9 ideas
| 21227 | The Cogito demands a bridge to the world, and ends in isolating the ego [Velarde-Mayol] |
| Full Idea: All philosophies inspired in the Cogito have the problem of building a bridge from the starting point of consciousness to the external world. The result of this is the isolation and solitude of the very ego. | |
| From: Victor Velarde-Mayol (On Husserl [2000], 4.7.2) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as a pretty good reason not to develop a philosophy which is inspired by the Cogito. |
| 21215 | The representation may not be a likeness [Velarde-Mayol] |
| Full Idea: Representationalism is the doctrine that maintains that the object is represented in consciousness by means of an image. ...One should not confuse an image with a likeness. | |
| From: Victor Velarde-Mayol (On Husserl [2000], 2.4.3) | |
| A reaction: Helpful reminder that sense-data or whatever may not be a likeness. But then how do they represent? Symbolic representation needs massive interpretation. |
| 7643 | We have far fewer colour concepts than we have discriminations of colour [Evans] |
| Full Idea: Do we really understand the proposal that we have as many colour concepts as there are shades colour that we can sensibly discriminate? | |
| From: Gareth Evans (The Varieties of Reference [1980], 7.5) | |
| A reaction: This is the argument (rejected by McDowell) that experience cannot be conceptual because experience is too rich. We should not confuse lack of concepts with lack of words. I may have a concept of a colour between two shades, but no word for it. |
| 12580 | Experiences have no conceptual content [Evans, by Greco] |
| Full Idea: In Evans's work experiences are conceived of as not having a conceptual content at all. | |
| From: report of Gareth Evans (The Varieties of Reference [1980]) by John Greco - Justification is not Internal | |
| A reaction: I presume it is this view which provoked McDowell's contrary view in 'Mind and World'. I say this is a job for neuroscience, and I struggle to see what philosophical questions hang on the outcome. I think I side with Evans. |
| 23794 | Some representational states, like perception, may be nonconceptual [Evans, by Schulte] |
| Full Idea: Evans introduced the idea that there are some representational states, for example perceptual experiences, which have content that is nonconceptual. | |
| From: report of Gareth Evans (The Varieties of Reference [1980]) by Peter Schulte - Mental Content 3.4 | |
| A reaction: McDowell famously disagree, and whether all experience is inherently conceptualised is a main debate from that period. Hard to see how it could be settled, but I incline to McDowell, because minimal perception hardly counts as 'experience'. |
| 16366 | The Generality Constraint says if you can think a predicate you can apply it to anything [Evans] |
| Full Idea: If a subject can be credited with the thought that a is F, then he must have the conceptual resources for entertaining the thought that a is G, for every property of being G of which he has conception. This condition I call the 'Generality Constraint'. | |
| From: Gareth Evans (The Varieties of Reference [1980], p.104), quoted by François Recanati - Mental Files 5.3 | |
| A reaction: Recanati endorses the Constraint in his account of mental files. Apparently if I can entertain the thought of a circle being round, I can also entertain the thought of it being square, so I am not too sure about this one. |
| 12575 | Concepts have a 'Generality Constraint', that we must know how predicates apply to them [Evans, by Peacocke] |
| Full Idea: Evans's 'Generality Constraint' says that if a thinker is capable of attitudes to the content Fa and possesses the singular concept b, then he is capable of having attitudes to the content Fb. | |
| From: report of Gareth Evans (The Varieties of Reference [1980], 4.3) by Christopher Peacocke - A Study of Concepts 1.1 | |
| A reaction: So having an attitude becomes the test of whether one possesses a concept. I suppose if one says 'You know you've got a concept when you are capable of thinking about it', that is much the same thing. Sounds fine. |
| 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'). |
| 21219 | Find the essence by varying an object, to see what remains invariable [Velarde-Mayol] |
| Full Idea: Eidetic Reduction consists of producing variations in the individual object until we see what is invariable in it. What is invariable is its essence or Eidos. | |
| From: Victor Velarde-Mayol (On Husserl [2000], 3.2.2) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as an excellent idea. It more or less describes the method of science. Chemical atoms were thought to be unsplittable, until someone tried a new variation for dealing with them. |