7 ideas
3626 | Knowing the attributes is enough to reveal a substance [Descartes] |
Full Idea: I have never thought that anything more is required to reveal a substance than its various attributes. | |
From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 360) |
3630 | Our thinking about external things doesn't disprove the existence of innate ideas [Descartes] |
Full Idea: You can't prove that Praxiteles never made any statues on the grounds that he did not get from within himself the marble from which he sculpted them. | |
From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 362) |
3631 | A blind man may still contain the idea of colour [Descartes] |
Full Idea: How do you know that there is no idea of colour in a man born blind? | |
From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 363) |
1655 | If goodness needs true opinion but not knowledge, you can skip the 'examined life' [Vlastos on Plato] |
Full Idea: If true opinion without knowledge does suffice to guide action aright, the great mass of men and women may be spared the pain and hazards of the "examined" life. | |
From: comment on Plato (The Apology [c.383 BCE], 38a) by Gregory Vlastos - Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher p.125 |
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. |
3640 | Possible existence is a perfection in the idea of a triangle [Descartes] |
Full Idea: Possible existence is a perfection in the idea of a triangle, just as necessary existence is a perfection in the idea of God. | |
From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 383) |
3639 | Necessary existence is a property which is uniquely part of God's essence [Descartes] |
Full Idea: In the case of God necessary existence is in fact a property in the strictest sense of the term, since it applies to him alone and forms a part of his essence as it does of no other thing | |
From: René Descartes (Reply to Fifth Objections [1641], 383) |