27 ideas
| 5062 | First: there must be reasons; Second: why anything at all?; Third: why this? [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We rise to metaphysics by saying 'nothing takes place without a reason', then asking 'why is there something rather than nothing?, and then 'why do things exist as they do?' | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace based on Reason [1714], §7) | |
| A reaction: Wonderful. This is what we pay philosophers for - to attempt to go to the heart of the mystery, and then start formulating the appropriate questions. The question of 'why this?' is the sweetest question. The first one seems a little intractable. |
| 19377 | A monad and its body are living, so life is everywhere, and comes in infinite degrees [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Each monad, together with a particular body, makes up a living substance. Thus, there is not only life everywhere, joined to limbs or organs, but there are also infinite degrees of life in the monads, some dominating more or less over others. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace based on Reason [1714], 4) | |
| A reaction: Two key ideas: that each monad is linked to a body (which is presumably passive), and the infinite degrees of life in monads. Thus rocks consist of monads, but at an exceedingly low degree of life. They are stubborn and responsive. |
| 20339 | Classes rarely share properties with their members - unlike universals and types [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: Classes can share properties with their members (e.g. the class of big things is big), but this is very rare. ....In the case of both universals and types, there will be shared properties. Red things can be exhilarating, and so can redness. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 92) | |
| A reaction: 'Exhilarating' is an extrinsic property, so not the best illustration. This is interesting, but would need checking with a wide range of examples. (Too busy for that right now) |
| 16078 | Clay is intrinsically and atomically the same as statue (and that lacks 'modal properties') [Rudder Baker] |
| Full Idea: Arguments for statue being the clay are: that the clay is intrinsically like the statue, that the clay has the same atoms as the statue', that objects don't have modal properties such as being necessarily F, and the reference of 'property' changes. | |
| From: Lynne Rudder Baker (Why Constitution is not Identity [1997], II) | |
| A reaction: [my summary of the arguments she identifies - see text for details] Rudder Baker attempts to refute all four of these arguments, in defence of constitution as different from identity. |
| 16077 | The clay is not a statue - it borrows that property from the statue it constitutes [Rudder Baker] |
| Full Idea: I argue that a lump of clay borrows the property of being a statue from the statue. The lump is a statue because, and only because, there is something that the lump constitutes that is a statue. | |
| From: Lynne Rudder Baker (Why Constitution is not Identity [1997], n9) | |
| A reaction: It is skating on very thin metaphysical ice to introduce the concept of 'borrowing' a property. I've spent the last ten minutes trying to 'borrow' some properties, but without luck. |
| 16080 | Is it possible for two things that are identical to become two separate things? [Rudder Baker] |
| Full Idea: A strong intuition shared by many philosophers is that some things that are in fact identical might not have been identical. | |
| From: Lynne Rudder Baker (Why Constitution is not Identity [1997], IV) | |
| A reaction: This flies in the face of the Kripkean view that if Hesperus=Phosphorus then the identity is necessary. I don't think I have an intuition that some given thing might have been two things - indeed the thought seems totally weird. Amoeba? Statue/clay? |
| 16076 | Constitution is not identity, as consideration of essential predicates shows [Rudder Baker] |
| Full Idea: I want to resuscitate an essentialist argument against the view that constitution is identity, of the form 'x is essentially F, y is not essentially F, so x is not y'. | |
| From: Lynne Rudder Baker (Why Constitution is not Identity [1997], Intro) | |
| A reaction: The point is that x might be essentially F and y only accidentally F. Thus a statue is essentially so, but a lump if clay is not essentially a statue. Another case where 'necessary' would do instead of 'essentially'. |
| 16081 | The constitution view gives a unified account of the relation of persons/bodies, statues/bronze etc [Rudder Baker] |
| Full Idea: Constitution-without-identity is superior to constitution-as-identity in that it provides a unified view of the relation between persons and bodies, statues and pieces of bronze, and so on. | |
| From: Lynne Rudder Baker (Why Constitution is not Identity [1997], IV) | |
| A reaction: I have a problem with the intrinsic dualism of this whole picture. Clay needs shape, statues need matter - there aren't two 'things' here which have a 'relation'. |
| 16082 | Statues essentially have relational properties lacked by lumps [Rudder Baker] |
| Full Idea: The statue has relational properties which the lump of clay does not have essentially. | |
| From: Lynne Rudder Baker (Why Constitution is not Identity [1997], V) | |
| A reaction: She has in mind relations to the community of artistic life. I don't think this is convincing. Is something only a statue if it is validated by an artistic community? That sounds like relative identity, which she doesn't like. |
| 19353 | 'Perception' is basic internal representation, and 'apperception' is reflective knowledge of perception [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: We distinguish between 'perception', the internal state of the monad representing external things, and 'apperception', which is consciousness, or the reflective knowledge of this internal state, not given to all souls, nor at all times to a given soul. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace based on Reason [1714], §4) | |
| A reaction: The word 'apperception' is standard in Kant. I find it surprising that modern analytic philosophers don't seem to use it when they write about perception. It strikes me as useful, but maybe specialists have a reason for avoiding it. |
| 5061 | Animals are semi-rational because they connect facts, but they don't see causes [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: There is a connexion between the perceptions of animals, which bears some resemblance to reason: but it is based only on the memory of facts or effects, and not at all on the knowledge of causes. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace based on Reason [1714], §5) | |
| A reaction: This amounts to the view that animals can do Humean induction (where you see regularities), but not Leibnizian induction (where you see necessities). I say all minds perceive patterns, but only humans can think about the patterns they have perceived. |
| 20338 | We often treat a type as if it were a sort of token [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: Much of the time we think and talk of a type as though it were itself a kind of token. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 35) | |
| A reaction: A helpful way of connecting what I call 'objectification' to the more conventional modern philosophical vocabulary. Thus I might claim that beauty is superior to truth, as if they were two tokens. |
| 20342 | Interpretation is performance for some arts, and critical for all arts [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: Performative interpretation occurs only with certain arts, but critical intepretation pertains to all. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 38) | |
| A reaction: Fairly obvious, but this is the first point to make about the concept of 'interpretation'. Does the word in fact have two meanings? Or do I perform a painting when I look carefully at it? |
| 20343 | A love of nature must precede a love of art [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: We could not have a feeling for the beauties of art unless we had been correspondingly moved in front of nature. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 43) | |
| A reaction: Wollheim offers this in defence of Kant's view, without necessarily agreeing. Similarly one could hardly care for fictional characters, but not for real people. So the aesthetic attitude may arise from life, rather than from art. Is art hence unimportant? |
| 20348 | A criterion of identity for works of art would be easier than a definition [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: Maybe, rather than defining art, it would be more fruitful, and more realistic, to seek a general method of identifying works of art. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 60) | |
| A reaction: The whole enterprise is ruined by Marcel Duchamp! I'm more interested in identifying or defining good art. |
| 20347 | If beauty needs organisation, then totally simple things can't be beautiful [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: It is said that beauty cannot consist in organisation because, if it did, we would not be able to predicate beauty of totally simple objects. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 59) | |
| A reaction: [He says this idea originates in Plotinus] I'm struggling to think of an example of something which is 'totally' simple and beautiful. Maybe a patch of colour like the breast of a bullfinch? |
| 20345 | Some say art must have verbalisable expression, and others say the opposite! [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: The view that a work of art expresses nothing if it can't be put into other words ...is reduced by the view that a work of art has no value if what it expresses or says can be put into (other) words. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 49) | |
| A reaction: I prefer the second view. Poetry is what is lost in translation. Good art actually seems to evoke emotions which one virtually never feels in ordinary life. But how could that be possible? What are those emotions doing there? |
| 20331 | It is claimed that the expressive properties of artworks are non-physical [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: The argument that works of art have properties that physical objects could not have characteristically concentrates on the expressive properties of works of art. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 10) | |
| A reaction: Since the idea of an object having non-physical properties strikes me as ridiculous, this gets off to a bad start. If artworks are abstract objects, then all of their properties are non-physical. |
| 20336 | Style can't be seen directly within a work, but appreciation needs a grasp of style [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: 'Style' would seem to be a concept that cannot be applied to a work solely on the basis of what is represented and yet it is also essential to a proper understanding or appreciation of a work. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 32) | |
| A reaction: Sounds right. One long held musical note creates an expectation which depends on the presumed style of the piece of music. A single bar from a piece may well not exhibit its characteristic style. |
| 20337 | The traditional view is that knowledge of its genre to essential to appreciating literature [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: From Aristotle onwards it has been a tenet of the traditional rhetoric that the proper understanding of a literary work involves the location of it in the correct genre, that is, as drama, epic or lyric. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 32) | |
| A reaction: Walton argues this persuasively. I've seen the climax of a Jacobean tragedy ruined by laughter from the audience. Genre dictates appropriate responses, so it is a communal concept. |
| 20333 | If artworks are not physical objects, they are either ideal entities, or collections of phenomena [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: In denying that works of art are physical objects, one theory (the 'ideal') withdraws them altogether from experience, and a second theory ('phenomenal') pins them too it inescapably and at all points. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 21) | |
| A reaction: I incline towards them being transient ideals, created by human minds. As with so much, we idealise and objectify them as 'works', and abstract their image from the instance(s) we encounter. |
| 20334 | The ideal theory says art is an intuition, shaped by a particular process, and presented in public [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: The ideal theory of Croce and Collingwood says art is first an inner intuition or expression of the artist, resulting from a particular process of organisation and unification, which can be externalised in public form. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 22) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] As stated this doesn't sound very controversial or 'ideal'. I take it the theory is intended to be more platonist than this expression of it suggests. I think the idea that it is an 'expression' of the artist is wrong. |
| 20335 | The ideal theory of art neglects both the audience and the medium employed [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: Because the ideal theory makes a work of art inner or mental, the link between the artist and the audience has been severed .....and it also totally ignores the significance of the medium. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 23) | |
| A reaction: Emily Dickinson had virtually no audience for her poetry. The medium used to perform Bach's 'Art of Fugue' seems unimportant. For paintings of painterly painters paint matters. For some visual art many different media will suffice. |
| 20340 | A musical performance has virtually the same features as the piece of music [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: With the usual reservations, there is nothing that can be predicated of a performance of a piece of music that could not also be predicated of that piece of music itself. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 37) | |
| A reaction: He offers this as evidence that it fits the performance being a token, and music (and all other art) being a type. There are quite a few 'reservations'. Music too difficult to perform. Great music always badly performed. |
| 5063 | Music charms, although its beauty is the harmony of numbers [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Music charms us although its beauty only consists in the harmony of numbers. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Principles of Nature and Grace based on Reason [1714], §17) | |
| A reaction: 'Only'! This is a super-pythagorean view of music, as you might expect from a great mathematician. Did he understand the horrible compromises that had just been made to achieve even-tempered tuning? Patterns are the key, as always. |
| 20341 | An interpretation adds further properties to the generic piece of music [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: Interpretation may be regarded as the production of a token that has properties in excess of those of the type. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 37) | |
| A reaction: I suppose so. If you play accurately everything that is written in the score, then anything else has to be an addition. If you play less than the score, you aren't quite playing that piece of music. |
| 20332 | A drawing only represents Napoleon if the artist intended it to [Wollheim] |
| Full Idea: It is necessary, if a drawing is to represent Napoleon, that the draughtsman should intend it to be Napoleon. | |
| From: Richard Wollheim (Art and Its Objects [1968], 13) | |
| A reaction: Does a perfect and intended representation of a person also count as a representation of the person's identical twin? The families of both might well order copies. |