3 ideas
| 16209 | How can point-duration slices of people have beliefs or desires? [Thomson] |
| Full Idea: Can one really think that point-duration temporal slices of bodies believe things or want things? | |
| From: Judith (Jarvis) Thomson (People and Their Bodies [1997], p.211), quoted by Katherine Hawley - How Things Persist 2.9 n21 | |
| A reaction: There is a problem with a slice doing anything long-term. The bottom line is that things are said to 'endure', but that is precisely what time-slices are unable to do. Hawley rejects this idea. |
| 9807 | In pursuing truth, anything less certain than mathematics is a waste of time [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: In our search for the direct road towards truth we should busy ourselves with no object about which we cannot attain a certitude equal to that of the demonstrations of Arithmetic and Geometry. | |
| From: René Descartes (Rules for the Direction of the Mind [1628], Rule II), quoted by Alain Badiou - Mathematics and Philosophy: grand and little p.8 | |
| A reaction: A beautiful statement of the way in which rationalist philosophy was founded on the model of mathematics (esp. Euclid), with all its concomitant problems. The most important concept of the last hundred years may well be fallibilist rationalism. |
| 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. |