7 ideas
| 21982 | I only wish I had such eyes as to see Nobody! It's as much as I can do to see real people. [Carroll,L] |
| Full Idea: "I see nobody on the road," said Alice. - "I only wish I had such eyes," the King remarked. ..."To be able to see Nobody! ...Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people." | |
| From: Lewis Carroll (C.Dodgson) (Through the Looking Glass [1886], p.189), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.7 | |
| A reaction: [Moore quotes this, inevitably, in a chapter on Hegel] This may be a better candidate for the birth of philosophy of language than Frege's Groundwork. |
| 3626 | Knowing the attributes is enough to reveal a substance [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I have never thought that anything more is required to reveal a substance than its various attributes. | |
| From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 360) |
| 3630 | Our thinking about external things doesn't disprove the existence of innate ideas [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: You can't prove that Praxiteles never made any statues on the grounds that he did not get from within himself the marble from which he sculpted them. | |
| From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 362) |
| 3631 | A blind man may still contain the idea of colour [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: How do you know that there is no idea of colour in a man born blind? | |
| From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 363) |
| 5271 | Prejudice apart, push-pin has equal value with music and poetry [Bentham] |
| Full Idea: Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and science of music and poetry. | |
| From: Jeremy Bentham (Constitutional Code I [1827], p.139), quoted by J.R. Dinwiddy - Bentham p.114 | |
| A reaction: Mill quoted this with implied outrage, but Bentham was attacking public subsidies to the arts when he said it. It is a basic idea in the debate on pleasure - that pleasures are only distinguished by their intensity, not some other value. |
| 3640 | Possible existence is a perfection in the idea of a triangle [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Possible existence is a perfection in the idea of a triangle, just as necessary existence is a perfection in the idea of God. | |
| From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 383) |
| 3639 | Necessary existence is a property which is uniquely part of God's essence [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: In the case of God necessary existence is in fact a property in the strictest sense of the term, since it applies to him alone and forms a part of his essence as it does of no other thing | |
| From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 383) |