43 ideas
| 23755 | Genius and love of truth are always accompanied by great humility [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Love of truth is always accompanied by humility, and real genius is nothing else but the supernatural virtue of humility in the domain of thought. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.87) | |
| A reaction: A striking and attractive thought, true of all the lovers of truth I have ever encountered. Socrates is the role model. She likens truth to an inarticulate plaintiff stammering before a judge who fluently manipulates opinions. |
| 10888 | Sets can be defined by 'enumeration', or by 'abstraction' (based on a property) [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: We can define a set by 'enumeration' (by listing the items, within curly brackets), or by 'abstraction' (by specifying the elements as instances of a property), pretending that they form a determinate totality. The latter is written {x | x is P}. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §1.3) |
| 10889 | The 'Cartesian Product' of two sets relates them by pairing every element with every element [Zalabardo] |
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Full Idea:
The 'Cartesian Product' of two sets, written A x B, is the relation which pairs every element of A with every element of B. So A x B = { |
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| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §1.6) |
| 10890 | A 'partial ordering' is reflexive, antisymmetric and transitive [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: A binary relation in a set is a 'partial ordering' just in case it is reflexive, antisymmetric and transitive. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §1.6) |
| 10886 | Determinacy: an object is either in a set, or it isn't [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: Principle of Determinacy: For every object a and every set S, either a is an element of S or a is not an element of S. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §1.2) |
| 10887 | Specification: Determinate totals of objects always make a set [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: Principle of Specification: Whenever we can specify a determinate totality of objects, we shall say that there is a set whose elements are precisely the objects that we have specified. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §1.3) | |
| A reaction: Compare the Axiom of Specification. Zalabardo says we may wish to consider sets of which we cannot specify the members. |
| 10897 | A first-order 'sentence' is a formula with no free variables [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: A formula of a first-order language is a 'sentence' just in case it has no free variables. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §3.2) |
| 10899 | Γ |= φ if φ is true when all of Γ is true, for all structures and interpretations [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: A formula is the 'logical consequence' of a set of formulas (Γ |= φ) if for every structure in the language and every variable interpretation of the structure, if all the formulas within the set are true and the formula itself is true. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §3.5) |
| 10893 | Γ |= φ for sentences if φ is true when all of Γ is true [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: A propositional logic sentence is a 'logical consequence' of a set of sentences (written Γ |= φ) if for every admissible truth-assignment all the sentences in the set Γ are true, then φ is true. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §2.4) | |
| A reaction: The definition is similar for predicate logic. |
| 10896 | Propositional logic just needs ¬, and one of ∧, ∨ and → [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: In propositional logic, any set containing ¬ and at least one of ∧, ∨ and → is expressively complete. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §2.8) |
| 10898 | The semantics shows how truth values depend on instantiations of properties and relations [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: The semantic pattern of a first-order language is the ways in which truth values depend on which individuals instantiate the properties and relations which figure in them. ..So we pair a truth value with each combination of individuals, sets etc. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §3.3) | |
| A reaction: So truth reduces to a combination of 'instantiations', which is rather like 'satisfaction'. |
| 10902 | We can do semantics by looking at given propositions, or by building new ones [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: We can look at semantics from the point of view of how truth values are determined by instantiations of properties and relations, or by asking how we can build, using the resources of the language, a proposition corresponding to a given semantic pattern. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §3.6) | |
| A reaction: The second version of semantics is model theory. |
| 10892 | We make a truth assignment to T and F, which may be true and false, but merely differ from one another [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: A truth assignment is a function from propositions to the set {T,F}. We will think of T and F as the truth values true and false, but for our purposes all we need to assume about the identity of these objects is that they are different from each other. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §2.4) | |
| A reaction: Note that T and F are 'objects'. This remark is important in understanding modern logical semantics. T and F can be equated to 1 and 0 in the language of a computer. They just mean as much as you want them to mean. |
| 10900 | Logically true sentences are true in all structures [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: In first-order languages, logically true sentences are true in all structures. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §3.5) |
| 10895 | 'Logically true' (|= φ) is true for every truth-assignment [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: A propositional logic sentence is 'logically true', written |= φ, if it is true for every admissible truth-assignment. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §2.4) |
| 10901 | Some formulas are 'satisfiable' if there is a structure and interpretation that makes them true [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: A set of formulas of a first-order language is 'satisfiable' if there is a structure and a variable interpretation in that structure such that all the formulas of the set are true. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §3.5) |
| 10894 | A sentence-set is 'satisfiable' if at least one truth-assignment makes them all true [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: A propositional logic set of sentences Γ is 'satisfiable' if there is at least one admissible truth-assignment that makes all of its sentences true. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §2.4) |
| 10903 | A structure models a sentence if it is true in the model, and a set of sentences if they are all true in the model [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: A structure is a model of a sentence if the sentence is true in the model; a structure is a model of a set of sentences if they are all true in the structure. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §3.6) |
| 10891 | If a set is defined by induction, then proof by induction can be applied to it [Zalabardo] |
| Full Idea: Defining a set by induction enables us to use the method of proof by induction to establish that all the elements of the set have a certain property. | |
| From: José L. Zalabardo (Introduction to the Theory of Logic [2000], §2.3) |
| 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. |
| 23747 | What is sacred is not a person, but the whole physical human being [Weil] |
| Full Idea: There is something sacred in every man, but it is not his person. Nor yet is it the human personality. It is this man; no more and no less. …It is he. The whole of him. The arms, they eyes, the thoughts, everything. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p,70) | |
| A reaction: I take her to be referring to exactly the concept of a 'person' which Locke introduced. It is important to remember that his concept is mainly forensic - as a concept of ownership and contracts. A person is an abstraction. Even a corpse is a human. |
| 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. |
| 23756 | The mind is imprisoned and limited by language, restricting our awareness of wider thoughts [Weil] |
| Full Idea: At the very best, a mind is enclosed in language as in a prison. It is limited to the number of relations which words can make simultaneously present to it; and remains in ignorance of thoughts which involve the combination of a greater number. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.89) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a germ of the type of view of language which blossoms in Derrida. But she is on to something. None of us grasp fully, I think, the non-linguistic nature of good thinking. |
| 23758 | Beauty is an attractive mystery, leaving nothing to be desired [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Beauty is the supreme mystery of the world. It is a gleam which attracts the attention and yet does nothing to sustain it. …While exciting desire, it makes clear that there is nothing in it to be desired, because what we want is that it should not change. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.92) | |
| A reaction: She attributes beauty to a supernatural source. I catalogue this idea under 'the sublime', rather than 'beauty'. It may be better to say that beauty inspires love, rather than desire. |
| 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. |
| 23760 | All we need are the unity of justice, truth and beauty [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Justice, truth, and beauty are sisters and comrades. With three such beautiful words we have no need to look for any others. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.93) | |
| A reaction: The embodiment of platonist values. Without the platonist ontology, I like the identification of a few core values, and have always thought that Beauty, Goodness and Truth were a well chosen trio. Swapping 'justice' for 'goodness' is interesting. |
| 23748 | The sacred in every human is their expectation of good rather than evil [Weil] |
| Full Idea: At the bottom of every human heart …there is something that goes on indomitably expecting, in the teeth of all crimes committed, suffered and witnessed, that good and not evil will be done to him. It is this above all that is sacred in every human being. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.71) | |
| A reaction: I'm thinking that this expectation may come from having at least one loving parent, and failing that there are people who have no such expectation as adults. Simone obviously thinks the hope runs deeper than that. |
| 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. |
| 23759 | Everything which originates in love is beautiful [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Everything which originates from pure love is lit with the radiance of beauty. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.93) | |
| A reaction: I suppose if I found a counterexample, she would say that is not 'pure' love. This sentence leaves open the possibility of beauty in the absence of love (such as a beautiful face noticed in the street). In her case, can beauty and love be separated? |
| 23762 | Evil is transmitted by comforts and pleasures, but mostly by doing harm to people [Weil] |
| Full Idea: One may transmit evil to a human being by flattering him or giving him comforts and pleasures; but most often men transmit evil to other men by doing them harm. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.94) | |
| A reaction: Some people receive harm very passively, especially if it is normal. What of tough love, which is erroneously seen as harm? |
| 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. |
| 23750 | It is not more money which the wretched members of society need [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Suppose the devil were bargaining for the soul of some wretch, and some pitying person said to the devil 'Shame on you, that commodity is worth twice as much'. Such is the sinister farce played by the working class unions, parties and intellectuals. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.80) | |
| A reaction: A striking thought. It is paradoxical when the working classes despise the middle classes, and yet aspire to be like them. It's hard to know what a mystic like Weil has in mind. An obvious thought is that the aspiration should be freedom, not money. |
| 23749 | The problem of the collective is not suppression of persons, but persons erasing themselves [Weil] |
| Full Idea: The chief danger does not lie in the collectivity's tendency to circumscribe the person, but in the person's tendency to immolate himself in the collective. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.78) | |
| A reaction: I'm guessing that in 1943 she had in mind both Nazis and Communists. She seems to articulate a strong form of liberalism in an interesting way. It sounds like a form of Bad Faith. |
| 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. |
| 23753 | People absurdly claim an equal share of things which are essentially privileged [Weil] |
| Full Idea: To the dimmed understanding of our age there seems nothing odd in claiming an equal share of privilege for everybody - an equal share in things whose essence is privilege. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.84) | |
| A reaction: Not sure what she has in mind. Probably not the finest food and drink. I suppose she is attacking the modern egalitarian view of democratic society. What things have privilege as their 'essence'? Being a 'winner'? Interesting, though. |
| 23751 | Rights are asserted contentiously, and need the backing of force [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Rights are always asserted in a tone of contention; and when this tone is adopted, it must rely upon force in the background, or else it will be laughed at. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.81) | |
| A reaction: This is the sort of observation which leads on to Foucault's account of all-pervasive power. Her observation may not be so sinister. It is obvious that introductions of new rights go against the grain of a conservative society - and so need a push. |
| 23752 | Giving centrality to rights stifles all impulses of charity [Weil] |
| Full Idea: To place the notion of rights at the centre of social conflicts is to inhibit any possible impulse of charity on both sides. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.83) | |
| A reaction: I think she exaggerates. To place personal charity at the centre of social conflicts strikes me as extremely conservative, and unlikely to improve the situation very much. I'm unsure how to reconcile this with Idea 23750. What sort of charity? |
| 23757 | The spirit of justice needs the full attention of truth, and that attention is love [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Because affliction and truth need the same kind of attention …the spirit of justice and the spirit of truth are one. The spirit of justice and truth is nothing else be a certain kind of attention, which is pure love. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.92) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about this as an observation, but as an inspiration it is very appealing, and (as so often with Weil) strikingly and attractively independent. I prefer love to arise naturally, rather than be a product of exhortation. |
| 23761 | Justice (concerning harm) is distinct from rights (concerning inequality) [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Justice is seeing that no harm is done to men. When a man cries inwardly 'Why am I being hurt?' he is being harmed. The other cry of 'Why have others got more than me?' refers to rights. We must distinguish them, and hush the second with law. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.93) | |
| A reaction: Her great passion is for justice, and so she downplays rights. The simple 'why am I being hurt?' has a horrible resonance in 1943. What of the hurts of disease? Are they unjust? |
| 23764 | The only thing in society worse than crime is repressive justice [Weil] |
| Full Idea: There is one, and only one, thing in society more hideous than crime - namely, repressive justice. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.95) | |
| A reaction: Presumably fans of 'repressive' justice would describe it as 'reformative' justice. In general, one of the most hideous parts of historical human societies has been the punishments they dished out (simply because they had the power to do it). |
| 23763 | Punishment aims at the good for men who don't desire it [Weil] |
| Full Idea: Punishment is solely a method of procuring pure good for men who do not desire it. The art of punishing is the art of awakening in a criminal, by pain or even death, the desire for pure good. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.95) | |
| A reaction: I know Weil is seen as some sort of saint, but this remark could have come from the Inquisition. I'm always alarmed by talk of 'pure' good and 'pure' evil, which seem to need a superior insight the rest of us lack. But see Idea 23764. |
| 23754 | The only choice is between supernatural good, or evil [Weil] |
| Full Idea: In all the crucial problems of human existence the only choice is between supernatural good on the one hand and evil on the other. | |
| From: Simone Weil (Human Personality [1943], p.86) | |
| A reaction: This idea strikes me as absurd, but I include it for a fuller picture of Simone Weil. Aristotle (my hero) is referred to, and labelled as more stupid than a village idiot. |
| 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. |