111 ideas
| 6200 | Wisdom is knowing the highest good, and conforming the will to it [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Wisdom, theoretically regarded, means the knowledge of the highest good and, practically, the conformability of the will to the highest good. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.V) | |
| A reaction: This seems a narrow account of wisdom, focusing entirely on goodness rather than truth. A mind that valued nothing but understood everything would have a considerable degree of wisdom, in the normal use of that word. |
| 6207 | What fills me with awe are the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the oftener and the more steadily we reflect on them: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], Concl) | |
| A reaction: I am beginning to think that the two major issues of all philosophy are ontology and metaethics, and Kant is close to agreeing with me. He certainly wasn't implying that astronomy was a key aspect of philosophy. |
| 6184 | Consistency is the highest obligation of a philosopher [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Consistency is the highest obligation of a philosopher and yet the most rarely found. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.1.§3) | |
| A reaction: I agree with this, and it also strikes me as the single most important principle of Kant's philosophy, which is the key to his whole moral theory. |
| 6203 | Metaphysics is just a priori universal principles of physics [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Metaphysics only contains the pure a priori principles of physics in their universal import. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.VI) | |
| A reaction: 'Universal' seems to imply 'necessary'. If you thought that no a priori universal principles were possible, you would be left with physics. I quite like the definition, except that I think there would still be metaphysics even if there were no physics. |
| 14227 | We could refer to tables as 'xs that are arranged tablewise' [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: We could paraphrase 'some chairs are heavier than some tables' as 'there are xs that are arranged chairwise and there are ys that are arranged tablewise and the xs are heavier than the ys'. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 11) | |
| A reaction: Liggins notes that this involves plural quantification. Being 'arranged tablewise' has become a rather notorious locution in modern ontology. We still have to retain identity, to pick out the xs. |
| 19023 | Slippery slope arguments are challenges to show where a non-arbitrary boundary lies [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Slippery slope arguments are not intended as demonstrative arguments, but rather as a challenge to show where a boundary is, and to show that the boundary is not arbitrary. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 5.3.3) | |
| A reaction: [extracted from details of its context] You could respond by saying that a slippery slope levels off, rather than hitting a wall or plunging to perdition. |
| 19033 | Deontic modalities are 'ought-to-be', for sentences, and 'ought-to-do' for predicates [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Deontic modality can be divided into sentence-modifying 'ought-to-be' modals, and predicate-modifying 'ought-to-do' modals. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 6.9.2) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Brennan 1993] These two seem to correspond to what is 'good' (ought to be), and what is 'right' (ought to do). Since I like that distinction, I also like this one. |
| 19032 | S5 is undesirable, as it prevents necessities from having contingent grounds [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Wedgwood (2007:220) argues that S5 is undesirable because it excludes that necessary truths may have contingent grounds. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 6.4 n5) | |
| A reaction: Cameron defends the possibility of necessity grounded in contingency, against Blackburn's denial of it. It's interesting that we choose the logic on the basis of the metaphysics. Shouldn't there be internal reasons for a logic's correctness? |
| 19036 | The Barcan formula endorses either merely possible things, or makes the unactualised impossible [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Subscribers to the Barcan formula must either be committed to the existence of mere possibilia (such as possible unicorns), or deny many unactualised possibilities of existence. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 7.5) | |
| A reaction: It increasingly strikes me that the implications of the Barcan formula are ridiculous. Williamson is its champion, but I'm blowed if I can see why. What could a possible unicorn be like? Without them, must we say unicorns are impossible? |
| 10662 | Mereology is 'nihilistic' (just atoms) or 'universal' (no restrictions on what is 'whole') [Inwagen, by Varzi] |
| Full Idea: Van Ingwagen writes of 'mereological nihilism' (that only mereological atoms exist) and of 'mereological universalism' (adhering to the principle of Unrestricted Composition). | |
| From: report of Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], p.72-) by Achille Varzi - Mereology 4.3 | |
| A reaction: They both look mereologically nihilistic to me, in comparison with an account that builds on 'natural' wholes and their parts. You can only be 'unrestricted' if you view the 'wholes' in your vast ontology as pretty meaningless (as Lewis does, Idea 10660). |
| 17587 | The 'Law' of Excluded Middle needs all propositions to be definitely true or definitely false [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: I think the validity of the 'Law' of Excluded Middle depends on the assumption that every proposition is definitely true or definitely false. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: I think this is confused. He cites vagueness as the problem, but that is a problem for Bivalence. If excluded middle is read as 'true or not-true', that leaves the meaning of 'not-true' open, and never mentions the bivalent 'false'. |
| 17558 | Variables are just like pronouns; syntactic explanations get muddled over dummy letters [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Explanations in terms of syntax do not satisfactorily distinguish true variables from dummy or schematic letters. Identifying variables with pronouns, however, provides a genuine explanation of what variables are. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 02) | |
| A reaction: I like this because it shows that our ordinary thought and speech use variables all the time ('I've forgotten something - what was it?'). He says syntax is fine for maths, but not for ordinary understanding. |
| 17583 | There are no heaps [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Fortunately ....there are no heaps. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: This is the nihilist view of (inorganic) physical objects. If a wild view solves all sorts of problems, one should take it serious. It is why I take reductive physicalism about the mind seriously. (Well, it's true, actually) |
| 19034 | The world is either a whole made of its parts, or a container which contains its parts [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: We can think of the world as a 'whole' that has everything as its parts, like raisins in a cake, or we can think of the world as a 'container', which is disjoint from everything there is, like a bottle containing water. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 7.3) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Space and time seem to have a special role here, and it is hard to think of any other candidates for being the 'container'. I think I will apply my 'what's it made of' test to ontology, and opt for the world as a 'whole'. |
| 19015 | Grounding can be between objects ('relational'), or between sentences ('operational') [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: 'Relational' grounding is between entities, best expressed by the two-place predicate 'x grounds y'. 'Operational' grounding is between sentences, best expressed by the two-place sentence operator read as 'because of' or 'in virtue of'. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 1.6) |
| 19012 | The Humean supervenience base entirely excludes modality [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Humean supervenience excludes modality - the whole modal package - from the supervenience base. The Humean world is, at root, thoroughly non-modal. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This sums up my problem with David Lewis with perfect clarity. He is just excessively empirical. Hume himself also excluded modality from the basic impressions. Locke allows powerful essences (even if they are well hidden). |
| 17578 | I reject talk of 'stuff', and treat it in terms of particles [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: I have a great deal of difficulty with an ontology that includes 'stuffs' in addition to things. ...I prefer to replace talk of sameness of matter with talk of sameness of particles. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 14) | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen is wedded to the idea that reality is composed of 'simples' - even if physicists seem now to talk of 'fields' as much as they do about objects in the fields. Has philosophy yet caught up with Maxwell? |
| 17582 | Singular terms can be vague, because they can contain predicates, which can be vague [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Since singular terms can contain predicates, and since vague predicates are common, vague singular terms are common. For 'the tallest man that Sally knows' there are lots of men for whom it is unclear whether Sally knows them. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 17) |
| 19024 | A determinate property must be a unique instance of the determinable class [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: The crucial feature of the determinates / determinables relation is that to possess the determinable property, an object must possess exactly one of the determinate properties. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 5.7.2) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a determinable being a function, and the determinate being its output. If 'scarlet' is a determinate of the determinables 'red' or 'coloured', it is not obvious that there is only one possible shade of scarlet. This schema oversimplifies. |
| 19021 | I have an 'iterated ability' to learn the violin - that is, the ability to acquire that ability [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: I do not have the ability to play the violin. Nor does my desk. Unlike my desk, however, I possess the ability to learn to play the violin - the ability, that is, to acquire the ability to play the violin. I have an 'iterated ability' to play the violin. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 4.6) | |
| A reaction: An important idea, though the examples are more likely to come from human behaviour than from the non-human physical world. |
| 19016 | We should think of dispositions as 'to do' something, not as 'to do something, if ....' [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: We should think in terms of dispositions in terms of the manifestation alone - not as a disposition to ...if..., but as a disposition to ..., full stop. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: This way of individuating dispositions seems plausible. Some dispositions only have one trigger, but others have many. All sorts of things are inclined to trigger a human smile, but we are just disposed to smile. Some people smile at disasters. |
| 19017 | Nomological dispositions (unlike ordinary ones) have to be continually realised [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Nomological dispositions such as electric charge seem different from ordinary dispositions. A particle's being electrically charged is not just a possibility of exerting a certain force. Rather, the particle has to exert a force in certain circumstances. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: I can only pull when there is something to pull, but a magnet seems to have a 'field' of attraction which is pullish in character. Does it detect something to pull (like a monad)? Can there be a force which has no object? |
| 19014 | How can spatiotemporal relations be understood in dispositional terms? [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Spatiotemporal relations are a prime example of properties that are difficult to understand in dispositional terms. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 1.6) | |
| A reaction: [Vetter refers to A.Bird 2007 Ch.8 for an attempt] One approach would be to question whether they are 'properties'. I don't think of relations as properties, even if they are predicates. Is space a property of something? |
| 17556 | Material objects are in space and time, move, have a surface and mass, and are made of some stuff [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A thing is a material object if it occupies space and endures through time and can move about in space (literally move, unlike a shadow or wave or reflection) and has a surface and has a mass and is made of a certain stuff or stuffs. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 01) | |
| A reaction: It is not at all clear what electrons (which must count for him as 'simples') are made of. |
| 8264 | Maybe table-shaped particles exist, but not tables [Inwagen, by Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Van Ingwagen holds that although table-shaped collections of particles exist, tables do not. | |
| From: report of Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], Ch.13) by E.J. Lowe - The Possibility of Metaphysics 2.3 | |
| A reaction: I find this idea appealing. See the ideas of Trenton Merricks. When you get down to micro-level, it is hard to individuate a table among the force fields, and hard to distinguish a table from a smashed or burnt table. An ontology without objects? |
| 17565 | Nihilism says composition between single things is impossible [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Nihilism about objects says there is a Y such that the Xs compose it if and only if there is only one of the Xs. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 08) | |
| A reaction: He says that Unger, the best known 'nihilist' about objects, believes a different version - claiming there are composites, but they never make up the ordinary objects we talk about. |
| 14228 | If there are no tables, but tables are things arranged tablewise, the denial of tables is a contradiction [Liggins on Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Van Inwagen says 'there are no tables', and 'there are tables' means 'there are some things arranged tablewise'. Presumably 'there are no tables' negates the latter claim, saying no things are arranged tablewise. But he should think that is false. | |
| From: comment on Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 10) by David Liggins - Nihilism without Self-Contradiction 3 | |
| A reaction: Liggins's nice paper shows that Van Inwagen is in a potential state of contradiction when he starts saying that there are no tables, but that there are things arranged tablewise, and that they amount to tables. Liggins offers him an escape. |
| 14468 | Actions by artefacts and natural bodies are disguised cooperations, so we don't need them [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: All the activities apparently carried out by shelves and stars and other artefacts and natural bodies can be understood as disguised cooperative activities. And, therefore, we are not forced to grant existence to any artefacts or natural bodies. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 12) | |
| A reaction: In 'the crowd tore her to pieces' are we forced to accept the existence of a crowd? We can't say 'Jack tore her to pieces' and 'Jill tore her to pieces'. If a plural quantification is unavoidable, we have to accept the plurality. Perhaps. |
| 17571 | Every physical thing is either a living organism or a simple [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: The thesis about composition and parthood that I am advocating has far-reaching ontological consequences: that every physical thing is either a living organism or a simple. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 10) | |
| A reaction: A 'simple' is a placeholder for anything considered to be a fundamental unit of existence (such as an electron or a quark). This amazingly sharp distinction strikes me as utterly implausible. There is too much in the middle ground. |
| 17562 | The statue and lump seem to share parts, but the statue is not part of the lump [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Those who believe that the statue is distinct from the lump should concede that whatever shares a part with the statue shares a part with the lump but deny that the statue is a part of the lump. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 05) | |
| A reaction: Standard mereology says if they share all their parts then they are the same thing, so it is hard to explain how they are 'distinct'. The distinction is only modal - that they could be separated (by squashing, or by part substitution). |
| 17574 | If you knead clay you make an infinite series of objects, but they are rearrangements, not creations [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: If you can make a (random) gollyswoggle by accident by kneading clay, then you must be causing the generation and corruption of a series of objects of infinitesimal duration. ...We have not augmented the furniture of the world but only rearranged it. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 13) | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen's final conclusion is a bit crazy, but I am in sympathy with his general scepticism about what sorts of things definitively constitute 'objects'. He overrates simples, and he overrates lives. |
| 17531 | I assume matter is particulate, made up of 'simples' [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: I assume in this book that matter is ultimately particulate. Every material being is composed of things that have no proper parts: 'elementary particles' or 'mereological atoms' or 'metaphysical simples'. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], Pref) | |
| A reaction: It may be that modern physics doesn't support this, if 'fields' is the best term for what is fundamental. Best to treat his book as hypothetical - IF there are just simples, proceed as follows. |
| 17560 | If contact causes composition, do two colliding balls briefly make one object? [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: If composition just requires contact, if I cause the cue ball to rebound from the eight ball, do I thereby create a short-lived object shaped like two slightly flattened spheres in contact? | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 03) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] |
| 17561 | If bricks compose a house, that is at least one thing, but it might be many things [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: If composition just requires contact, that tells us that the bricks of a house compose at least one thing; it does not tell us that they also compose at most one thing. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 04) |
| 17566 | I think parthood involves causation, and not just a reasonably stable spatial relationship [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: I propose that parthood essentially involves causation. Too many philosophers have supposed that objects compose something when and only when they stand in some (more or less stable) spatial relationship to one another. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 09) | |
| A reaction: I have to say that I like this, even though it comes from a thinker who is close to nihilism about ordinary non-living objects. He goes on to say that only a 'life' provides the right sort of causal relationship. |
| 14230 | We can deny whole objects but accept parts, by referring to them as plurals within things [Inwagen, by Liggins] |
| Full Idea: Van Inwagen's claim that nothing has parts causes incredulity. ..But the problem is not with endorsing the sentence 'Some things have parts'; it is with interpreting this sentence by means of singular resources rather than plural ones. | |
| From: report of Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 7) by David Liggins - Nihilism without Self-Contradiction | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen notoriously denies the existence of normal physical objects. Liggins shows that modern formal plural quantification gives a better way of presenting his theory, by accepting tables and parts of tables as plurals of basic entities. |
| 17557 | Special Composition Question: when is a thing part of something? [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: The Special Composition Question asks, In what circumstances is a thing a (proper) part of something? | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 02) | |
| A reaction: [He qualifies this formulation as 'misleading'] It's a really nice basic question for the metaphysics of objects. |
| 17564 | The essence of a star includes the released binding energy which keeps it from collapse [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: I think it is part of the essence of a star that the radiation pressures that oppose the star's tendency to gravitational collapse has its source in the release of no-longer-needed nuclear binding energy when colliding nuclei fuse in the star's hot core. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 07) | |
| A reaction: A perfect example of giving the essence of something as the bottom level of its explanation. This even comes from someone who doesn't really believe in stars! |
| 17575 | The persistence of artifacts always covertly involves intelligent beings [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Statements that are apparently about the persistence of artifacts make covert reference to the dispositions of intelligent beings to maintain certain arrangements of matter. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 13) | |
| A reaction: If you build a self-sustaining windmill that pumps water, that seems to have an identity of its own, apart from the intentions of whoever makes it and repairs it. The function of an artefact is not just the function we want it to have. |
| 17577 | When an electron 'leaps' to another orbit, is the new one the same electron? [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Is the 'new' electron in the lower orbit the one that was in the higher orbit? Physics, as far as I can tell, has nothing to say about this. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 14) | |
| A reaction: I suspect that physicists would say that philosophers are worrying about such questions because they haven't grasped the new conceptual scheme that emerged in 1926. The poor mutts insist on hanging on to 'objects'. |
| 17589 | If you reject transitivity of vague identity, there is no Ship of Theseus problem [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: If you have rejected the Principle of the Transitivity of (vague) Identity, it is hard to see how the problem of the Ship of Theseus could arise. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: I think this may well be the best solution to the whole problem |
| 19030 | Why does origin matter more than development; why are some features of origin more important? [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Not every feature of an individual's origin is plausibly considered necessary, so we can distinguish two questions: 'why origin, rather than development?', and 'why these particular features of origin?'. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: [she cites P. Mackie 1998] The point is that exactly where someone was born doesn't seem vital. If it is nothing more than that every contingent object must have an origin, that is not very exciting. |
| 19040 | We take origin to be necessary because we see possibilities as branches from actuality [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: The plausibility of the necessity of origin is a symptom of our general tendency to think of possibility in terms of the 'branching model' - that unactualised possibilities must branch off from actuality, at some point. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 7.9) | |
| A reaction: [she cites P. Mackie 1998] It is hard to see how we could flatly deny some possibilities which had absolutely no connection with actuality, and were probably quite unimaginable for us. |
| 17588 | We should talk of the transitivity of 'identity', and of 'definite identity' [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: In some contexts, the principle of 'the transitivity of identity' should be called 'the transitivity of definite identity'. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: He is making room for a person to retain identity despite having changed. Applause from me. |
| 19008 | The modern revival of necessity and possibility treated them as special cases of quantification [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Necessity and possibility had a revival with the development of modal logic, treating them as special cases of the existential and universal quantifiers, ranging over an infinity of possible worlds. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: The problem seems to be that possible worlds offer a very useful and interesting 'model' of modality, but say nothing at all about its nature. Any more than a weather map will show you what weather is. |
| 19029 | It is necessary that p means that nothing has the potentiality for not-p [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Necessities mark the limits of the potentialities that objects have. More precisely, it is necessary that p just in case nothing has, or had, or will have a potentiality to be such that not-p. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: [See Vetter's other ideas for her potentiality account of modality] If we wish to build a naturalistic account of modality (and if you don't want that then your untethered metaphysics will drift away in logical space) then this is the way to go. |
| 19028 | Possibilities are potentialities of actual things, but abstracted from their location [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: When we speak of possibility, we speak of potentiality in abstraction from its possessor; a possibility is a potentiality somewhere or other in the world, no matter where. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 6.1) | |
| A reaction: I note that, as so often, this is psychological abstraction, which is usually sneered at by modern philosophers (e.g. Geach), and yet is employed all the time. This is Vetter's key thesis, which I like. |
| 19010 | All possibility is anchored in the potentiality of individual objects [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Potentiality is, metaphorically speaking, possibility anchored in individual objects; I claim that all possibility is thus anchored in some individual object(s) or other. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: This will be fine for specific physical possibilities, but may become tricky for possibilities that are increasingly abstract, or universal, or idealised. I agree with the general approach. Anchor modality in reality (which is physical!). |
| 19013 | Possibility is a generalised abstraction from the potentiality of its bearer [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: We should think of possibility as potentiality in abstraction from its bearer. So 'it is possible that p' is defined as 'something has an iterated potentiality for it to be the case that p'. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 1.4) | |
| A reaction: If possibilities are abstractions from potentialities, I am inclined the treat potentialities as abstractions from dispositions, and dispositions (and properties) as abstractions from powers. Powers are not abstractions - they are the reality. |
| 23705 | A potentiality may not be a disposition, but dispositions are strong potentialities [Vetter, by Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| Full Idea: Although not all potentialities are dispositions, Vetter claims that all dispositions are potentialities which are had to a sufficiently high degree. | |
| From: report of Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015]) by Friend/Kimpton-Nye - Dispositions and Powers 2.4.2 | |
| A reaction: This sounds plausible. A potentiality could be faint or negligible, but once it is a serious possibility it becomes a 'disposition'. ...I suppose. But if the meteor is probably going to hit my house, it doesn't mean it has a disposition to do so. |
| 19009 | Potentiality does the explaining in metaphysics; we don't explain it away or reduce it [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: This book is a plea for recognising potentiality as an explanans in the metaphysics of modality, rather than as something in need of explanation or reduction. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 1.1) | |
| A reaction: Something has to do the explaining, and it is obviously much better to have some aspect of the real world do the job, rather than remote abstractions such as laws, possible worlds or Forms. Personally I like the potentiality of 'powers'. |
| 19027 | Potentiality logic is modal system T. Stronger systems collapse iterations, and necessitate potentials [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: The logic for potentiality corresponds to modal system T, the minimum for metaphysics. The S4 axiom ◊◊φ → ◊φ says iterated potentialities collapse, and the S5 ◊φ → □◊φ says potentialities can't be lost. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 5.9) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems persuasive. I nice example of modern analytic metaphysics, that you have to find a logic that suits your theory. N.Salmon defends system T for all of metaphysics, though most people favour S5. |
| 19019 | Potentiality is the common genus of dispositions, abilities, and similar properties [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Potentiality can now be recognised as the common genus of dispositions and such related properties as abilities. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: This is the reason why Vetter defends a metaphysics of modality based on potentialities, rather than on narrower concepts such as dispositions, powers or essences. She can evade the problems which those narrower concepts raise. |
| 19031 | There are potentialities 'to ...', but possibilities are 'that ....'. [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Potentialities are 'potentialities to ....', while possibilities are 'possibilities that ....'. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 6.4) | |
| A reaction: This feels a bit like a stipulation, rather than a precise description of normal usage. That said, it is quite a nice distinction. It sounds as if an event follows a potentiality, and a state of affairs follows a possibility. Active and passive? |
| 19025 | Potentialities may be too weak to count as 'dispositions' [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Potentialities may get exercised despite having a degree that is too low for them to qualify as dispositions. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 5.7.4) | |
| A reaction: The key reason why her book is called 'Potentialities', rather than 'Dispositions'. She still wants to offer a naturalistic picture which ties potentialities to individual objects, but I am wondering whether potentialities are too abstract for the job. |
| 19022 | Water has a potentiality to acquire a potentiality to break (by freezing) [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Water has no potentiality to break. But water has a potentiality to be frozen and turn into ice, which does have a potentiality to break. So water has a potentiality to acquire a potentiality to break. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 4.6) | |
| A reaction: Thus potentially has an 'iterated' character to it, and an appropriate modal logic for it will have to allow for those iterations. She suggests a version of System T modal logic. |
| 6181 | Necessity cannot be extracted from an empirical proposition [Kant] |
| Full Idea: It is a clear contradiction to try to extract necessity from an empirical proposition. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], Pref) | |
| A reaction: This is precisely the idea which Kripke challenged, claiming that the necessary essences of natural kinds such as gold have to be discovered empirically. All my intuitions are with Kant (and Hume) on this, but it is a complex issue… |
| 17572 | Actuality proves possibility, but that doesn't explain how it is possible [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A proof of actuality is a proof of possibility, but that does not invariably explain the possibility whose existence it demonstrates, for we may know that a certain thing is actual (and hence possible) but have no explanation of how it could be possible. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 12) | |
| A reaction: I like this, because my project is to see all of philosophy in terms of explanation rather than of description. |
| 19011 | If worlds are sets of propositions, how do we know which propositions are genuinely possible? [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: If possible worlds are sets of propositions, we need some way to distinguish those sets of propositions that do from those that do not correspond to genuine possibilities. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: The idea of a 'genuine' possibility does not seem to play a role in the conceptual scheme of those who treat possibility entirely in terms of possible worlds. If possibility is primitive, or is a set of worlds, there can be no criterion for 'genuine'. |
| 17579 | Counterparts reduce counterfactual identity to problems about similarity relations [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Counterpart Theory essentially reduces all problems about counterfactual identity to problems about choosing appropriate similarity relations. That is, Counterpart Theory essentially eliminates problems of counterfactual identity as such. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 14) |
| 17590 | A merely possible object clearly isn't there, so that is a defective notion [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: The notion of a merely possible object is an even more defective notion than the notion of a borderline object; after all, a merely possible object is an object that definitely isn't there. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 19) |
| 19037 | Are there possible objects which nothing has ever had the potentiality to produce? [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Is it not possible that there be objects with (natural) properties that no actual thing ever had the potentiality to have, to produce, or constitute? (Call such properties 'super-alien properties'). | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 7.5) | |
| A reaction: This is a problem for her potentiality account of possibility. Her solution is (roughly) to either deny the super-aliens, or have chains of iterated possibility which take this case back to actuality. That sounds OK to me. |
| 17591 | Merely possible objects must be consistent properties, or haecceities [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Talk of merely possible objects may be redeemed in either maximally consistent sets of properties or in haecceities. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 19) |
| 19018 | Explanations by disposition are more stable and reliable than those be external circumstances [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Patterns of behaviour may be explained by circumstances external to the individual, but dispositional explanations, based on the instrinsic make-up of individuals are typically more reliable and stable. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This is very nice support for the view I have been defending. She doesn't deal in essences, and prefers 'potentialities' (as broader) to 'dispositions'. The point is to explain events by the natures of the ingredients. |
| 19020 | Grounding is a kind of explanation, suited to metaphysics [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Grounding is a kind of explanation - and specifically, the kind of metaphysical explanation that metaphysicians are after. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: Depending on how you interpret 'grounding', it is plausible that it is the sort of explanation that physicists and economists are after as well. If the aim is to understand the structure of everything, the target is to know what grounds what. |
| 6183 | Can pure reason determine the will, or are empirical conditions relevant? [Kant] |
| Full Idea: This is the first question: Is pure reason sufficient of itself to determine the will, or is it only as empirically conditioned that it can do so? | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be the core question of intellectualism, which goes back to Socrates. You can only accept the question if you accept the concept of 'pure' reason. Values seem to be needed for action, as well as empirical circumstances. |
| 6191 | The will is the faculty of purposes, which guide desires according to principles [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The will could be defined as the faculty of purposes, since they are always determining grounds of the faculty of desire according to principles. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.II) | |
| A reaction: Do animals have wills? Kant implies that you can only have a will if you have principles. Compare Hobbes' rather less elevated definition of the will (Idea 2362). |
| 6190 | The sole objects of practical reason are the good and the evil [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The sole objects of a practical reason are thus those of the good and the evil. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.II) | |
| A reaction: Of course, you may aim to achieve x because it is good, while I judge x to be evil. |
| 18235 | Only human reason can confer value on our choices [Kant, by Korsgaard] |
| Full Idea: Kant argues that only human reason is in a position to confer value on the objects of human choice. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788]) by Christine M. Korsgaard - Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value 8 'Kant' | |
| A reaction: If the source of value is humans, then it is not immediately clear why it is only our reason that does the conferring. What is the status of a choice on which reason fails to confer value? The idea is that reason, unlike desire, has intrinsic value. |
| 6196 | People cannot come to morality through feeling, because morality must not be sensuous [Kant] |
| Full Idea: In the subject there is no antecedent feeling tending to morality; that is impossible, because all feeling is sensuous, and the drives of the moral disposition must be free from every sensuous condition. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.III) | |
| A reaction: I'm not quite clear (even after reading Kant) why moral drives 'must' be free of sensuousness. Aristotle gives a much better account, when he tells us that the sensuous drives must be trained in the right way, and must be in harmony with the reason. |
| 18675 | Kant may rate two things as finally valuable: having a good will, and deserving happiness [Orsi on Kant] |
| Full Idea: In some interpretations it appears that for Kant two things are finally valuable: good will (unconditionally), and deserved happiness (conditionally on the value of good will). | |
| From: comment on Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788]) by Francesco Orsi - Value Theory 2.2 | |
| A reaction: It doesn't sound difficult to reconcile these two. Just ask 'what is required of someone to deserve happiness?'. |
| 22007 | An autonomous agent has dignity [Würde], which has absolute worth [Kant, by Pinkard] |
| Full Idea: For Kant, there is something about beings that can act autonomously that is itself of 'absolute worth', which Kant calls the 'dignity' [Würde] of each such agent. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788]) by Terry Pinkard - German Philosophy 1760-1860 02 | |
| A reaction: This answers my puzzle about where Kant's fundamental values come from. Surely wicked actions can be autonomous? Autonomous actions aren't thereby good actions. A 'good' will, course, whatever that is. Rational? My problem with existentialist ethics. |
| 18234 | The good will is unconditionally good, because it is the only possible source of value [Kant, by Korsgaard] |
| Full Idea: Kant argues that the good will is unconditionally good because it is the only thing able to be a source of value. | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788]) by Christine M. Korsgaard - Aristotle and Kant on the Source of Value 8 'Kant' | |
| A reaction: The obvious worry is the circularity of resting a theory of value on identifying a 'good' will as its source. |
| 6192 | Good or evil cannot be a thing, but only a maxim of action, making the person good or evil [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If something is held to be absolutely good or evil in all respects and without qualification, it could not be a thing but only the manner of acting, i.e., it could only be the maxim of the will, and consequently the acting person himself is good or evil. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.II) | |
| A reaction: It goes on to deny that pain is intrinsically evil, but his reason for the claim is not clear. Nevetheless, I think he is right. This remark is an important bridge between Enlightenment concerns with law and Greek concerns with character. |
| 6197 | Morality involves duty and respect for law, not love of the outcome [Kant] |
| Full Idea: All the morality of actions may be placed in their necessity from duty and from respect for the law, and not from love for or leaning toward that which the action is to produce. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.III) | |
| A reaction: Kant tries to reject consequentialism, but you cannot assess your duty or the universal law without an assessment of probable consequences, and we could never choose between laws if we did not already see value in the outcome. |
| 6193 | Our happiness is all that matters, not as a sensation, but as satisfaction with our whole existence [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Our happiness is the only thing of importance, provided this is judged, as reason requires, not according to transitory sensation but according to the influence which this contingency has on our whole existence and our satisfaction with it. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.II) | |
| A reaction: This is closer to the Greek eudaimonia than to the modern conception of happiness, which is largely just a feeling. Kant's view seems more like a private judgement on your whole life, where the Greek idea seems more public and objective. |
| 1452 | Happiness is the condition of a rational being for whom everything goes as they wish [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Happiness is the condition of a rational being in the world with whom everything goes according to his wish and will. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.V) | |
| A reaction: For such a sophisticated and rational philosopher this seems a rather crude notion. Reluctant alcoholics don't fit. Bradley has a much better definition (Idea 5655). |
| 1454 | Morality is not about making ourselves happy, but about being worthy of happiness [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Morality is not properly the doctrine of how we should make ourselves happy, but how we should become worthy of happiness. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.V) | |
| A reaction: Whatever else you think of Kant's moral theory, this remark is a clarion call we can all recognise. Suppose we all somehow ended up in a state of maximal happiness by systematically betraying one another. |
| 6194 | The highest worth for human beings lies in dispositions, not just actions [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The highest worth which human beings can and should procure for themselves lies in dispositions and not in actions only. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.II) | |
| A reaction: This leaves the problem of the well-meaning fool, who has wonderful dispositions but poor judgement. What Kant is describing here is better known as virtue. See Idea 58. |
| 6198 | Virtue is the supreme state of our pursuit of happiness, and so is supreme good [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Virtue (as the worthiness to be happy) is the supreme condition of whatever appears to us to be desirable and thus of all our pursuit of happiness and, consequently, the supreme good. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II) | |
| A reaction: Thus Kant can claim to be a virtue theorist, but giving us a very different account of how virtue arises. He emphasises elsewhere (Idea 6197) that the supreme good must be in the will, not in the outcome. 'Virtue' is here a rather thin concept. |
| 1456 | Moral law is holy, and the best we can do is achieve virtue through respect for the law [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The moral law is holy (unyielding), although all the moral perfection to which man can attain is still only virtue, that is, a rightful disposition arising from respect for the law. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.V) | |
| A reaction: In comparison with Aristotle's view of virtue this is very passive and external. Aristotle doesn't need laws for virtue, he needs inner harmony and a grasp of what has high value. |
| 6185 | No one would lend money unless a universal law made it secure, even after death [Kant] |
| Full Idea: If my maxim is 'augment my property by all safe means', I can't make that a law allowing me to keep a dead man's loan, because no one would make a loan if that were the moral law. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.1.§4) | |
| A reaction: This is a simple illustration of Kant's strategy and it shows clearly how, for all his talk of 'pure reason', his moral law is strongly guided by consequences, and that these can only judged by prior values - for example, that loans are a good thing. |
| 6187 | Universality determines the will, and hence extends self-love into altruism [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The form of universality is itself the determining ground of the will, …and from this limitation alone, and not from the addition of any exernal drive, the concept of obligation arises to extend the maxim of self-love also to the happiness of others. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.1.§8) | |
| A reaction: This is the heroic and optimistic part of Kant's philosophy, the attempt to derive altruism from pure reason. The claim seems to be that maxims don't motivate until they have been universalised. I fear that only altruism could add such motivation. |
| 6201 | Everyone (even God) must treat rational beings as ends in themselves, and not just as means [Kant] |
| Full Idea: In the order of ends, man (and every rational being) is an end in himself, i.e., he is never to be used merely as a means for someone (even for God) without at the same time being himself an end. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.V) | |
| A reaction: The worry here is that Kant has set up an exam that you have to pass before you can be treated as a moral end. Animals and the ecosystem will fail the exam, and even some human beings will be borderline cases. We should respect everything. |
| 6186 | A holy will is incapable of any maxims which conflict with the moral law [Kant] |
| Full Idea: A holy will is one which is incapable of any maxims which conflict with the moral law | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.1.§7) | |
| A reaction: If such a will is 'incapable' of conflicting with moral law, it will not need to think or assess before action. This means that Kant's moral ideal can ultimately exclude the free-thinking intellect. Kant is describing a state of true Aristotelian virtue. |
| 6195 | Reason cannot solve the problem of why a law should motivate the will [Kant] |
| Full Idea: How a law in itself can be the direct motive of the will (which is the essence of morality) is an insoluble problem for the human reason. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.III) | |
| A reaction: If that is the great man's final word, then it is tempting to switch to an empirical moral theory, such as that of Hobbes or Hume or E.O. Wilson, which starts from what motivations are available, and builds morality up from that. |
| 6188 | A permanent natural order could not universalise a rule permitting suicide [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The maxim of freely disposing of my life could not hold as a universal law of nature, …because no one could choose to end his life, for such an arrangement could not constitute a permanent natural order. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.1.1.I) | |
| A reaction: This sort of claim brings out the advantanges of Aristotelian 'particularism' (expounded by Dancy). Obviously universal suicide isn't promising, but no one wants that. A few suicides in extreme cases will have no effect at all on the natural order. |
| 19039 | The view that laws are grounded in substance plus external necessity doesn't suit dispositionalism [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: The Armstrong/Tooley/Dretske view, which takes laws to be substantial but grounded in a relation of nomic necessitation external to the properties themselves, is not an attractive option for the dispositionalist. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 7.8) | |
| A reaction: The point is that the dispositionalist sees laws as grounded in the properties. I prefer her other option, of dispositionalism plus a 'shallow' view of laws (which she attributes to Mumford). The laws are as Lewis says, but powers explain them. |
| 19038 | Dispositional essentialism allows laws to be different, but only if the supporting properties differ [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Even on the dispositional essentialist view the world might have been governed by different laws, if those laws involved different properties. What is excluded is the possibility of different laws involving the same properties as our actual laws. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 7.8) | |
| A reaction: Important. Critics of dispositional essentialism accuse it of promoting the idea that the laws of nature are necessary, a claim for which we obviously have no evidence. I prefer to say they are necessary given that 'stuff', rather than those properties. |
| 17563 | The strong force pulls, but also pushes apart if nucleons get too close together [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: The strong force doesn't always pull nucleons together, but pushes them apart if they get too close. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 07) | |
| A reaction: Philosophers tend to learn their physics from other philosophers. But that's because philosophers are brilliant at picking out the interesting parts of physics, and skipping the boring stuff. |
| 19026 | If time is symmetrical between past and future, why do they look so different? [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Any defender of the symmetry of time will have to provide some explanation of the obstinate appearance that the future is very different from the past. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 5.8) | |
| A reaction: Presumably you have to say that it is all there, but only one end of the time spectrum is revealed to us, namely the past. But how do we get this uniquely lopsided view? Being an ominiscient god is more obvious than being a lopsided human. |
| 19041 | Presentists explain cross-temporal relations using surrogate descriptions [Vetter] |
| Full Idea: Presentists usually deal with the lack of cross-temporal relations by the construction of a surrogate, by way of paraphrasing the objectionable relation ascriptions. 'I admire Socrates' becomes 'I admire the Socrates properties'. | |
| From: Barbara Vetter (Potentiality [2015], 7.9) | |
| A reaction: [compressed. The cites Markosian 2004:63] Why can't I just say 'I admire Socrates, who no longer exists'? The present includes tensed facts, and memories and evidence-based theories. Admiring is not a direct relation between objects. |
| 17559 | Is one atom a piece of gold, or is a sizable group of atoms required? [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A physicist once told me that of course a gold atom was a piece of gold, and a physical chemist has assured me that the smallest possible piece of gold would have to be composed of sixteen or seventeen atoms. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 01) | |
| A reaction: The issue is at what point all the properties that we normally begin to associate with gold begin to appear. One water molecule can hardly have a degree of viscosity or liquidity. |
| 17581 | Being part of an organism's life is a matter of degree, and vague [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Being caught up in the life of an organism is, like being rich or being tall, a matter of degree, and is in that sense a vague condition. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 17) | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen is trying to cover himself, given that he makes a sharp distinction between living organisms, which are unified objects, and everything else, which isn't. There may be a vague centre to a 'life', as well as vague boundaries. |
| 17584 | Some events are only borderline cases of lives [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: There are events of which it is neither definitely true nor definitely false that those events are lives. I do not see how we can deny this. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: Very frustrating, since this is my main objection to Van Inwagen's distinction between unified lives and mere collections of simples. Some boundaries are real enough, despite their vagueness, and others indicate that there is no real distinction. |
| 17586 | At the lower level, life trails off into mere molecular interaction [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: The lives of the lower links of the Great Chain of Being trail off into vague, temporary episodes of molecular interaction. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: His case involves conceding all sorts of vagueness to life, but asserting the utter distinctness of the full blown cases of more elaborate life. I don't really concede the distinction. |
| 17567 | A flame is like a life, but not nearly so well individuated [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A flame, though it is a self-maintaining event, does not seem to be nearly so well individuated as a life. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 09) | |
| A reaction: This is to counter the standard problem that if you attempt to define 'life', fire turns out to tick nearly all the same boxes. The concept of 'individuated' often strikes me as unsatisfactory. How does a bonfire fail to be individuated? |
| 17568 | A tumour may spread a sort of life, but it is not a life, or an organism [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A tumour is not an organism (or a parasite) and there is no self-regulating event that is its life. It does not fill one space, but is a locus within which a certain sort of thing is happening: the spreading of a certain sort of (mass-term) life. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 09) |
| 17569 | Unlike waves, lives are 'jealous'; it is almost impossible for them to overlap [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: A wave is not a 'jealous' event. Lives, however, are jealous. It cannot be that the activities of the Xs constitute at one and the same time two lives. Only in certain special cases can two lives overlap. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 09) |
| 17580 | One's mental and other life is centred on the brain, unlike any other part of the body [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: One's life - not simply one's mental life - is centered in the activity of the simples that virtually compose one's brain in a way in which it is not centered in the activity of any of the other simples that compose one. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 15) | |
| A reaction: This justifies the common view that 'one follows one's brain'. I take that to mean that my brain embodies my essence. I would read 'centered on' as 'explains'. |
| 17576 | If God were to 'reassemble' my atoms of ten years ago, the result would certainly not be me [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: If God were to 'reassemble' the atoms that composed me ten years ago, the resulting organism would certainly not be me. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 13) | |
| A reaction: What is obvious to Van Inwagen is not obvious to me. He thinks lives are special. Such examples just leave us bewildered about what counts as 'the same', because our concept of sameness wasn't designed to deal with such cases. |
| 17585 | Life is vague at both ends, but could it be totally vague? [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: Individual human lives are infected with vagueness at both ends. ...But could there be a 'borderline life'? | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 18) | |
| A reaction: Van Inwagen says (p.239) that there may be wholly vague lives, though it would suit his case better if there were not. |
| 17570 | The chemical reactions in a human life involve about sixteen elements [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: There are sixteen or so chemical elements involved in those chemical reactions that collectively constitute the life of a human being. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 09) |
| 6199 | Obligation does not rest on the existence of God, but on the autonomy of reason [Kant] |
| Full Idea: It is not to be understood that the assumption of the existence of God is necessary as a ground for all obligation in general (for this rests, as has been shown, solely on the autonomy of reason itself). | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.V) | |
| A reaction: This shows that Kant agrees with Plato about the Euthyphro Question - that is, they both think that morality is logically and naturally prior to any gods. I agree. Why would we admire or worship or obey gods if we didn't think they were good? |
| 17573 | There is no reason to think that mere existence is a valuable thing [Inwagen] |
| Full Idea: There is no reason to suppose - whatever Saint Anselm and Descartes may have thought - that mere existence is a valuable thing. | |
| From: Peter van Inwagen (Material Beings [1990], 12) | |
| A reaction: This is one of the simplest and most powerful objections to the Ontological Argument. God's existence may be of great value, but the existence of Hitler wasn't. |
| 1453 | We have to postulate something outside nature which makes happiness coincide with morality [Kant] |
| Full Idea: The existence must be postulated of a cause of the whole of nature, itself distinct from nature, which contains the ground of the exact coincidence of happiness with morality. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.V) | |
| A reaction: I can see that we need a concept of how happiness could be made proportional to morality, but I can't make sense of the assumption that it is actually possible, and hence something must exist that would achieve it. |
| 1455 | Belief in justice requires belief in a place for justice (heaven), a time (eternity), and a cause (God) [Kant, by PG] |
| Full Idea: To believe in justice in an unjust world, you have to believe in a place of perfect justice (heaven), a time for perfect justice (eternity), and a cause of perfect justice (God). | |
| From: report of Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.V) by PG - Db (ideas) | |
| A reaction: Compare Boethius in Idea 5765. I can see that we might need to grasp the ideals of eternal justice in order to understand morality, but belief in their genuine possibility, or even actuality, doesn't seem to follow. |
| 6205 | To know if this world must have been created by God, we would need to know all other possible worlds [Kant] |
| Full Idea: We can't infer the existence of God from knowledge of this world, because we should have to know all possible worlds in order to compare them - in short, we should have to be omniscient - in order to say that it is possible only through a God. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.VI) | |
| A reaction: A nice remark, but not wholly convincing. This argument would block all attempts to work out necessities a priori, such as those of maths and logic. Must we know all possible worlds intimately to know that 2+2 is always 4? |
| 6204 | Using God to explain nature is referring to something inconceivable to explain what is in front of you [Kant] |
| Full Idea: To have recourse to God in explaining the arrangements of nature is not a physical explanation but a confession that one has come to the end of philosophy, since one assumes something of which one has no concept to conceive what is before one's eyes. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.VI) | |
| A reaction: Hume had many objections to the design argument, some of them positively sarcastic, but none as ruthless as this, since Kant (here) seems to find God to be a totally empty concept, and hence a complete non-starter as explanation for anything. |
| 6206 | From our limited knowledge we can infer great virtues in God, but not ultimate ones [Kant] |
| Full Idea: Since we know only a small part of the world, and cannot compare it with all possible worlds, we can infer from the order, design and magnitude to a wise, beneficent and powerful Author, but not that He is all-knowing, all-good, and all-powerful. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.VI) | |
| A reaction: This is very much in the spirit of David Hume, who inferred from the flaws in the world that God did not seem to be entirely competent. Hume is also more imaginative, in seeing that God might be a committee, or a hired workman. |
| 6202 | In all naturalistic concepts of God, if you remove the human qualities there is nothing left [Kant] |
| Full Idea: One can confidently challenge all pretended natural theologians to cite one single definitive attribute of their object, of which one could not irrefutably show that, when everything anthropomorphic is removed, only the word remains. | |
| From: Immanuel Kant (Critique of Practical Reason [1788], I.II.II.VI) | |
| A reaction: This idea derives from Hume's very empiricist view of our understanding of God (Idea 2185), but Kant is (remarkably) more hostile than Hume, because he actually implies that most people's concept of God is totally vacuous. |