5 ideas
| 9100 | Our intellect only assents to what we believe to be true [William of Ockham] |
| Full Idea: Our intellect does not assent to anything unless we believe it to be true. | |
| From: William of Ockham (Prologue to Ordinatio [1320], Q 1 N sqq) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being a much more accurate and commonsense view of belief than that of Hume, who simply views it phenomenologically. ...But then the remark appears to be circular. Belief requires a belief that it is true. Hm. |
| 4691 | If all mental life were conscious, we would be unable to see things, or to process speech [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: If there were nothing more to our mind than our conscious awareness, then we would be unable to see anything or to process speech. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Making of a Philosopher [2002], Ch. 6) | |
| A reaction: A vital point. Traditional dualism has left us a simplistic exaggeration of the role of consciousness, and the misapprehension that most of what we do is conscious - which it clearly isn't, once you think about it. |
| 9101 | Abstractive cognition knows universals abstracted from many singulars [William of Ockham] |
| Full Idea: Abstractive cognition (in one sense) relates to something abstracted from many singulars; and in this sense abstractive cognition is nothing else but cognition of a universal which can be abstracted from many things. | |
| From: William of Ockham (Prologue to Ordinatio [1320], Q 1 N sqq) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as being correct common sense, even though it has become deeply unfashionable since Frege. We may not be able to see quite how the mind manages to see universals in a bunch of objects, but there is no better story. |
| 4690 | If meaning is speaker's intentions, it can be reduced to propositional attitudes, and philosophy of mind [McGinn] |
| Full Idea: The importance of Grice's analysis of speaker meaning is that it offers the prospect of analysing the whole phenomenon of linguistic meaning in terms of propositional attitudes… thus turning semantics into a department of the philosophy of mind. | |
| From: Colin McGinn (The Making of a Philosopher [2002], Ch. 5) | |
| A reaction: Although meaning being truth conditions is the most cited theory, the reduction of semantics to an aspect of mind also seems almost orthodox now. But how do the symbols 'represent' the attitudes? |
| 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'). |