Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'poems', 'Intending' and 'Quaestiones de anima'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     specify just one area for these texts

---

4 ideas

9. Objects / C. Structure of Objects / 2. Hylomorphism / d. Form as unifier

16766	One thing needs a single thing to unite it; if there were two forms, something must unite them [Aquinas]
	Full Idea: One thing simpliciter is produced out of many actually existing things only if there is something uniting and tying them to each other. If Socrates were animal and rational by different forms, then to be united they would need something to make them one.
	From: Thomas Aquinas (Quaestiones de anima [1269], 11c), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 25.2
	A reaction: This is the reply to the idea that a single thing is just an interesting of many sortal essences. It presumes, of course, that a thing like a horse has something called 'unity'.

20. Action / B. Preliminaries of Action / 1. Intention to Act / a. Nature of intentions

20076	An intending is a judgement that the action is desirable [Davidson]
	Full Idea: We can identify an intentional action ...with an all-out conditional judgement that the action is desirable. ...In the case of pure intending, I now suggest that the intention simply is an all-out judgement.
	From: Donald Davidson (Intending [1978], p.99), quoted by Rowland Stout - Action 8 'Davidson's'
	A reaction: 'Pure' intending seems to be what Stout calls 'prior' intending, which is clearer. This still strikes me as obviously false. I judge that it is desirable that I make a cup of coffee, but secretly I'm hoping someone else will make it for me.

20. Action / B. Preliminaries of Action / 1. Intention to Act / c. Reducing intentions

20024	Davidson gave up reductive accounts of intention, and said it was a primitive [Davidson, by Wilson/Schpall]
	Full Idea: Later Davidson dropped his reductive treatment of intentions (in terms of 'pro-attitudes' and other beliefs), and accepted that intentions are irreducible, and distinct from pro-attitudes.
	From: report of Donald Davidson (Intending [1978]) by Wilson,G/Schpall,S - Action 2
	A reaction: Only a philosopher would say that intentions cannot be reduced to something else. Since I have a very physicalist view of the mind, I incline to reduce them to powers and dispositions of physical matter.

22. Metaethics / A. Ethics Foundations / 2. Source of Ethics / j. Ethics by convention

6017	Nomos is king [Pindar]
	Full Idea: Nomos is king.
	From: Pindar (poems [c.478 BCE], S 169), quoted by Thomas Nagel - The Philosophical Culture
	A reaction: This seems to be the earliest recorded shot in the nomos-physis wars (the debate among sophists about moral relativism). It sounds as if it carries the full relativist burden - that all that matters is what has been locally decreed.