28 ideas
| 17486 | Supervenience is simply modally robust property co-variance [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: Supervenience is not an ontological relationship, being just modally robust property co-variance. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Ontol') | |
| A reaction: I take supervenience to be nothing more than an interesting phenomenon that requires explanation. I suppose Humean Supervenience is a priori metaphysics, since you could hardly explain it. |
| 17481 | Nuclear charge (plus laws) explains electron structure and spectrum, but not vice versa [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: Given relevant laws of nature (quantum mechanics, the exclusion principle) nuclear charge determines and explains electronic structure and spectroscopic behaviour, but not vice versa. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: I argue that the first necessary condition for essentialism is a direction of explanation, and here we seem to have one. |
| 3847 | Man is nothing else but the sum of his actions [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Man is nothing else but the sum of his actions. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.41) | |
| A reaction: This might be plausible if unperformed actions are included. For some people, their whole life story consists of what they failed to do. |
| 3846 | Man IS freedom [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: There is no determinism - man is free, man IS freedom. …Man is condemned to be free. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.34) |
| 3843 | There is no human nature [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: There is no human nature. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.28) | |
| A reaction: Everything which can be individuated has a nature, say I, wearing my Aristotelian lapel badge. Does he think the same of cats? Does he think the mind is a blank page? |
| 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. |
| 20762 | There are no values to justify us, and no excuses [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: There are no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. …We are alone with no excuses. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.296), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 6 'Bad' | |
| A reaction: If there are no values or duties, why might you ever need excuses? |
| 3852 | If values depend on us, freedom is the foundation of all values [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Once a man has seen that values depend upon himself, he can only will one thing, and that is freedom as the foundation of all values. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.51) | |
| A reaction: I don't think so. Is freedom the foundation of all arithmetic, because I am untrammelled when doing addition? Values are ridiculous if they don't reflect facts. |
| 20764 | In becoming what we want to be we create what we think man ought to be [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: In creating the man that we want to be, there is not a single one of our acts which does not at the same time create an image of man as we think he ought to be. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.293), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 7 'Anything' | |
| A reaction: I recall this being one of my earliest thoughts about morality - that in everything we do we are all role models for the people around us. For me, that leads to virtue theory. |
| 3848 | Cowards are responsible for their cowardice [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: The existentialist, when he portrays a coward, shows him as responsible for his cowardice. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.42) |
| 20763 | When my personal freedom becomes involved, I must want freedom for everyone else [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Freedom as the definition of man does not depend on others, but as soon as there is involvement, I am obliged to want others to have freedom at the same time that I want my own freedom. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.306), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 7 'Anything' | |
| A reaction: Appears to be a highly Kantian sense of rational duty, and a rather odd constraint on someone whose only value is freedom. Sartre is aware that he needs an existential politics, but he's not there yet. 'Involvement' is an interesting addition to Kant. |
| 22229 | Existentialists says that cowards and heroes make themselves [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: What the existentialist says is that the coward makes himself cowardly, that the hero makes himself heroic. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.35), quoted by Christine Daigle - Jean-Paul Sartre 2.3 | |
| A reaction: A nice statement of the existential plasticity of the self, in opposition to the much stronger concept of human nature in Aristotle (who nevertheless believes you can acquire virtues and vices). |
| 3842 | Existence before essence (or begin with the subjective) [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Existentialism says that existence comes before essence - or, if you will, that we must begin from the subjective. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.26) |
| 6868 | 'Existence precedes essence' means we have no pre-existing self, but create it through existence [Sartre, by Le Poidevin] |
| Full Idea: I take 'existence precedes essence' to mean that we do not have a pre-existing self, which organises our behaviour, but rather that we create our self as we go along, through our existence and activities. | |
| From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945]) by Robin Le Poidevin - Interview with Baggini and Stangroom p.222 | |
| A reaction: The direct opponent of this is Aristotle, who builds his ethics on a fairly fixed human nature, but even he agrees that we mould our moral characters through our activities, in a circular way. There are not, though, infinite possibilities in mankind. |
| 3844 | Existentialism says man is whatever he makes of himself [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. This is the first principle of existentialism. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.28) |
| 20754 | It is dishonest to offer passions as an excuse [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Every man who takes refuge behind the excuse of his passions is a dishonest man. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.305), quoted by Kevin Aho - Existentialism: an introduction 5 'Core' | |
| A reaction: To say 'my passion was so strong that I was too weak to resist it' doesn't sound prima facie dishonest. Sartre's idea is more of an exhortation than a fact, and sounds rather old fashioned and puritan. Do my reasons constitutes excuses? |
| 6571 | When a man must choose between his mother and the Resistance, no theory can help [Sartre, by Fogelin] |
| Full Idea: When a young man must choose between his bereft mother and the French Resistance, Sartre says no moral theory is capable of resolving the dilemma; the man must act on his own, and in the process define his moral character. | |
| From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.35-9) by Robert Fogelin - Walking the Tightrope of Reason Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: Fogelin agrees, but rejects Sartre's claim that all morality is like this. I agree with Fogelin. However, what I like is the idea of 'defining one's moral character' by choices, but that is because it endorses the views of Aristotle (e.g. Idea 4394). |
| 3851 | If I do not choose, that is still a choice [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: If I do not choose, that is still a choice. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.48) |
| 17478 | Maybe two kinds are the same if there is no change of entropy on isothermal mixing [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: One suggestion is that any two different substance, however alike, exhibit a positive entropy change on mixing. So absence of entropy change on isothermal mixing provides a criterion of sameness of kind. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: [He cites Paul Needham 2000] This sounds nice, because at a more amateur level we can say that stuff is the same if mixing two samples of it produces no difference. I call it the Upanishads Test. |
| 17484 | Maybe the nature of water is macroscopic, and not in the microstructure [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: Some deny that that microstructure is what makes it water; substance identity and difference should be determined instead by macroscopic similarities and differences. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: Very plausible. Is the essential nature of human beings to be found in the structure of our cells? |
| 17479 | The nature of an element must survive chemical change, so it is the nucleus, not the electrons [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: Whatever earns something membership of the extension of 'krypton' must be a property that can survive chemical change and, therefore, the gain and loss of electrons. Hence what makes it krypton must be a nuclear property. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: A very nice illuminating example of essentialism in chemistry. The 'nature' is what survives through change, just like what Aristotle said, innit? |
| 17485 | Maybe water is the smallest part of it that still counts as water (which is H2O molecules) [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: If they do count as water, individual H2O molecules are the smallest items that can qualify as water on their own account. Hydroxyl ions and protons, in contrast, qualify as water only as part of a larger body. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: As Aristotle might say, this is the homoeomerous aspect of water. This is Hendry's own proposal, and seems rather good. |
| 17482 | Compounds can differ with the same collection of atoms, so structure matters too [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: The distinctness of the isomers ethanol (CH3CH2OH, boiling at 78.4°) and dimethyl ether (CH3OCH3, boiling at -24.9°) must lie in their different molecular structures. ...But structure has continuously varying quantities, like bond length and angle. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems to imply that what matters is an idealised abstraction of the structure (i.e. its topology), which is a reason for denying that chemistry is reducible to mere physics. |
| 17483 | Water continuously changes, with new groupings of molecules [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: Macroscopic bodies of water are complex and dynamic congeries of different molecular species, in which there is a constant dissociation of individual molecules, re-association of ions, and formation, growth and disassociation of oligomers. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: The point is that these activities are needed to explain the behaviour of water (such as its conductivity). |
| 17476 | Elements survive chemical change, and are tracked to explain direction and properties [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: Elements survive chemical change, and chemical explanations track them from one composite substance to another, thereby explaining both the direction of the chemical change, and the properties of the substances they compose. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], Intro) | |
| A reaction: [The 16,000th idea of this database, entered on Guy Fawkes' Day 2013] |
| 17477 | Defining elements by atomic number allowed atoms of an element to have different masses [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: In 1923 elements were defined as populations of atoms with the same nuclear charge (i.e. atomic number), allowing that atoms of the same element may have different masses. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Chem') | |
| A reaction: The point is that it allowed isotopes of the same element to come under one heading. This is fine for the heavier elements, but a bit dubious for the very light ones (where an isotope makes a bigger difference). |
| 17480 | Generally it is nuclear charge (not nuclear mass) which determines behaviour [Hendry] |
| Full Idea: In general, nuclear charge is the overwhelming determinant of an element's chemical behaviour, while nuclear mass is a negligible factor. | |
| From: Robin F. Hendry (Chemistry [2008], 'Micro') | |
| A reaction: The exception is the isotopes of very light elements light hydrogen. |
| 3845 | Without God there is no intelligibility or value [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: For the atheist existentialist there disappears with God all possibility of finding values in an intelligible heaven. (Dostoevsky wrote "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"). | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Existentialism and Humanism [1945], p.33) |