5 ideas
490 | Everything happens by reason and necessity [Leucippus] |
Full Idea: Nothing happens at random; everything happens out of reason and by necessity. | |
From: Leucippus (fragments/reports [c.435 BCE], B002), quoted by (who?) - where? |
22200 | If you eliminate the impossible, the truth will remain, even if it is weird [Conan Doyle] |
Full Idea: When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. | |
From: Arthur Conan Doyle (The Sign of Four [1890], Ch. 6) | |
A reaction: A beautiful statement, by Sherlock Holmes, of Eliminative Induction. It is obviously not true, of course. Many options may still face you after you have eliminated what is actually impossible. |
20887 | A rape disregards the status of being a person - but so does all assault [Foa] |
Full Idea: In a rape a person is used without proper regard for her personhood - but this is true of every kind of assault. | |
From: Pamela Foa (What's Wrong with Rape? [1977], 1) | |
A reaction: This is a good step towards her attempt to pin down what is specifically wrong with rape, which strikes me as an extremely important question, and not merely in order to justify punishments. |
20888 | Rape of children is dreadful, but no one thinks children should have a right of consent [Foa] |
Full Idea: Rape of children is at least as heinous as rape of adults, though few believe that children have or ought to have the same large domain of consent adults (male and female) ought to have. | |
From: Pamela Foa (What's Wrong with Rape? [1977], 1) | |
A reaction: A powerful point. She is not quite spelling out the crux, which is that no one thinks children should have a right to consent to sexual intercourse, which means that consent is irrelevant in such a case of rape. So it can't be the key to adult rape? |
20889 | If men should lust and women shouldn't, that makes rape the prevalent sexual model [Foa] |
Full Idea: We are taught that sexual desires are desires women ought not to have and men must have. This is the model which makes necessary an eternal battle of the sexes. It explains why rape is the prevalent model of sexuality. | |
From: Pamela Foa (What's Wrong with Rape? [1977], 3) | |
A reaction: A striking thought. See 'The Origins of Sex' by F.Dabhoiwala, which claims that women used to be seen as the sexual predators, and the balance shifted in the 18thC. Are women obliged to exhibit lust, in order to defuse rapacious desires? |