9 ideas
| 7903 | The six perfections are giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom [Nagarjuna] |
| Full Idea: The six perfections are of giving, morality, patience, vigour, meditation, and wisdom. | |
| From: Nagarjuna (Mahaprajnaparamitashastra [c.120], 88) | |
| A reaction: What is 'morality', if giving is not part of it? I like patience and vigour being two of the virtues, which immediately implies an Aristotelian mean (which is always what is 'appropriate'). |
| 21733 | The right-wing conception of freedom is based on the idea of self-ownership [Cohen,GA] |
| Full Idea: The right-wing conception of freedom is, I think, founded on the idea that each person is the morally rightful owner of himself, even if existing legal systems do not acknowledge it. Let us call that the 'self-ownership' thesis. | |
| From: G.A. Cohen (Are Freedom and Equality Compatible? [1986], 1) | |
| A reaction: He cites Nozick as articulating this view. At the end Cohen rejects self-ownership, though he agrees that no one would accept that the state could be the owner of your eyes. Do I own my hair after it is cut? |
| 21739 | Plenty of people have self-ownership, but still lack autonomy [Cohen,GA] |
| Full Idea: Universal self-ownership fails to ensure autonomy, since it tends to produce proletarians, who lack it. | |
| From: G.A. Cohen (Are Freedom and Equality Compatible? [1986], 3) | |
| A reaction: The implication is that autonomy is not a property of individuals but a social phenomenon. Self-owning people can still be imprisoned. What about autonomy without self-ownership? A bright slave who is given extensive responsibility? |
| 21736 | It is doubtful whether any private property was originally acquired legitimately [Cohen,GA] |
| Full Idea: It is easy to doubt that much actually existing private property was formed in what anyone could think was a legitimating way. | |
| From: G.A. Cohen (Are Freedom and Equality Compatible? [1986], 2) | |
| A reaction: What if I created an artificial island out of unwanted raw materials? What about the first humans to reach some remote territory? |
| 21734 | It is plausible that no one has an initial right to own land and natural resources [Cohen,GA] |
| Full Idea: One may plausibly say of external things in their initial state, of raw land and natural resources, that no person has a greater right to them than any other does. | |
| From: G.A. Cohen (Are Freedom and Equality Compatible? [1986], 1) | |
| A reaction: How about if your group has lived on that plot for fifty generations, and some interlopers arrive and claim part of it. No one thought of 'owning' it till the interlopers arrived. Native Americans and Australians. |
| 21735 | Every thing which is now private started out as unowned [Cohen,GA] |
| Full Idea: In the prehistory of anything that is now private property there was at least one moment at which something privately unowned was taken into private ownership. | |
| From: G.A. Cohen (Are Freedom and Equality Compatible? [1986], 2) | |
| A reaction: He is obviously talking about land and natural resources. Presumably a table which I made and own was always private property, although the land where the trees were grown was not. Though in some communities what I make could be automatically communal. |
| 21731 | Fields can be 'scalar', or 'vector', or 'tensor', or 'spinor' [Baggott] |
| Full Idea: Fields can be 'scalar', with no particular direction (pointing, but not pushing or pulling); or 'vector', with a direction (like magnetism, or Newtonian gravity); or 'tensor' (needing further parameters); or 'spinor' (depending on spin orientation). | |
| From: Jim Baggott (Farewell to Reality: fairytale physics [2013], 2 'Quantum') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] So the question is, why do they differ? What is it in the nature of each field the result in a distinctive directional feature? |
| 21730 | A 'field' is a property with a magnitude, distributed across all of space and time [Baggott] |
| Full Idea: A 'field' is defined in terms of the magnitude of some physical property distributed over every point in time and space. | |
| From: Jim Baggott (Farewell to Reality: fairytale physics [2013], 2 'Quantum') | |
| A reaction: If it involves a 'property', normal usage entails that there is some entity which possesses the property. So what's the entity? Eh? Eh? You don't know! Disappointed... |
| 21732 | The current standard model requires 61 particles [Baggott] |
| Full Idea: The current model requires 61 particles: three generations of two leptons and two flavours of quark, in three different colours (making 24); the anti-particles of all of these (48); 12 force particles (photon, W1, Z0, 8 gluons), and a Higgs boson. | |
| From: Jim Baggott (Farewell to Reality: fairytale physics [2013], 6 n) |