22 ideas
| 15118 | A successful Aristotelian 'definition' is what sciences produces after an investigation [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: My current use of the Aristotelian term 'definition' is intended to correspond to what is typically accessible to a scientist only at the end of a successful investigation into the nature of a particular phenomenon. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Essence, Necessity and Explanation [2012], 13.3.1) | |
| A reaction: It is crucial to understand that Aristotle's definitions could be several hundred pages long. It has nothing to do with dictionary definitions. He proposes 'nominal' and 'real' definitions. |
| 15116 | Essences cause necessary features, and definitions describe those necessary features [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: Since essences cause the other necessary features of a thing, so definitions, as the linguistic correlates of essences, explain, together with other axioms, the propositions describing those necessary features. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Essence, Necessity and Explanation [2012], 13.3.1) | |
| A reaction: This is nice and clear. Definitions are NOT essences - they are the linguistic correlates of essences, and mirror those essences. The necessary features are not the only things needing explanation. That picture is too passive. |
| 15110 | An essence and what merely follow from it are distinct [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: We can distinguish (as Aristotle and Fine do) between what belongs to the essence of an object, and what merely follows from the essence of an object. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Essence, Necessity and Explanation [2012], 13.1) | |
| A reaction: This can help to clarify the confusions that result from treating necessary properties as if they were essential. |
| 15113 | Individuals are perceived, but demonstration and definition require universals [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: Individual instances of a kind of phenomenon, in Aristotle's view, can only be perceived through sense-perception; but they are not the proper subject-matter of scientific demonstration and definition. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Essence, Necessity and Explanation [2012], 13.3.1) | |
| A reaction: A footnote (11) explains that this is because they involve syllogisms, which require universals. I take Aristotle, and anyone sensible, to rest on individual essences, but inevitably turn to generic essences when language becomes involved. |
| 15112 | If an object exists, then its essential properties are necessary [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: If an object has a certain property essentially, then it follows that the object has the property necessarily (if it exists). | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Essence, Necessity and Explanation [2012], 13.2) | |
| A reaction: She is citing Fine, who says that the converse (necessity implying essence) is false. I agree with that. I also willing to challenge the first bit. I suspect an object can retain identity and lose essence. Coma patient; broken clock; aged athlete. |
| 15111 | In demonstration, the explanatory order must mirror the causal order of the phenomena [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: Demonstration encompasses more than deductive entailment, in that the explanatory order of priority represented in a successful demonstration must mirror precisely the causal order of priority present in the phenomena in question. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Essence, Necessity and Explanation [2012], 13.1) | |
| A reaction: She is referring to Aristotle's 'Posterior Analytics'. Put so clearly this sounds like an incredibly useful concept in discussing how we present good modern scientific explanations. Reinstating Aristotle is a major priority for philosophy! |
| 15115 | In a demonstration the middle term explains, by being part of the definition [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: In a proper demonstrative argument, the middle term must be explanatory of the conclusion, in a very specific sense: the middle term must state what properly belongs to the definition of the kind of phenomenon in question. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Essence, Necessity and Explanation [2012], 13.3.1) | |
| A reaction: So 'All men are mortal, S is a man, so S is mortal'. The middle term is 'man', which gives a generic explanation for why S is mortal. Explanation as categorisation? I don't think this is the whole story of Aristotelian explanation. |
| 15117 | Greek uses the same word for 'cause' and 'explanation' [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: The Greek does not disambiguate between 'cause' and 'explanation', since the same terms ('aitia' and 'aition') can be translated in both ways. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Essence, Necessity and Explanation [2012], 13.3.1 n15) | |
| A reaction: This is essential information if we are to understand Aristotle's Four Causes, which are quite baffling if we take 'causes' in the modern way. The are the Four Modes of Explanation. |
| 15114 | Discovering the Aristotelian essence of thunder will tell us why thunder occurs [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: Both the question 'what is thunder?', and the question 'why does thunder occur?', for Aristotle, are answered simultaneously, once it has been discovered what the essence of thunder it, i.e. what it is to be thunder. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Essence, Necessity and Explanation [2012], 13.3.1 n10) | |
| A reaction: I take this idea to be pretty much the whole story about essences. |
| 21833 | Research suggest that we overrate conscious experience [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: The emerging consensus is that we probably overrate the power of conscious experience in our lives. Freud, of course, said the same thing for different reasons. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 3 'Ontology') | |
| A reaction: [He cites Pockett, Banks and Gallagher 2006]. Freud was concerned with big deep secrets, but the modern view concerns ordinary decisions and perceptions. An important idea, which should incline us all to become Nietzscheans. |
| 21834 | Sensations may be identical to brain events, but complex mental events don't seem to be [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: There is still some hope for something like identity theory for sensations. But almost no one believes that strict identity theory will work for more complex mental states. Strict identity is stronger than type neurophysicalism. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 3 'Ontology') | |
| A reaction: It is so hard to express the problem. What needs to be explained? How can one bunch of neurons represent many different things? It's not like computing. That just transfers the data to brains, where the puzzling stuff happens. |
| 2850 | How can emotivists explain someone who recognises morality but is indifferent to it? [Brink] |
| Full Idea: It is not clear how the emotivist can accommodate the amoralist - one who recognises moral requirements but is indifferent to them. | |
| From: David O. Brink (Emotivism [1995], p.224) | |
| A reaction: Nietzsche recognised current morals, but was indifferent to them. It is hard to imagine, though, an amoralist who lacked all the feelings which imply morality. |
| 2848 | Two people might agree in their emotional moral attitude while disagreeing in their judgement [Brink] |
| Full Idea: Critics of emotivism claim that moral agreement need not track agreement in attitude; moralists with the same attitude can disagree in their views, and they can hold the same view while disagreeing in attitude. | |
| From: David O. Brink (Emotivism [1995], p.224) | |
| A reaction: Thus two racists can disagree about how racists should behave. Sounds like a good criticism. |
| 2853 | Emotivists claim to explain moral motivation by basing morality on non-cognitive attitudes [Brink] |
| Full Idea: By stressing the intimate connection between moral judgements and the agent's non-cognitive attitudes, emotivists claim to capture the motivational properties of moral judgement. | |
| From: David O. Brink (Emotivism [1995], p.223) | |
| A reaction: The same claim is made by contractarians, who start from our universal self-interest. Emotivists also nicely capture the motivation properties of immoral judgements. |
| 2852 | Emotivists tend to favour a redundancy theory of truth, making moral judgement meaningless [Brink] |
| Full Idea: If you want to recognise the truth of some moral judgements, perhaps to make room for the possibility of moral mistakes, then one may not be satisfied with the emotivists' tendency to appeal to the redundancy theory of truth. | |
| From: David O. Brink (Emotivism [1995], p.224) | |
| A reaction: Probably thinking of Simon Blackburn. People who adopt a redundancy view of truth for semantics are left floundering when discussing what is true in the rest of philosophy. |
| 2849 | Emotivism implies relativism about moral meanings, but critics say disagreements are about moral reference [Brink] |
| Full Idea: Emotivism suggests that different feelings lead to different individual meanings for moral terms, but critics say that meanings are the same, and disagreement is about the extension (range of reference) of the terms. | |
| From: David O. Brink (Emotivism [1995], p.224) | |
| A reaction: It's hard to see how 'ought to p' could have quite different meanings for an emotivist and (say) a theistic moralist. 'Ought' is an obvious and simple word. Good criticism. |
| 2851 | Emotivists find it hard to analyse assertions of moral principles, rather than actual judgements [Brink] |
| Full Idea: It is hard for the emotivist to give an analysis of the occurrence of moral ideas in unasserted contexts, such as "IF he did wrong, then he should be punished". | |
| From: David O. Brink (Emotivism [1995], p.224) | |
| A reaction: This is the 'Frege-Geach Problem'. |
| 21837 | Morality is normative because it identifies best practices among the normal practices [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Morality is 'normative' in the sense that it consists of the extraction of 'good' or 'excellent' practices from common practices. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 4 'Naturalism') | |
| A reaction: I take normativity not be the mere labelling of certain things as 'good', but as a way of responding to that fact, with some sort of motivation. |
| 21830 | For Darwinians, altruism is either contracts or genetics [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Two explanations came forward in the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Altruism is either 1) person-based reciprocal altruism, or 2) gene-based kin altruism. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 2 'Darwin') | |
| A reaction: Flanagan obviously thinks there is also 'genuine psychological atruism'. Presumably we don't explain mathematics or music or the desire to travel as either contracts or genetics, so we have other explanations available. |
| 21835 | We need Eudaimonics - the empirical study of how we should flourish [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: It would be nice if I could advance the case for Eudaimonics - empirical enquiry into the nature, causes, and constituents of flourishing, …and the case for some ways of living and being as better than others. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 4 'Normative') | |
| A reaction: Things seem to be moving in that direction. Lots of statistics about happiness have been appearing. |
| 21831 | Alienation is not finding what one wants, or being unable to achieve it [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: What Marx called 'alienation' is the widespread condition of not being able to discover what one wants, or not being remotely positioned to achieve. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 2 'Expanding') | |
| A reaction: I took alienation to concern people's relationship to the means of production in their trade. On Flanagan's definition I would expect almost everyone aged under 20 to count as alienated. |
| 21832 | Buddhists reject God and the self, and accept suffering as key, and liberation through wisdom [Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Buddhism rejected the idea of a creator God, and the unchanging self [atman]. They accept the appearance-reality distinction, reward for virtue [karma], suffering defining our predicament, and that liberation [nirvana] is possible through wisdom. | |
| From: Owen Flanagan (The Really Hard Problem [2007], 3 'Buddhism') | |
| A reaction: [Compressed] Flanagan is an analytic philosopher and a practising Buddhist. Looking at a happiness map today which shows Europeans largely happy, and Africans largely miserable, I can see why they thought suffering was basic. |