41 ideas
1749 | If all laws were abolished, philosophers would still live as they do now [Aristippus elder] |
Full Idea: If all laws were abolished, philosophers would still live as they do now. | |
From: Aristippus the elder (fragments/reports [c.395 BCE]), quoted by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.4 | |
A reaction: Presumably philosophers develop inner laws which other people lack. |
15169 | Metaphysics is clarifying how we speak and think (and possibly improving it) [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: Metaphysics, for the conventionalist, is not a matter of trying to see deeply into the structure of mind-independent reality, but of trying to clarify the way we actually speak and think, and perhaps negotiating ways of doing this to our best advantage. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.1) | |
A reaction: Note that he is still allowing space for 'revisionary' as well as for 'descriptive' metaphysics. I can't wholly accept this, as I really do think we can have some deep insights into reality, but Sidelle is articulating a large part of the truth. |
192 | Only one thing can be contrary to something [Plato] |
Full Idea: To everything that admits of a contrary there is one contrary and no more. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 332c) | |
A reaction: The sort of thing for which a modern philosopher would demand a proof (and then reject when the proof couldn't be found), where a Greek is happy to assert it as self-evident. I can't think of a counterexample. |
15164 | We seem to base necessities on thought experiments and imagination [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: Judgments of necessity seem always to be based on thought experiments and appeals to what we can imagine. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.1) | |
A reaction: That is, the denial of this thing seems inconceivable. I would say that they are also based on coherence. The idea that we can think without imagination is nonsense. |
15180 | There doesn't seem to be anything in the actual world that can determine modal facts [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: Metaphysically, nothing in the actual world seems to be a candidate for determining what is necessarily the case. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.4) | |
A reaction: I file this under 'Dispositions' to show what is at stake in the debate about dispositional and categorical properties. I take a commitment to dispositions to be a commitment to modal facts about the actual world. |
190 | If asked whether justice itself is just or unjust, you would have to say that it is just [Plato] |
Full Idea: If someone asked me 'Is justice itself just or unjust?' I should answer that it was just, wouldn't you? I agree. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 330c) |
15184 | Causal reference presupposes essentialism if it refers to modally extended entities [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: Even if the causal theory of reference proper does not presuppose essentialism, it does presuppose essentialism if it is to be an account of reference to modally extended entities. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.6) |
15172 | Clearly, essential predications express necessary properties [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: It is clear, of course, that if there are true essential predications, then they express necessary properties. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.2) | |
A reaction: I would certainly want to ask whether essences have to be analysed as properties, and also (more boldly) whether there might not be contingent essences. |
15181 | Being a deepest explanatory feature is an actual, not a modal property [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: The property of being a deepest explanatory feature is a nonmodal property: it's an actual property. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.4) | |
A reaction: I don't accept the existence of properties of the form 'being-F'. The possibility of securing a door may be the deepest explanatory feature of a lock. [To be fair to Sidelle, see context - just for once!] Dispositions are actual. |
15173 | That the essence of water is its microstructure is a convention, not a discovery [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: The necessity to water of whatever is found out to be the water's microstructure is given by convention, and is not something which is discovered. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.2) | |
A reaction: A powerful point. It shows the authority of science that we accept the microstructure as the essence. The essences of statues and people are definitely not their microstructures. One H2O molecule isn't water. Why not? Macro-properties count too! |
15185 | We aren't clear about 'same stuff as this', so a principle of individuation is needed to identify it [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: Independent of conventions, no definite sense can be given to the notion of 'the same stuff as this'. So reference-fixing must include some principle of individuation to determine the aspects of sameness for the identity referred to. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.6) | |
A reaction: Is he really saying that we don't understand 'same stuff as this'? Surely animals can manage that, and they are not famous for their conventions. Sidelle has fallen into the sortalist trap, I think. |
15175 | Evaluation of de dicto modalities does not depend on the identity of its objects [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: In the evaluation of de dicto modal statements, whether some possible state of affairs is relevant to its truth does not depend on the identity of its objects, as in 'Necessarily, the President of the USA is male'. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.3) | |
A reaction: This is a more clear-cut and easy to grasp criterion than most that are on offer. |
15032 | Necessary a posteriori is conventional for necessity and nonmodal for a posteriority [Sidelle, by Sider] |
Full Idea: Sidelle defends conventionalism against a posteriori necessities by 'factoring' a necessary a posteriori truth into an analytic component and a nonmodal component. The modal force then comes from the analytic part, and the a posteriority from the other. | |
From: report of Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989]) by Theodore Sider - Writing the Book of the World 12.8 | |
A reaction: [I note that Sidelle refers, it seems, to the nonmodal component as a 'deep explanatory feature', which is exactly what I take an essence to be]. |
15179 | To know empirical necessities, we need empirical facts, plus conventions about which are necessary [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: What we need to know, in order to know what is empirically necessary, is some empirical fact plus our conventions that tell us which truths are necessary given which empirical facts. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.4) | |
A reaction: I take this attack on a posteriori necessities to be the most persuasive part of Sidelle's case, but you can't just put all of our truths down to convention. There are stabilities in the world, as well as in our conventions. |
15171 | The necessary a posteriori is statements either of identity or of essence [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: The necessary a posteriori crudely divides into two groups - (synthetic) identity statements (between rigid designators), and statements of essential properties. The latter is either statements of property identity, or of the essences of natural kinds. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.2) | |
A reaction: He cites Kripke's examples (Hesperus,Cicero,Truman,water,gold), and divides them into the two groups. Helpful. |
15167 | Empiricism explores necessities and concept-limits by imagining negations of truths [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: In the traditional empiricist picture, we go about modal enquiry by trying to see whether we can imagine a situation in which it would be correct to assert the negation of a proposed necessary truth. Thus we can find out the limits of our concepts. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.1) |
15177 | Contradictoriness limits what is possible and what is imaginable [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: Contradictoriness is the boundary both of what is possible and also of what is imaginable. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.4) | |
A reaction: Of course we may see contradictions where there are none, and fail to grasp real hidden contradictions, so the two do not coincide in the practice. I think I would say it is 'a' boundary, not 'the' boundary. |
15176 | The individuals and kinds involved in modality are also a matter of convention [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: It is not merely the modal facts that result from our conventions, but the individuals and kinds that are modally involved. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.3) | |
A reaction: I am beginning to find Sidelle's views very sympathetic - going over to the Dark Side, I'm afraid. But conventions won't work at all if they don't correspond closely to reality. |
15174 | A thing doesn't need transworld identity prior to rigid reference - that could be a convention of the reference [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: For a term to be rigid, it is said there must be real transworld identity prior to our use of the rigid term, ..but this may only be because we have conventional principles for individuating across worlds. 'Let's call him Fred' - perhaps explicitly rigid. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.3) | |
A reaction: This seems right. An example might be a comic book character, who retains a perfect identity in all the comics, with no scars, weight change, or ageing. |
15183 | 'Dthat' operates to make a singular term into a rigid term [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: 'Dthat' is Kaplan's indexical operator; it operates on a given singular term, φ, and makes it into a rigid designator of whatever φ designates in the original context. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.6 n11) | |
A reaction: I like this idea a lot, because it strikes me that referring to something rigidly is a clear step beyond referring to it in actuality. I refer to 'whoever turns up each week', but that is hardly rigid. The germ of 2-D semantics is here. |
20184 | The only real evil is loss of knowledge [Plato] |
Full Idea: The only real kind of faring ill is the loss of knowledge. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 345b) | |
A reaction: This must crucially involve the intellectualist view (of Socrates) that virtuos behaviour results from knowledge, and moral wickedness is the result of ignorance. It is hard to see how forgetting a phone number is evil. |
20185 | The most important things in life are wisdom and knowledge [Plato] |
Full Idea: It would be shameful indeed to say that wisdom and knowledge are anything but the most powerful forces in human activity. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 352d) | |
A reaction: He lumps wisdom and knowledge together, and I think we can take 'knowledge' to mean something like understanding, because obviously mere atomistic propositional knowledge can be utterly trivial. |
15165 | A priori knowledge is entirely of analytic truths [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: The a priori method yields a priori knowledge, and the objects of this knowledge are not facts about the world, but analytic truths. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.1) | |
A reaction: Are we not allowed any insights at all into how the world must be, independent of how we happen to conceptualise it? |
191 | Everything resembles everything else up to a point [Plato] |
Full Idea: Everything resembles everything else up to a point. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 331d) |
15168 | That water is essentially H2O in some way concerns how we use 'water' [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: If water is essentially H2O, this is going to have something to do with our intentions in using 'water'. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.1) | |
A reaction: This very simple point looks to be correct, and raises very important questions about the whole Twin Earth thing. When new discoveries are made, words shift their meanings. We're not quite sure what 'jade' means any more. |
15166 | Causal reference seems to get directly at the object, thus leaving its nature open [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: The causal theory of reference appears to give us a way to get at an object while leaving it undetermined what its essence or necessary features might be. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.1) | |
A reaction: This pinpoints why the direct/causal theory of reference seems to open the doors to scientific essentialism. Sidelle, of course, opposes the whole programme. |
15182 | Because some entities overlap, reference must have analytic individuation principles [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: The phenomenon of overlapping entities requires that if our reference is to be determinate (as determinate as it is), then there must be analytic principles of individuation. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.5) | |
A reaction: His point is that there is something inescapably conventional about the way in which our reference works. It isn't just some bald realist baptism. |
203 | Courage is knowing what should or shouldn't be feared [Plato] |
Full Idea: Knowledge of what is and is not to be feared is courage. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 360d) |
3558 | Only the Cyrenaics reject the idea of a final moral end [Aristippus elder, by Annas] |
Full Idea: The Cyrenaics are the most radical ancient moral philosophers, since they are the only school explicitly to reject the importance of achieving an overall final end. | |
From: report of Aristippus the elder (fragments/reports [c.395 BCE]) by Julia Annas - The Morality of Happiness 11.1 | |
A reaction: This looks like dropping out, but it could also be Keats's 'negative capability', of simply participating in existence without needing to do anything about it. |
202 | No one willingly and knowingly embraces evil [Plato] |
Full Idea: No one willingly goes to meet evil, or what he thinks is evil. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 358d) | |
A reaction: Presumably people who actively choose satanism can override this deep-seated attitude. But their adherence to evil usually seems to be rather restrained. A danger of tautology with ideas like this. |
193 | Some things are good even though they are not beneficial to men [Plato] |
Full Idea: 'Do you mean by good those things that are beneficial to men?' 'Not only those. I call some things which are not beneficial good as well'. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 333e) | |
A reaction: Examples needed, but this would be bad news for utilitarians. Good health is not seen as beneficial if it is taken for granted. Not being deaf. |
5835 | The road of freedom is the surest route to happiness [Aristippus elder, by Xenophon] |
Full Idea: The surest road to happiness is not the path through rule nor through servitude, but through liberty. | |
From: report of Aristippus the elder (fragments/reports [c.395 BCE]) by Xenophon - Memorabilia of Socrates 2.1.9 | |
A reaction: The great anarchist slogan. Personally I don't believe it, because I agree a little with Hobbes that authority is required to make cooperation flourish, and that is essential for full happiness. If I were a slave, I would agree with Aristippus. |
197 | Some pleasures are not good, and some pains are not evil [Plato] |
Full Idea: There are some pleasures which are not good, and some pains which are not evil. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 351d) | |
A reaction: Sadism and child birth. Though Bentham (I think) says that there is nothing good about the pain, since the event would obviously be better without it. |
200 | People tend only to disapprove of pleasure if it leads to pain, or prevents future pleasure [Plato] |
Full Idea: The only reason the common man disapproves of pleasures is if they lead to pain and deprive us of future pleasures. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 354a) | |
A reaction: Plato has a strong sense that some pleasures are just innately depraved and wicked. If those pleasure don't hurt anyone, it is very hard to pinpoint what is wrong with them. |
1751 | Pleasure is the good, because we always seek it, it satisfies us, and its opposite is the most avoidable thing [Aristippus elder, by Diog. Laertius] |
Full Idea: Pleasure is the good because we desire it from childhood, when we have it we seek nothing further, and the most avoidable thing is its opposite, pain. | |
From: report of Aristippus the elder (fragments/reports [c.395 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.8 |
3018 | People who object to extravagant pleasures just love money [Aristippus elder, by Diog. Laertius] |
Full Idea: When blamed for buying expensive food he asked "Would you have bought it for just three obols?" When the person said yes, he said,"Then it is not that I am fond of pleasure, but that you are fond of money". | |
From: report of Aristippus the elder (fragments/reports [c.395 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.7.4 |
204 | Socrates is contradicting himself in claiming virtue can't be taught, but that it is knowledge [Plato] |
Full Idea: Socrates is contradicting himself by saying virtue is not teachable, and yet trying to demonstrate that every virtue is knowledge. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 361b) |
189 | If we punish wrong-doers, it shows that we believe virtue can be taught [Plato] |
Full Idea: Athenians inflict punishment on wrong-doers, which shows that they too think it possible to impart and teach goodness. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 324c) |
188 | Socrates did not believe that virtue could be taught [Plato] |
Full Idea: Socrates: I do not believe that virtue can be taught. | |
From: Plato (Protagoras [c.380 BCE], 320b) |
1755 | Errors result from external influence, and should be corrected, not hated [Aristippus elder, by Diog. Laertius] |
Full Idea: Errors ought to meet with pardon, for a man does not err intentionally, but influenced by some external circumstances. We should not hate someone who has erred, but teach him better. | |
From: report of Aristippus the elder (fragments/reports [c.395 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.9 |
15178 | Can anything in science reveal the necessity of what it discovers? [Sidelle] |
Full Idea: Is there anything in the procedures of scientists that could reveal to them that water is necessarily H2O or that gold necessarily has atomic number 79. | |
From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.4) | |
A reaction: This is Leibniz's is view, that empirical evidence can never reveal necessities. Given that we know some necessities, you have an argument for rationalism. |