the ways things depend on substances. ...Categories are places in the dependence ordering. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (On What Grounds What [2009], 1.3) |
| 12959 | We discern active power from our minds, so mind must be involved in all active powers [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The clearest idea of active power comes to us from the mind. So active power occurs only in things which are analogous to minds, that is, in entelechies; for strictly matter exhibits only passive power. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: If this is meant to be a precise argument, then 'so' and 'only' are blatantly unjustified. I guess that if it isn't analogous to a mind then he won't allow it to be a TRUE active power! I say mind arises from the entelechies of the physical brain. |
| 12967 | I use the word 'entelechy' for a power, to include endeavour, as well as mere aptitude [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If 'power' is the source of action, it means more than aptitude or ability. It also includes endeavour. It is in order to express this sense that I appropriate the term 'entelechy' to stand for power. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.22) | |
| A reaction: An 'entelechy' is, roughly, an instantiated thing, but I like what Leibniz is fishing for here - that we will never understand the world if we think of it as passive. |
| 12965 | All occurrence in the depth of a substance is spontaneous 'action' [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Anything which occurs in what is strictly a substance must be a case of 'action' in the metaphysically rigorous sense of something which occurs in the substance spontaneously, arising out of its own depths. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: I love this idea, which fits in with scientific essentialism. The question is whether Leibniz has idenified the end point of all explanations. Cutting edge physics is trying to give further explanations for what seemed basic, such as mass and gravity. |
| 12999 | Substances are primary powers; their ways of being are the derivative powers [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Primary powers are what make up the substances themselves; derivative powers, or 'faculties' if you like, are merely 'ways of being' - and they must be derived from substances. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.03) | |
| A reaction: We might talk of 'deep' and 'surface' properties, or maybe 'powers' and 'qualities' is better. 'Primary' and 'derivative' only gives the logical relationship, but not the causal relationship. |
| 5056 | Material or immaterial substances cannot be conceived without their essential activity [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I maintain that substances, whether material or immaterial, cannot be conceived in their bare essence without any activity, activity being of the essence of substance in general. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: Thus there could be no 'tabula rasa', because that would be an inactive mental substance. This strikes me as a nice question for modern physicists. Do they regard movement as essential, or an addition to bare particles? I'm with Leibniz. Essentialism. |
| 12969 | The active powers which are not essential to the substance are the 'real qualities' [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Powers which are not essential to substance, and which include not merely an aptitude but also a certain endeavour, are exactly what are or should be meant by 'real qualities'. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.23) | |
| A reaction: An important part of Leibniz's account. There are thus essential powers, in the 'depth' of the substance, and more peripheral powers, which also initiate action, and give rise to the qualities. The second must derive from the first? |
| 12941 | There cannot be power without action; the power is a disposition to act [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Where will one ever find in the world a faculty consisting in sheer power without performing an act? There is always a particular disposition to action, and towards one action rather than another. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: This is muddled. Leibniz defends powers in the possibilities of things, but he must then accept that some possibilities may never be realised, as with two complex chemicals which never ever come into contact with one another. |
| 12990 | Real (non-logical) abstract terms are either essences or accidents [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Real (as opposed to logical) abstract terms, or at least those which are conceived as real, are either essences or parts of essences, or else accidents (i.e. beings added to a substance). | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.08) | |
| A reaction: Interesting to refer to accidents as 'beings'. This seems to fit abstraction by ignoring, since you can either ignore the accidents to get the essence, or ignore the essence to get the accidents. |
| 12939 | Wholly uniform things like space and numbers are mere abstractions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Things which are uniform, containing no variety, are always mere abstractions: for instance, time, space, and the other entities of pure mathematics. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: I presume that being 'mere abstractions' denies them ontological status, and makes them creations of thought. If so, I like this idea a lot. |
| 12979 | The only way we can determine individuals is by keeping hold of them [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is impossible for us to know individuals or to find any way of precisely determining the individuality of any thing except by keeping hold of the thing itself. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: 'The tallest woman in London' seems to determine someone perfectly well, though only by cross-referencing universal concepts like 'tall'. |
| 12971 | If two individuals could be indistinguishable, there could be no principle of individuation [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If two individuals were perfectly similar and equal and, in short, indistinguishable in themselves, there would be no principle of individuation. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the main motive for Leibniz's unusual claim that there cannot be two indiscernible individuals, but it looks suspiciously like an a priori claim made about what should be an a posteriori discovery. Are electrons distinguishable? |
| 13098 | We use things to distinguish places and times, not vice versa [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is by means of things that we must distinguish one time and place from another, rather than vice versa. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27) | |
| A reaction: This rests on Leibniz's relative view of space (as opposed to Newton's absolute view). If you need to re-identify a thing to individuate it, re-identifying the exact place or time seems impossible, but it is usually manageable with thing. |
| 13075 | No two things are quite the same, so there must be an internal principle of distinction [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: In addition to the difference of time or of place there must always be an internal principle of distinction: although there can be many things of the same kind, it is still the case that none of them are ever exactly alike. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27) | |
| A reaction: This rests on Leibniz's unusual view that all things (even electrons) are qualitatively distinct. Personally I disagree with that, but agree with the idea. Things have time and place because they have identity, not the other way around. |
| 12953 | Fluidity is basic, and we divide into bodies according to our needs [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Fluidity is the fundamental condition, and the division into bodies is carried out - there being no obstacle to it - according to our need. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.13) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz is referring to what he usually calls 'aggregates', like piles of bricks, which are things lacking a unifying substance. There may be no true substances, in which fluidity is the order of the day. |
| 12943 | Individuality is in the bond substance gives between past and future [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Within each substance there is a perfect bond between the future and the past, which is what creates the identity of the individual. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: I'm not quite sure if this means anything, but the idea that a bond across time is a necessity for intrinsic identity is interesting. The 'bond' would, I take it, have to be a causal one. |
| 11855 | Substances cannot be bare, but have activity as their essence [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I maintain that substances (material or immaterial) cannot be conceived in their bare essence devoid of activity; that activity is of the essence of substance in general | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref 65) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz liked the idea that God was the source of this activity, but this remark makes Leibniz a direct ancestor of modern scientific essentialism. |
| 12970 | We can imagine two bodies interpenetrating, as two rays of light seem to [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We find that two shadows or two rays of light interpenetrate, and we could devise an imaginary world where bodies did the same. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27) | |
| A reaction: I suspect this is a case of being able to imagine something when you don't fully understand it (like a bonfire on the Moon), but when you fully understand the modern physics of it, you see the necessity of separation between objects. |
| 12986 | The essence of baldness is vague and imperfect [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There are vague and imperfect essences, as in the question of how few hairs a man can have without being bald. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.05) | |
| A reaction: This example is much discussed in contemporary debate, but I now learn that it has a venerable history. The surprise here is the word 'essences', because I had taken Leibnizian essences to be 'perfect ideas', and hence precise. |
| 12968 | A 'substratum' is just a metaphor for whatever supports several predicates [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: From the beginning we conceive several predicates in a single subject, and that is all there is to these metaphorical words 'support' and 'substratum'. So I do not see why it is made out to involve a problem. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.23) | |
| A reaction: The question is whether the substratum is 'bare' if you remove all the predicates, and clearly Leibniz believes you are left with true essential substance (although the removal process is presumably only possible in thought, thanks to God). |
| 13742 | There exist heaps with no integral unity, so we should accept arbitrary composites in the same way [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: I am happy to accept universal composition, on the grounds that there are heaps, piles etc with no integral unity, and that arbitrary composites are no less unified than heaps. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (On What Grounds What [2009], 2.1 n11) | |
| A reaction: The metaphysical focus is then placed on what constitutes 'integral unity', which is precisely the question which most interested Aristotle. Clearly if there is nothing more to an entity than its components, scattering them isn't destruction. |
| 13752 | The notion of 'grounding' can explain integrated wholes in a way that mere aggregates can't [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: The notion of grounding my capture a crucial mereological distinction (missing from classical mereology) between an integrated whole with genuine unity, and a mere aggregate. x is an integrated whole if it grounds its proper parts. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (On What Grounds What [2009], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: That gives a nice theoretical notion, but if you remove each of the proper parts, does x remain? Is it a bare particular? I take it that it will have to be an abstract principle, the one Aristotle was aiming at with his notion of 'form'. Schaffer agrees. |
| 12931 | Particular truths are just instances of general truths [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The reasons for particular truths rest wholly on the more general ones of which they are mere instances. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: Clearly particulars have their own distinctive truth, but the Leibniz case seems to be that a particular is a unique intersection for an array of general truths - and nothing else. Audrey Hepburn's smile has no generalities to it. |
| 12811 | We can't know individuals, or determine their exact individuality [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is impossible for us to have knowledge of individuals and to find the means of determining exactly the individuality of everything. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle was clearly also tempted by this doubt (since universals are involved), though individuals are what he wanted to understand. I think they are wrong. Leibniz gives the bizarre reason that we can't know individuals as they each contain infinity. |
| 12981 | Essence is just the possibility of a thing [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Essence is fundamentally nothing but the possibility of the thing under consideration. Something which is thought possible is expressed by a definition. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.03) | |
| A reaction: It is unclear whether he means 'possible modes of existence' or 'possible actions of the thing'. Leibniz sees more clearly than Aristotle that essences extend beyond the actual thing, because Leibniz is more aware of the active powers. |
| 5057 | If you fully understand a subject and its qualities, you see how the second derive from the first [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Every time we find some quality in a subject, we ought to think that, if we understood the nature of this subject and of this quality, we should conceive how this quality could result from it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: Thus (in Kripke's analogy) God cannot make 'subjects' on Thursday and then add 'qualities' on Friday. Add the point that all subjects are physical, and I say you have the whole story. The physical entails the mental. The laws result from the qualities. |
| 12987 | For some sorts, a member of it is necessarily a member [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There are sorts or species such that if an individual has ever been of such a sort or species it cannot (naturally, at least) stop being of it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.06) | |
| A reaction: Note the thoughtful 'naturally, at least', which blocks genetic engineering. But natural selection is genetic engineering. Crucially, Leibniz is not attributing this to all sorts or species, and allows exceptions. |
| 12884 | The same whole ceases to exist if a part is lost [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We cannot say - with complete fidelity to the truth of things - that the same whole continues to exist if a part of it is lost. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27.11) | |
| A reaction: This is the reference Simons 1987:319 gives when he claims that Leibniz accepts mereological essentialism. I think this is mereological necessity of identity, but not what I call 'essentialism'. That has to distinguish essential from non-essential. |
| 12975 | We have a distinct idea of gold, to define it, but not a perfect idea, to understand it [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: That gold is a metal which resists cupellation and is insoluble in aquafortis is a distinct idea, for it gives us the criteria or definition of 'gold'. But it is not a perfect idea, because we know too little about cupellation and actions of aquafortis. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.31) | |
| A reaction: This connects the 'perfect idea' of something with knowing its active substance, and hence its essence. See Idea 12976 for the connection between perfect ideas and definitions. |
| 12805 | If two people apply a single term to different resemblances, they refer to two different things [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If one person applies the name 'avarice' to one resemblance, and some one else to another, there will be two different species designated by the same name. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 6.6.292), quoted by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz and Locke on Essences p.199 | |
| A reaction: Part of Leibniz's sustained attack on Locke's nominal essences. There is clearly an uninteresting nominal essence, where a 'big brown bear' is necessarily brown, but in the interesting respects I think Leibniz is right. |
| 12806 | Locke needs many instances to show a natural kind, but why not a single instance? [Leibniz, by Jolley] |
| Full Idea: Leibniz points out that it is a concealed premise of Locke's argument that if a natural kind exists it must have many instances, but there seems no a priori objection to the idea of a species with just one member. | |
| From: report of Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 6.6.311) by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz and Locke on Essences p.200 | |
| A reaction: I can't see this bothering Locke. Generally we formulate nominal essences by induction from bundles of ideas, but we can formulate a cautious first stab at it from one instance. If you see a new creature, is it a normal one, or a 'monster'? |
| 12972 | Bodies, like Theseus's ship, are only the same in appearance, and never strictly the same [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We must acknowledge that organic bodies as well as others remain 'the same' only in appearance, and not strictly speaking. It is rather like the river whose water is continually changing, or like Theseus's ship which Athenians constantly repaired. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27) | |
| A reaction: This is Leibniz's standard view, that something only remains the same if it has a unifying substance, and so a collection of planks is just an aggregate, and doesn't have any identity to begin with. |
| 5055 | No two things are totally identical [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: By virtue of insensible variations, two individual things can never be perfectly alike. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This sounds a bit like the 'discernibility of non-identicals', except that he says that the differences may not be 'sensible'. He has to be talking of physical things, since I presume that, say, the symmetry of two circles is perfectly identical. |
| 12978 | A perfect idea of an object shows that the object is possible [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: One mark of a perfect idea is that it shows conclusively that the object is possible. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.31) | |
| A reaction: Subtle but nice. My favourite example would be that the perfect idea of a bonfire on the Moon shows that it is not possible. Essence reveals necessity, as Aristotle and Kit Fine claim. A perfect idea has a single definition. |
| 17079 | Proofs of necessity come from the understanding, where they have their source [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The fundamental proof of necessary truths comes from the understanding alone, and other truths come from experience or from observations of the senses. Our mind is capable of knowing truths of both sorts, but it is the source of the former. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: Interesting because it not only spells out that necessary truths are known a priori, but also explicitly says that the understanding is the 'source' of the truths, or at least the source of their proofs. He also says possibilities derive from essences. |
| 13749 | Belief in impossible worlds may require dialetheism [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: One motivation for dialetheism is the view that there are impossible worlds. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (On What Grounds What [2009], 2.3) |
| 12998 | Understanding grasps the agreements and disagreements of ideas [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Ordinarily, when ideas are thoroughly understood, their agreements and disagreements are apparent. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.02) | |
| A reaction: In other words, there is a holistic aspect of understanding, which makes us ask how understanding ever gets off the ground. Is it not possible to understand a single idea in isolation? |
| 12960 | We understand things when they are distinct, and we can derive necessities from them [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We understand the things of which we are aware only when we have distinct ideas of them accompanied by the power to reflect and to derive necessary truths from those ideas. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: A rather startling way of putting it, but we also say that good understanding brings the power to predict. What must you understand in order to predict? What has to happen next! |
| 13006 | Certainty is where practical doubt is insane, or at least blameworthy [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Certainty might be knowledge of a truth such that to doubt it in a practical way would be insane; and sometimes it is taken more broadly, to cover cases where doubt would be very blameworthy. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.11) | |
| A reaction: The normative aspect of the second half of this touches on a trend in recent epistemology. You have rights to believe, and duties to believe, and virtues for the justifying process. I prefer more neutral, value-free epistemology. |
| 13740 | 'Moorean certainties' are more credible than any sceptical argument [Schaffer,J] |
| Full Idea: A 'Moorean certainty' is when something is more credible than any philosopher's argument to the contrary. | |
| From: Jonathan Schaffer (On What Grounds What [2009], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: The reference is to G.E. Moore's famous claim that the existence of his hand is more certain than standard sceptical arguments. It sounds empiricist, but they might be parallel rational truths, of basic logic or arithmetic. |
| 12996 | I know more than I think, since I know I think A then B then C [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Not only is it immediately evident to me that I think, but it is just as evident that I think various thoughts: at one time I think about A and at another about B and so on. Thus the Cartesian principle is sound, but it is not the only one of its kind. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.02) | |
| A reaction: I don't suppose that Descartes would object to this, but he was aware that there didn't seem to be any actual introspective experience that united the various thoughts into a single thinker. Only logical connections between the thoughts does that. |
| 13003 | The Cogito doesn't prove existence, because 'I am thinking' already includes 'I am' [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To say 'I think therefore I am' is not really to prove existence from thought, since 'to think' and 'to be thinking' are one and the same, and to say 'I am thinking' [je suis pensant] is already to say 'I am' [je suis]. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.07) | |
| A reaction: This is the objection which was offered by A.J. Ayer, and I take it to the one of the two principle objections to the Cogito (i.e. that it may be a tautology), along with the objection about the assumption of the continuity of the same thinker. |
| 21253 | Descartes needs to demonstrate how other people can attain his clear and distinct conceptions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is not sufficient for Descartes to claim that he perceives something in himself clearly and distinctly, for this is to not complete the demonstration, unless he shows the method through which others can attain the same experience. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], App X) | |
| A reaction: For the simplest rational insight this seems a rather tough requirement. If you say A>B, and B>C, so A>C, then once you have grasped the concept of 'greater than' I'm not sure there is a further possible demonstration. |
| 12933 | Arithmetic and geometry are implicitly innate, awaiting revelation [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I would name the propositions of arithmetic and geometry as innate. ...The actual knowledge of them is not innate. What is innate is what might be called the implicit knowledge of them, as the veins of marble outline a shape for the sculptor. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: This seems to walk straight into the empiricist guns. The marble example shows the problem, because the 'veins' will hardly outline David in the block. Locke's challenge is to show that merely 'implicit' ideas have demonstrable reality. |
| 12991 | Children learn language fast, with little instruction and few definitions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I have sometimes been amazed that children can learn languages so early, ...considering how little trouble is taken to instruct children in their native tongue, and how little thought adults give to getting sharp definitions. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.10) | |
| A reaction: A striking anticipation of the key observation on which Chomsky built his theories, from a philosopher who was equally concerned to defend innate ideas and innate knowledge. |
| 12929 | All of our thoughts come from within the soul, and not from the senses [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I always accepted the innate idea of God, but my new system says all the thoughts and actions of the soul come from its own depths and could not be given to it by the senses. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: It is hard to adjudicate on this one. The counterexamples would be associations. I see a face in the crowd and think of my friend. But Leibniz could be right even about that. Who cares? Externalism is designed to bypass this problem. |
| 12940 | What is left of the 'blank page' if you remove the ideas? [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Those who hold forth about the 'blank page' cannot say what is left of it once the ideas have been taken away. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: This is a decisive criticism of the total tabula rasa idea, but empiricists responded by developing associationism - that what remains is principles of association for incoming experience. Brain mechanisms, we might say. |
| 19358 | Colour and pain must express the nature of their stimuli, without exact resemblance [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Ideas such as those of colour and pain are not arbitrary. ...That is not God's way ...I would say there is a resemblance of a kind, not a perfect one, but a resemblance in which one thing expresses another through some orderly relationship between them. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.08) | |
| A reaction: The main point of Locke's idea of 'secondary' qualities is that (unlike the 'primary' ones) they bear no resemblance to their stimuli. It's not much of an argument from Leibniz, to say that is not God's way, but he has a vast system to support his claim. |
| 12948 | A pain doesn't resemble the movement of a pin, but it resembles the bodily movement pins cause [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is true that pain does not resemble the movement of a pin; but it might thoroughly resemble the motions which the pin causes in our body, and it might resemble them in the soul; and I have not the least doubt that it does. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.08) | |
| A reaction: He may not have the least doubt, but the rest of us do, I should think. Try as I will, I cannot see any resemblance between pain and a motion. What feeling does a pendulum resemble? |
| 13005 | Truth arises among sensations from grounding reasons and from regularities [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The truth of sensible things is established by the links amongst them; these depend upon intellectual truths, grounded in reason, and upon observations of regularities among sensible things themselves, even when the reasons are not apparent. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.11) | |
| A reaction: It's not clear why regularities would establish truths, given that most hallucinations have regularities in them. I'm thinking that Leibniz is not sufficiently rationalist here, and that it is the rational coherence of experience which validates it. |
| 4302 | You may experience a universal truth, but only reason can tell you that it is always true [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: However often one experiences instances of a universal truth, one could never know inductively that it would always hold unless one knew through reason that it was necessary. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: The problem, though, is that as soon as we go beyond experience we are not very reliable, and are liable to arrogance, error and lack of imagination. |
| 12947 | We only believe in sensible things when reason helps the senses [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The senses could not convince us of the existence of sensible things without help from reason. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.07) | |
| A reaction: This nicely pinpoints the big difficulty which keeps besetting orthodox empiricism. I've been educated as an empiricist, but I prefer Leibniz to Berkeley or Hume, and even to the more sensible Locke. |
| 12930 | The senses are confused, and necessities come from distinct intellectual ideas [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Intellectual ideas, from which necessary truths arise, do not come from the senses. ...The ideas that come from the senses are confused; and so too, at least in part, are the truths which depend on them, whereas intellectual ideas are distinct. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.01) | |
| A reaction: One might compare Descartes' example of the chiliagon, which is only grasped clearly by the intellect. However, the problem of vagueness seems to intrude as much into intellectual ideas as it does into the senses. He was a mathematician... |
| 13001 | Our sensation of green is a confused idea, like objects blurred by movement [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The sensory idea of green (made of blue and yellow) is a confused idea, like the swift rotation of a cog-wheel which makes us perceive an artificial transparency, and we are not able to discern the cause, the idea of the teeth on the wheel. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 4.06) | |
| A reaction: This is one of Leibniz's less well-known objections to empiricism. He always says that intellectual ideas are capable of a clarity which is never found in sensory experience. |
| 12949 | Light takes time to reach us, so objects we see may now not exist [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Since rays of light need time - however little - to reach us, it is possible that the object should be destroyed during the interval and no longer exist when the light reaches the eye. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.09) | |
| A reaction: This is the well know 'time lag' argument. Leibniz is no sceptic, but he can hardly fail to accept the truth of this problem. It seems self-evident that stars we observe may no longer exist, although special relativity confuses that issue. |
| 5053 | The instances confirming a general truth are never enough to establish its necessity [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: All the instances which confirm a general truth, however numerous they may be, are not sufficient to establish the universal necessity of this same truth. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This is Leibniz's standardly rationalist view of induction. We can either say that induction is therefore inadequate, or (a better option) that there isn't much evidence for claims of necessity, and they must be treated with caution. |
| 12977 | We will only connect our various definitions of gold when we understand it more deeply [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We can define gold as the heaviest metal, or by assaying procedures, but only when men have penetrated more deeply into the nature of things will they be able to see why one belongs with the other. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.31) | |
| A reaction: He mentions that geometry is different, because we do have perfect ideas of things. This is part of Leibniz's optimism about the future of science, in comparison with the surprising pessimism of the empiricists. See Idea 12976 and Idea 12975. |
| 5054 | Animal thought is a shadow of reasoning, connecting sequences of images by imagination [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The sequences of the brutes are but a shadow of reasoning, that is to say, they are but connexions of imagination, transitions from one image to another. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This account of animal thought cannot capture the fact that they are motivated by their images, and obviously make decisions based on them. Externally, there is usually an obvious reason why even an insect does something. |
| 23872 | 'Society determines consciousness' is contradictory; society only exists in minds [Weil on Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: In the Marxist formula 'social existence determines consciousness' there are more contradictions than words. Since 'social' can only exist in human minds, 'social existence' is already consciousness. It cannot determine consciousness, which is undefined. | |
| From: comment on K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846]) by Simone Weil - Fragments p.126 | |
| A reaction: I'm not convinced that society only exists in minds. Many children in Victorian London had never heard of 'London', but that didn't stop it existing. Our problems are often social substrata of which we are unaware. |
| 5277 | Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: This slogan is the heart of Marxism. It begs the obvious question of what determines (social) life? Aristotle is at least partly right - that some activities and social organisation are 'unnatural', going against the grain of the human 'given'. |
| 12944 | It is a serious mistake to think that we are aware of all of our perceptions [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Many errors can flow from the belief that the only perceptions in the soul are the ones of which it is aware. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: What a perceptive remark, for its time! I took it that it was only modern neuroscience and psychology which had woken us up to how much non-conscious activity is central to the mind. |
| 12951 | Abstraction attends to the general, not the particular, and involves universal truths [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Beasts recognise whiteness, but this does not amount to abstraction, which requires attention to the general apart from the particular, and consequently involves knowledge of universal truths. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.11) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure where 'truth' creeps into this. I might hallucinate pink elephants, and abstract the general notion of pink from them. Nevertheless, the features picked out in abstraction tend to be the shared features. |
| 19364 | Volition automatically endeavours to move towards what it sees as good (and away from bad) [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Volition is the effort or endeavour ('conatus') to move towards what one finds good and away from what one finds bad, the endeavour arising immediately out of one's awareness of those things. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: Modern neuroscience seems to confirm that there is a chicken-and-egg problem here. Is the moment of perception as good or bad itself an act of volition, or is it neutral? |
| 12942 | Memory doesn't make identity; a man who relearned everything would still be the same man [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If a man were made young again, and learned everything anew - would that make him a different man? So it is not memory that makes the very same man. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz takes this as a foregone conclusion. If you flipped to a possible world where someone you know well, as a physical being, has been brought up entirely differently (new language, culture, ethics etc), is it really the same person? |
| 12973 | We know our own identity by psychological continuity, even if there are some gaps [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To discover one's own moral identity unaided, it is sufficient that between one state and a neighbouring (or just a nearby) one there be a mediating bond of consciousness, even if this has a jump or forgotten interval mixed into it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.27) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz appears to accept the psychological continuity view of personal identity (which was probably a new problem to him), even though he rightly rejects the account based purely on memory. |
| 19368 | The will determines action, by what is seen as good, but it does not necessitate it [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Choice, however much the will is determined to make it, should not be called absolutely and strictly necessary: a predominance of goods of which one is aware inclines without necessitating, though this is determining and never fails to have its effect. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: Something like seeing that 7+5 equals 12 makes you say '12', but it doesn't actually necessitate your saying '12'? Certain facts seem determined by nature, but not necessitated. Or not necessarily necessitated? |
| 12935 | Every feeling is the perception of a truth [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Every feeling is the perception of a truth. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: I wouldn't say feelings ARE perceptions of truths, but I might say that every experience we have has an intellectual dimension as well as an emotional one. Our beliefs drift and solidify in just the same way that feelings do. |
| 12938 | An idea is an independent inner object, which expresses the qualities of things [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: An idea is an immediate inner object, which expresses the nature or qualities of things, ..but since it is the object of thought it can exist before and after the thoughts. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: This sounds something like Frege's 'third realm' between mind and world (Idea 7740). Notice that Leibniz is also using the word 'object' in this context. Leibniz doesn't make the mistake of confusing concepts and images, as many did. |
| 12950 | We must distinguish images from exact defined ideas [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is essential to distinguish images from exact ideas which are composed of definitions. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.09) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 12615, which is attacking Descartes and Locke, I think, but fails to register that Spinoza and Leibniz had got the notion of an 'idea' much more clearly. |
| 12945 | Thoughts correspond to sensations, but ideas are independent of thoughts [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I distinguish ideas from thoughts. For we always have all our pure or distinct ideas independently of the senses, but thoughts always correspond to some sensation. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.01) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz's concept of an 'idea' is quite different from the empiricist notion of them, and strikes me as being much closer to Frege's notion of a concept. On the whole I like the Leibniz account best. |
| 19357 | The idea of green seems simple, but it must be compounded of the ideas of blue and yellow [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is obvious that green comes from a mixture of blue and yellow; which makes it credible that the idea of green is composed of the ideas of those two colours, although the idea of green appears to us as simple as that of blue. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.07) | |
| A reaction: This shows the use of 'idea' at that time for non-verbal mental events and concepts. Ideas are not, then, just undestood as phenomena, but can be analysed and explained more deeply. |
| 12995 | The name 'gold' means what we know of gold, and also further facts about it which only others know [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The name 'gold' signifies not merely what the speaker knows of gold , but also what he does not know, which may be known by someone else: an inner constitution from which flow colour and weight, and generates other properties. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.11) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Thus in the course of defending true essences of gold (against Locke's claim that we are stuck with the nominal essence), Leibniz drifts into an externalist account of meaning. He mentions experts, as so often does Putnam. |
| 12807 | The word 'gold' means a hidden constitution known to experts, and not just its appearances [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The name 'gold' signifies not only what he who pronounces it knows about it, for example, something very heavy and yellow, but also what he does not know, and that another can know about it, its internal constitution from which colour and weight flow. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 6.6.354), quoted by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz and Locke on Essences | |
| A reaction: Leibniz goes on to use the word 'expert'. This isn't just a hint of Putnam's externalism about concepts like 'water' - it is a clear spelling out of the full idea. Locke would have been astounded by 'atomic number 79', and Leibniz would be, like, 'yeah'. |
| 5280 | Language co-exists with consciousness, and makes it social [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: Language is as old as consciousness, language is practical consciousness that exists also for other men. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: Dennett takes a similar view - that consciousness is more-or-less a consequence of the development of consciousness. This is understandable if you make intentional rather than phenomenal consciousness central. Otherwise ants may well have it. |
| 12946 | The idea of the will includes the understanding [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The idea of the will includes that of the understanding. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.06) | |
| A reaction: A nice remark, although I am not sure that I agree with it. The understanding (if we allow such talk of faculties, with which I have no problem) sometimes lags behind and sometimes forges ahead of the will. What else is weakness of the will? |
| 12964 | If would be absurd not to disagree with someone's taste if it was a taste for poisons [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If someone acquired a taste for poisons which would kill him or make him wretched, it would be absurd to say that we ought not to argue with him about his tastes. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a first step in any discussion of taste on which you would hope that sensible persons would agree. 'It is just a matter of taste' is definitely not the end of discussion. Aesthetic taste is important, just as values are important. |
| 5276 | The nature of an individual coincides with what they produce and how they produce it [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: As individuals express their life, so they are; what they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: This appears to be contradicted by their subsequent idea that 'alienation' from the means of production is possible. Presumably intellectuals (in all ages) are to some extent exempt from this rule. It is, in fact, not true. |
| 5281 | Consciousness is a social product [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: Consciousness is from the very beginning a social product. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: This slogan has produced the sociological view of truth which has stood opposed to philosophy for the last 150 years. It would be silly to deny that there is a good point here, but equally silly to think that all consciousness is explicable in this way. |
| 12958 | Love is pleasure in the perfection, well-being or happiness of its object [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To love is to be disposed to take pleasure in the perfection, well-being or happiness of the object of one's love. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.20) | |
| A reaction: I suppose so, though one might love a pathetic little plant that hangs on in the corner of the garden, just for its fighting qualities. He goes on to deny that we can truly love something that is incapable of happiness. Hm. |
| 12957 | The good is the virtuous, the pleasing, or the useful [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The good is divided into the virtuous, the pleasing, and the useful. ..The good is either pleasing or useful; and virtue itself consists of a pleasure of the mind. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.20) | |
| A reaction: I presume that the useful could be reduced to the pleasing. It strikes me as quite bizarre to define virtue as merely a pleasure of the mind. Aristotle says true virtue must also please the mind, but that is a different idea. |
| 12962 | Pleasure is a sense of perfection [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Fundamentally, pleasure is a sense of perfection, and pain a sense of imperfection. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21) | |
| A reaction: A bit odd, but I like the idea that there is an intellectual aspect to even the most visceral feelings. |
| 12934 | We can't want everyone to have more than their share, so a further standard is needed [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We would wish for more than our share if we had our own way; so do we also owe to others more than their share? If the rule applies only to a just will, the rule will need a standard. The rule means that to judge fairly we must adopt others' viewpoints. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: The first part of this is moving towards Kant's rational overview of ethics. Leibniz is wholly right here. All ethics faces the problem that initial values are needed to get it off the ground. What's wrong with pain, or unfairness, or hatred? |
| 5289 | When aristocracy or the bourgeoisie dominate, certain values dominate with them [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: During the time that the aristocracy was dominant, the concepts honour, loyalty etc. were dominant, and during the dominance of the bourgeoisie the concepts of freedom, equality etc. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.B) | |
| A reaction: This is a very anti-Aristotelian view, based on a very different idea of human nature. It must, to some extent, be true, but freedom and equality will be a value for the proletariat, and loyalty will be a key value if the family is central. |
| 5274 | Young Hegelians proposed changing our present consciousness for liberating critical consciousness [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: The Young Hegelians logically put to men the moral postulate of exchanging their present consciousness for human, critical or egoistic consciousness, and thus removing their limitations. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: It seems there are three views here: this one (that we can change our consciousness), the Aristotelian view (that consciousness is 'given'), and the Marxist view (that society determines consciousness). The truth is somewhere between them. |
| 21992 | Producing their own subsistence distinguishes men from animals [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: Men begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], p.160), quoted by Sydney Shoemaker - Some varieties of functionalism 6 | |
| A reaction: At the very least, we must say that there had to be some intrinsic distinctiveness in place before men could do this. I like meta-thought. |
| 5275 | Men distinguish themselves from animals when they begin to produce their means of subsistence [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: Men begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: This seems a rather external criterion. Presumably we can ask what biological or mental feature made it possible for men to produce their own means of subsistence, and why it evolved. Darwin puts a different perspective on this idea. |
| 5292 | Individuals are mutually hostile unless they group together in competition with other groups [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: Separate individuals form a class only insofar as they have to carry on a battle against another class; otherwise they are on hostile terms with each other as competitors. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.D) | |
| A reaction: Beneath the Marxist view that consciousness is a social creation lies a Hobbesian pessimism about basic human nature. This idea bodes ill for ultimate communism, because class struggle will have been abolished. What, then, can unite people? |
| 5293 | Only in community are people able to cultivate their gifts, and therefore be free [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: Only in community with others has each individual the means of cultivating his gifts in all directions; only in the community, therefore, is personal freedom possible. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.D) | |
| A reaction: This is where Aristotle and Marx agree, and I agree too. I think we could drop the word "free", which is to some degree a necessary right and precondition of human happiness, but is not the real target. |
| 5273 | Young Hegelians think consciousness is chains for men, where old Hegelians think it the bond of society [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: The Young Hegelians consider conceptions, thoughts, ideas, in fact all the products of consciousness, to which they attribute an independent existence, as the real chains of men (just as the Old Hegelians declared them the true bonds of human society). | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: Marx and Engels will attack both views. The Young Hegelians seem potential existentialists, and the Old Hegelians followers of Aristotle. The correct view is somewhere in the middle. Self-criticism is an option given to us by our culture. |
| 5283 | In communist society we are not trapped in one activity, but can act freely [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates production, and I can hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and criticise after dinner. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a hopeless daydream, and Plato would be appalled. It now (2004) looks as if this aspiration is more likely to be met in a liberal capitalist democracy than it is under any state-controlled communism. |
| 5282 | If the common interest imposes on the individual, his actions become alienated and enslaving [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: As long as a cleavage exists between the particular and the common interest, as long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally divided, man's own deed becomes an alien power opposed to him, which enslaves him. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: An isolated individual could feel 'alienated' doing menial tasks for themselves when they yearned to get on with their poetry. Alienation is not all-or-nothing. Compare working for a good employer with working for Nazi conquerors. |
| 5288 | The class controlling material production also controls mental production [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.B) | |
| A reaction: This is mostly true, because the wealthy will control both the media and most of the educational institutions, but in a world of universal education and underground presses it doesn't seem to be a necessary truth. Wide dissemination of ideas needs money. |
| 5290 | The revolutionary class is opposed to 'class', and represents all of society [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: The class making a revolution appears from the very start, if only because it is opposed to a 'class', not as a class but as the representative of the whole of society. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.B) | |
| A reaction: This appears to be the source of most of the troubles of the last 150 years. Aristotle thought a benevolent tyrant could represent all of society. It looks to me as if a representative democracy has the best chance, but control of the media is tricky. |
| 5294 | To assert themselves as individuals, the proletarians must overthrow the State [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: In order to assert themselves as individuals, the proletarians must overthrow the State. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.D) | |
| A reaction: By the 'State' is here meant the centralised power of the owners of the means of production. They are not aiming at anarchism, but at a more fluid 'society' or 'community'. Most of us have an Orwellian fear of violent 'overthrowing'. |
| 5285 | Slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: Slavery cannot be abolished without the steam-engine. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.B) | |
| A reaction: In Britain and its colonies it does appear that the rise of factories and the abolition of slavery coincided. It is hard to see why this should be a necessity, though. Did the early Christians keep slaves? Some ancient Greeks objected to slavery. |
| 5284 | Communism abolishes private property and dissolves the powerful world market [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: It is empirically established that by the overthrow of the existing state of society by the communist revolution, and the abolition of private property, which is identical with it, the power of the world market will be dissolved. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: They later dropped the abolition of private property as an aim. They were very early in spotting the problem of global capitalism. As long as there are scarcities of anything (e.g. Rembrandts) it is hard to imagine the disappearance of the market. |
| 5291 | The law says private property is the result of the general will [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: In civil law the existing property relations are declared to be the result of the general will. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.C) | |
| A reaction: In other words, the 'general will' is open to endless abuse, because it is defined by the current power group, which nowadays is whoever controls the mass media. Even a 'free' election doesn't prove the general will, which is a cultural thing. |
| 12936 | There are natural rewards and punishments, like illness after over-indulgence [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There can be natural rewards and punishments without a law-maker; intemperance, for instance, is punished by illness. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 1.02) | |
| A reaction: Hm. Maybe if it didn't result in illness it wouldn't be labelled as 'intemperance'. Why isn't studying philosophy all day long classed as intemperance? |
| 5279 | Human history must always be studied in relation to industry and exchange [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: The 'history of humanity' must always be studied and treated in relation to the history of industry and exchange. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.A) | |
| A reaction: There is a lot of truth in this, but why did the Greeks produce Pythagoras, or the Jews produce Jesus, or the British produce Sid Vicious? Two very similar industrial societies can produce very different cultures. Individuals can make a difference. |
| 5286 | Most historians are trapped in the illusions of their own epoch [Marx/Engels] |
| Full Idea: Most historians see in history just the political actions of princes and states, religious and all sorts of theoretical struggles, and in particular in each historical epoch have had to share the illusion of that epoch. | |
| From: K Marx / F Engels (The German Ideology [1846], §1.B) | |
| A reaction: Is it an illusion of our epoch that we share the illusions of our epoch? It seems unfair to say that Marx and Engels can see beyond the illusions of their epoch, but some historian writing about the Wars of the Roses can't. Princes were important. |
| 11856 | Qualities should be predictable from the nature of the subject [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Whenever we find some quality in a subject, we ought to believe that if we understood the nature of both the subject and the quality we would conceive how the quality could arise from it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref 66) | |
| A reaction: This is the idea that powers are prior to properties, which seems right to me. I take essence to be something like the best explanation of qualities. |
| 12994 | Gold has a real essence, unknown to us, which produces its properties [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The complex idea of gold includes its being something which has a real essence whose detailed constitution is unknown to us, except for the fact that such qualities as malleability depend upon it. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.10) | |
| A reaction: This is precisely the view of modern scientific essentialism. The underlying idea I take to be the conception of essence as the thing which explains the properties. |
| 12808 | Part of our idea of gold is its real essence, which is not known to us in detail [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: It is very true that it is part of the complex idea of gold that it is a thing which has a real essence, the constitution of which is not otherwise known to us in detail. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 6.6.345), quoted by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz and Locke on Essences p.201 | |
| A reaction: See also Idea 12807. This is the clearest possible statement of Leibniz's clear-cut scientific essentialism, here presented in opposition to Locke (thought I take the latter to be only bothered by our inability to know the hidden constitution). |
| 12985 | Maybe motion is definable as 'change of place' [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I believe 'motion' to be definable, and the definition which says that it is 'change of place' deserves respect. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.04) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the 'at-at' view of motion, championed by Bertrand Russell. (At p1 at t1, at p2 at t2...). Leibniz's version only mentions space and not time, and it includes 'change', which would need definition without mentioning motion. |
| 12952 | Space is an order among actual and possible things [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Space is a relationship: an order, not only among existents, but also among possibles as though they existed. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.13) | |
| A reaction: The modal end to this idea is a bit puzzling. Would there be any space if there were only possibles, and nothing yet existed, as in God's mind the instant before he got to work? |
| 12955 | If there were duration without change, we could never establish its length [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If there were a vacuum in space, one could establish its size. But if there were a vacuum in time, i.e. a duration without change, it would be impossible to establish its length. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.15) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 4226 for Shoemaker's wonderful counterproposal to this apparently unanswerable claim. I suppose Leibniz is right, but it just might be possible to bring induction to bear on the problem. |
| 12954 | God's essence is the source of possibilities, and his will the source of existents [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: God is the source of possibilities and of existents alike, the one by his essence and the other by his will. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.15) | |
| A reaction: Every now and then I rebel against metaphysics, and think 'how do these people know all this great things about which they make these dogmatic claims?' And this is one of those occasions. I get the idea, though... |
| 12988 | The universe contains everything possible for its perfect harmony [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The universe contains everything that its perfect harmony could admit. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 3.06) | |
| A reaction: This sort of Leibnizian remark leaves most modern readers, including me, totally bewildered. The claim depends entirely on the perfect nature of God. |
| 1414 | A perfection is a simple quality, which is positive and absolute, and has no limit [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I call every simple quality which is positive and absolute, or expresses whatever it expresses without any limits, a perfection. But a quality of this sort, because it is simple, is therefore irresolvable or indefinable. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], App X) | |
| A reaction: I don't think this definition of perfections would have occurred to anyone who wasn't planning to prove that perfections cannot be incompatible (as Leibniz is about to do). |
| 21252 | Perfections must have overlapping parts if their incompatibility is to be proved [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If two propositions (about perfections) are incompatible, that cannot be demonstrated without a resolution of the terms, for otherwise their nature would not enter into the ratiocination. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], App X) | |
| A reaction: If God is omnipotent and wholly free, these appear to be fully separate perfections. But it is their implications (can God decide to do otherwise, given His foreknowledge?) which lead to a problem. So this analyis of contradiction is wrong. |
| 19328 | Without the principle of sufficient reason, God's existence could not be demonstrated [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There is a fundamental axiom that 'nothing happens without reason', without which the existence of God and other great truths cannot be properly demonstrated. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], 2.21.13) | |
| A reaction: I'm rather drawn to the Principle of Sufficient Reason, but also to John Keats's 'negative capability'. Belief that there must be a reason in each case is not a justification for inventing a reason every time. There may be a reason for the universe.... |
| 5058 | Animals have thought and sensation, and indestructible immaterial souls [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I hold (against the Cartesians) that brutes also have thought, and hold that they have sensation, and souls which are, properly speaking, immaterial, and as incapable of perishing as the atoms of Democritus or Gassendi. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (New Essays on Human Understanding [1704], Pref) | |
| A reaction: Insect heaven will be a bit crowded. I can never grasp why theologians would claim that souls are 'indestructible', when they are held to come into existence at a particular moment in space-time. Transmigration of souls is a much more rational belief. |