85 ideas
| 13786 | Wisdom is called 'beautiful', because it performs fine works [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Wisdom [phronesis] is correctly given the name 'kalon' [beautiful], since it performs the works that we say are beautiful and welcome as such. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 416d) | |
| A reaction: 'Phronesis' in Aristotle is more like prudence, or common sense, rather than wisdom ['sophia']. 'Kalon' also means fine or noble. This translation seems fair enough, though. |
| 13780 | Good people are no different from wise ones [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Socrates: Are good people any different from wise ones? No, they aren't. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 398b) | |
| A reaction: This is Socrates's 'intellectualism', his view that being good is entirely a matter of reason and knowledge, and not a matter of habit or emotion. Do we still accept the traditional assumption that wise people are thereby morally good? |
| 8014 | Resolve a complex into simple elements, then reconstruct the complex by using them [Hobbes, by MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: Hobbes took his method from Galileo, of resolving any complex situation into its logically primitive, simple elements and then using the simple elements to show how the complex situation could be reconstructed. | |
| From: report of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651]) by Alasdair MacIntyre - A Short History of Ethics Ch.10 | |
| A reaction: Reverse engineering of reality. This idea, wherever it comes from, strikes me as the key to the advance of human understanding. No one has yet improved on it as a method, in science or philosophy. Reconstruction needs the mechanism. |
| 13778 | A dialectician is someone who knows how to ask and to answer questions [Plato] |
| Full Idea: What would you call someone who knows how to ask and answer questions? Wouldn't you call him a dialectician? | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 390c) | |
| A reaction: Asking good questions and giving good answers sound like two very different skills. I presume dialectic is the process of arriving at answers by means of asking the right questions. |
| 13776 | Truths say of what is that it is, falsehoods say of what is that it is not [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Those statements that say of the things that are that they are, are true, while those that say of the things that are that they are not, are false. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 385b) | |
| A reaction: It was quite a shock to discover this, because the famous Aristotle definition (Idea 586) is always quoted, and no modern writers seem to have any awareness of the Plato remark. Classical scholarship is very poor in analytic philosophy. |
| 15879 | The Square of Opposition has two contradictory pairs, one contrary pair, and one sub-contrary pair [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Square of Opposition: 'all A are B' and 'no A are B' are contraries; 'some A are B' and 'some A are not B' are sub-contraries; the pairs 'all A are B'/'some A are B' and 'no A are B'/'some A are B' are contradictories. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: [the reader may construct his own diagram from this description!] The contraries are at the extremes of contradiction, but the sub-contraries are actual compatible. You could add possible worlds to this picture. |
| 13791 | Things must be known before they are named, so it can't be the names that give us knowledge [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If things cannot be learned except from their names, how can we possibly claim that the name-givers or rule-setters have knowledge before any names had been given for them to know? | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 438b) | |
| A reaction: Running through this is a hostility to philosophy of language, so I find it very congenial. We are animals who relate to the world before language takes a grip. We have full-blown knowledge of things, with no intervention of words. |
| 13777 | A name is a sort of tool [Plato] |
| Full Idea: A name is a sort of tool. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 388a) | |
| A reaction: Idea 13775 gives a background for this metaphor, from earlier in the text. Wittgenstein has a famous toolkit metaphor for language. The whole of this text, 'Cratylus', is about names. |
| 13790 | A name-giver might misname something, then force other names to conform to it [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The name-giver might have made a mistake at the beginning and then forced the other names to be consistent with it. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 436c) | |
| A reaction: Lovely. This is Gareth Evans's 'Madagascar' example. See Idea 9041. |
| 13789 | Anyone who knows a thing's name also knows the thing [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The simple truth is that anyone who knows a thing's name also knows the thing. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 435d) | |
| A reaction: A nice slogan, but it seems to be blatantly false. The best example is Gareth Evans's of joining in a conversation about a person ('Louis'?), and only gradually tuning in to the person to which the name refers. |
| 15891 | Traditional quantifiers combine ordinary language generality and ontology assumptions [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The generalising function and the ontological function of discourse are elided in the traditional quantifier. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: This simple point strikes me as helping enormously to disentangle the mess created by over-emphasis on formal logic in ontology, and especially in the Quinean concept of 'ontological commitment'. |
| 15878 | Some quantifiers, such as 'any', rule out any notion of order within their range [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The quantifier 'any' unambiguously rules out any presupposition of order in the members of the range of individuals quantified. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: He contrasts this with 'all', 'each' and 'every', which are ambiguous in this respect. |
| 2063 | How can beauty have identity if it changes? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If beauty never stays the same, how can it be something? | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 439e) | |
| A reaction: A rather Platonic question! I presume that Heraclitus had a sense of beauty, and things regarded as 'sublime' are often tumultuous. |
| 7559 | Every part of the universe is body, and non-body is not part of it [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: The world is corporeal, that is to say, body...and every part of the universe is body, and that which is not body is no part of the universe. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], IV.46) | |
| A reaction: [Hobbes concedes existence to visible spirits, but not invisible ones]. This is the kind of remark which got Hobbes hated. It is also the sort of thing that makes him the best candidate for the 'first modern man'. |
| 13775 | We only succeed in cutting if we use appropriate tools, not if we approach it randomly [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If we undertake to cut something and make the cut in whatever way we choose and with whatever tool we choose, we will not succeed. If we cut according to the nature of cutting and being cut, and with the natural tool, we'll succeed and cut correctly. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 387a) | |
| A reaction: I take this passage to be the creed for realists about the physical world - a commitment not merely to the existence of an external world, but to the existence of facts about it, which we may or may not be able to discover. |
| 15874 | Scientific properties are not observed qualities, but the dispositions which create them [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The properties of material things with which the sciences deal are not the qualities we observe them to have, but the dispositions of those things to engender the states and qualities we observe. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be the correct use of the word 'qualities', so that properties are not qualities (in the way Heil would like). |
| 13787 | Doesn't each thing have an essence, just as it has other qualities? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Don't you think that just as each thing has a colour or some of those other qualities we mentioned, it also has a being or essence? | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 423e) | |
| A reaction: The Greek here seems to be 'ousia', which I increasingly think should be translated as 'distinct identity', rather than as 'existence' or as 'essence'. Maybe the philosophical term 'haecceity' captures it best. |
| 13774 | Things don't have every attribute, and essence isn't private, so each thing has an essence [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If Euthydemus is wrong that everything always has every attribute simultaneously, or that being or essence is private for each person, then it is clear that things have some fixed being or essence of their own. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 386d) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure what 'being or essence' translates. If it translates 'ousia' then I wouldn't make too much of this remark from an essentialist point of view. |
| 13772 | Is the being or essence of each thing private to each person? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Is the being or essence of each of the things that are something private to each person, as Protagoras tells us? | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 385e) | |
| A reaction: This kind of drastic personal relativism about essences doesn't sound very plausible, but the idea that essences are private to each culture, or to each language, must certainly be taken seriously. |
| 13788 | If we made a perfect duplicate of Cratylus, there would be two Cratyluses [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Soc: Suppose we made a duplicate of everything you have and put it beside you; would there then be two Cratyluses, or Cratylus and an image of Cratylus? Crat: It seems to me, Socrates, that there would be two Cratyluses. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 432c) | |
| A reaction: Don't think that science fiction examples are a modern development in philosophy. Plato has just invented the Startrek transporter. The two Cratyluses are the two spheres in Max Black's famous example. |
| 15884 | Laws of nature remain the same through any conditions, if the underlying mechanisms are unchanged [Harré] |
| Full Idea: A statement is a law of nature if it is true in all those worlds which differ only as to their initial conditions, that is in which the underlying mechanisms of nature are the same. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 4) | |
| A reaction: Harré takes it that laws of nature have to be necessary, by definition. I like this way of expressing natural necessity, in terms of 'mechanisms' rather than of 'laws'. Where do the mechanisms get their necessity? |
| 2356 | Appearance and reality can be separated by mirrors and echoes [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: If colours or sounds were in the bodies or objects that cause them, they could not be severed from them, as by glasses, and in echoes by reflection, we see they are; where we know the thing we see is in one place, the appearance in another. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.01) |
| 13792 | There can't be any knowledge if things are constantly changing [Plato] |
| Full Idea: It isn't even reasonable to say that there is such a thing as knowledge, Cratylus, if all things are passing on and none remain. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 440a) | |
| A reaction: This encapsulates Plato's horror at Heraclitus scepticism about the stable identity of things. It leads to the essentialism of Aristotle and Leibniz, who fear that there is no knowledge if we can't pin down individual identities. Know processes? |
| 2357 | Dreams must be false because they seem absurd, but dreams don't see waking as absurd [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: Because waking I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdity of my waking thoughts, I am well satisfied that, being awake, I know I dream not, though when I dream I think myself awake. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.02) |
| 15880 | In physical sciences particular observations are ordered, but in biology only the classes are ordered [Harré] |
| Full Idea: In the physical sciences the particular observations and experimental results are usually orderable, while in the biological sciences it is the classes of organism which are ordered, not the particular organisms. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: Harré is interesting on the role of ordering in science. Functions can be defined by an order. Maths feeds on orderings. Physics, he notes, focuses on things which vary together. |
| 15869 | Reports of experiments eliminate the experimenter, and present results as the behaviour of nature [Harré] |
| Full Idea: In accounts of experiments, by Faraday and others, the role of the guiding hand of the actual experimenter is written out in successive accounts. The effect is to display the phenomenon as a natural occurrence, existing independently of the experiments. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: He records three stages in Faraday's reports. The move from active to passive voice is obviously part of it. The claim of universality is thus implicit rather than explicit. |
| 15881 | We can save laws from counter-instances by treating the latter as analytic definitions [Harré] |
| Full Idea: When we come upon a counter-instance to a generalisation we can save the putative law, by treating it as potentially analytic and claiming it as a definition. ...Thus magnetism doesn't hold for phosphorus, so we say phosphorus is not a magnetic substance. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: He notes this as being particularly true when the laws concern the dispositions of substances, rather than patterns of events. |
| 15882 | Since there are three different dimensions for generalising laws, no one system of logic can cover them [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Since there are three different dimensions of generality into which every law of nature is generalised, there can be no one system of logic which will govern inference to or from every law of every kind. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 3) | |
| A reaction: This is aimed at the covering-law approach, which actually aims to output observations as logical inferences from laws. Wrong. |
| 15887 | 'Grue' introduces a new causal hypothesis - that emeralds can change colour [Harré] |
| Full Idea: In introducing the predicate 'grue' we also introduce an additional causal hypothesis into our chemistry and physics; namely, that when observed grue emeralds change from blue to green. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: [The 'when observered' is a Harré addition] I hate 'grue'. Only people who think our predicates have very little to do with reality are impressed by it. Grue is a behaviour, not a colour. |
| 15888 | The grue problem shows that natural kinds are central to science [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The grue problem illustrates the enormous importance that the concept of a natural-kind plays in real science. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: The point is that we took emeralds to be a natural kind, but 'grue' proposes that they aren't, since stability is the hallmark of a natural kind. |
| 15890 | Non-black non-ravens just aren't part of the presuppositions of 'all ravens are black' [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Non-black non-ravens have no role to play in assessing the plausibility of 'All ravens are black' because their existence is not among the existential presuppositions of that statement. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: [He cites Strawson for the 'presupposition' approach] |
| 15889 | It is because ravens are birds that their species and their colour might be connected [Harré] |
| Full Idea: It is because ravens are birds that it makes sense to contemplate the possibility of a lawful relation between their species and their colour. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: Compare the 'laws' concerning leaf colour in autumn, and the 'laws' concerning packaging colour in supermarkets. Harré's underlying point is that raven colour concerns mechanism. |
| 15885 | The necessity of Newton's First Law derives from the nature of material things, not from a mechanism [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The 'must' of Newton's First Law is different. There is no deeper level relative to the processes described to give a mechanism which generates uniform motion. There is no such mechanism. ..It specifies what it is for something to be a material thing. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 4) | |
| A reaction: Harré says the law can only exist as part of a network of other ideas. |
| 13781 | Soul causes the body to live, and gives it power to breathe and to be revitalized [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Those who named the soul thought that when the soul is present in the body, it causes it to live and gives it the power to breathe the air and be revitalized [anapsuchon]. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 399d) | |
| A reaction: I quote this to emphasis that Greek psuché is very different from the consciousness which is largely discussed in modern philosophy of mind. I find it helpful to make a real effort to grasp the Greek concept. The feeling of life within you. |
| 15868 | Idealisation idealises all of a thing's properties, but abstraction leaves some of them out [Harré] |
| Full Idea: An 'idealisation' preserves all the properties of the source but it possesses these properties in some ideal or perfect form. ...An 'abstraction', on the other hand, lacks certain features of its source. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: Yet another example in contemporary philosophy of a clear understanding of the sort of abstraction which Geach and others have poured scorn on. |
| 2358 | Freedom is absence of opposition to action; the idea of 'free will' is absurd [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: If a man should talk to me of a 'free-will', or any 'free' but free from being hindered by opposition, I should not say that he were in an error, but that his words were without a meaning, that is to say, absurd. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.05) |
| 6214 | Liberty and necessity are consistent, as when water freely flows, by necessity [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: Liberty and necessity are consistent: as in the water, that hath not only liberty, but a necessity of descending by the channel. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], II.Ch.XI) | |
| A reaction: Hume asserts something similar (Idea 2223), but they both miss the point, which is that libertarians about water would have to believe it didn't need to follow gravity, but could refuse to flow. Freedom of will and freedom of action are quite different. |
| 23987 | The 'simple passions' are appetite, desire, love, aversion, hate, joy, and grief [Hobbes, by Goldie] |
| Full Idea: For Hobbes the 'simple passions' were appetite, desire, love, aversion, hate, joy, and grief. | |
| From: report of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], I.6) by Peter Goldie - The Emotions 4 'Evidence' | |
| A reaction: This is the standard approach to emotions of Hobbes's time. Modern thinkers probably reject the idea that passions can be simple or basic. Rightly, I think. |
| 2362 | The will is just the last appetite before action [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: In deliberation, the last appetite or aversion immediately adhering to the action, or to the omission thereof, is that we call the Will. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.06) | |
| A reaction: I share his caution about 'the will', but his observation strikes me as inaccurate. When I drink, my 'will' is not my thirst. I take the will to be a feature of my reason. I gave my thirst permission to indulge itself. The will is practical reason? |
| 2363 | Reason is usually general, but deliberation is of particulars [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: Reasoning is in general words, but deliberation for the most part is of particulars. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.06) |
| 2360 | 'Good' is just what we desire, and 'Evil' what we hate [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: Whatsoever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth 'Good'; and the object of his hate or aversion 'Evil'. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.06) | |
| A reaction: This meets the Frege-Geach Problem - that we can have these feelings while reading ancient history, but we can't possibly 'desire' any of that. This is better on evil than on good. |
| 2368 | Men's natural desires are no sin, and neither are their actions, until law makes it so [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: The desires and other passions of man are in themselves no sin. No more are the actions that proceed from those passions, till they know a law that forbids them. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.13) | |
| A reaction: That is a pretty flat rejection of natural law, as you might expect from an empiricist. So prior to the first law-making, no one ever did anything wrong? Hm. |
| 2359 | Desire and love are the same, but in the desire the object is absent, and in love it is present [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: Desire and love are the same thing, save that by desire we always signify the absence of the object, by love most commonly the presence of the same. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.06) | |
| A reaction: Implausible reductivism from Hobbes. Plenty of counterexamples to this. You work it out! |
| 2370 | All voluntary acts aim at some good for the doer [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: Of the voluntary acts of every man, the object is some good to himself. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.14) | |
| A reaction: Nonsense. You can only describe sacrificial acts for loved ones, such as children, in this way if this proposal is a tautology. Hobbes cannot know the truth of this claim. |
| 2372 | The person who performs first in a contract is said to 'merit' the return, and is owed it [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: He that performeth first in the case of a contract, is said to 'merit' that which he is to receive by the performance of the other, and he hath it as due. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.14) |
| 2371 | A contract is a mutual transfer of rights [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: The mutual transferring of right is that which men call 'contract'. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.14) |
| 8015 | Hobbes wants a contract to found morality, but shared values are needed to make a contract [MacIntyre on Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: Hobbes makes two incompatible demands of the original contract: he wishes it to be the foundation of all shared and common standards and rules; but he also wishes it to be a contract, which needs prior shared and common standards. | |
| From: comment on Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], Pt 1) by Alasdair MacIntyre - A Short History of Ethics Ch.10 | |
| A reaction: At the very least, the participants in a contract must be committed to keeping it even when it is not convenient. But a common purpose seems to be needed too, which makes the contract itself intrinsically valuable. Similar objections to Kant. |
| 5337 | For Hobbes the Golden Rule concerns not doing things, whereas Jesus encourages active love [Hobbes, by Flanagan] |
| Full Idea: Hobbes put the Golden Rule as 'do NOT do to others what you would NOT want done to yourself'. Jesus's formulation encouraged active love. Most Westerners conceive their moral duty as not to do harm, rather than actively doing good. | |
| From: report of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651]) by Owen Flanagan - The Problem of the Soul p.20n | |
| A reaction: This idea probably runs very deep into western culture, where most people feel that they are being very morally good when they are sitting at home and not actually annoying anyone. Utilitarianism also offers a challenge to such complacency. |
| 2374 | In the violent state of nature, the merest suspicion is enough to justify breaking a contract [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: If a covenant is made with neither party performing presently, but trust one another, in the condition of mere nature (which is war between men) upon reasonable suspicion, it is void. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.14) |
| 2375 | Suspicion will not destroy a contract, if there is a common power to enforce it [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: If there be a common power set over both parties in a contract, with right and force sufficient to compel performance, a contract does not become void as soon as the parties are suspicious. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.14) |
| 8016 | Fear of sanctions is the only motive for acceptance of authority that Hobbes can think of [MacIntyre on Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: Hobbes has such a limited view of human motives that he cannot provide any other explanation for the acceptance of authority than the fear of sanctions.. | |
| From: comment on Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], Pt 1) by Alasdair MacIntyre - A Short History of Ethics Ch.10 | |
| A reaction: There are two alternative views - the conservative view that people naturally welcome and even need authority, because they need to be led; or the Aristotelian view that people are naturally communal, and authority is part of community life. |
| 2377 | No one who admitted to not keeping contracts could ever be accepted as a citizen [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: He therefore that breaketh his covenant, and consequently declareth that he thinks he may with reason do so, cannot be received into any society. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.15) |
| 2379 | If there is a good reason for breaking a contract, the same reason should have stopped the making of it [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: If any fault of man be sufficient to discharge our covenant made, the same ought in reason to have been sufficient to have hindered the making of it. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.15) |
| 2373 | The first performer in a contract is handing himself over to an enemy [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: He which performeth first in a contract, does but betray himself to his enemy. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.14) |
| 2382 | Someone who keeps all his contracts when others are breaking them is making himself a prey to others [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: He that should be modest and tractable, and perform all the promises, in such time and place where no man else should do so, should but make himself a prey to others. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.15) |
| 13785 | 'Arete' signifies lack of complexity and a free-flowing soul [Plato] |
| Full Idea: 'Areté' signifies lack of perplexity [euporia, ease of movement], and that the flow of a good soul is unimpeded. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 415d) | |
| A reaction: Some highly dubious etymology going on here, and throughout 'Cratylus', but it gives a nice feeling for the way Socrates and Plato saw virtue. |
| 2383 | Virtues are a means to peaceful, sociable and comfortable living [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: The writers of moral philosophy, though they acknowledge the same virtues and vices, yet not seeing wherein consisted their goodness, nor that they come to be praised as the means of peaceable, sociable and comfortable living. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.15) |
| 2376 | Injustice is the failure to keep a contract, and justice is the constant will to give what is owed [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: The definition of 'injustice' is no other than the not performance of covenant….. and 'justice' is the constant will of giving to every man his own. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.15) |
| 2367 | In time of war the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: In a time of war…. there is continual fear, and danger of violent death, and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.13) |
| 19764 | Hobbes attributed to savages the passions which arise in a law-bound society [Hobbes, by Rousseau] |
| Full Idea: Hobbes had wrongly injected into the savage man's concern for self-preservation the need to satisfy a multitude of passions which are the product of society and which have made laws necessary. | |
| From: report of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651]) by Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Part I | |
| A reaction: Hobbes's famous remark concerns a state of war, which is quite a sophisticated state of conflict between well formed social groups. Rousseau's savage is fairly solitary, so won't be involved in war. |
| 20566 | Hobbes says the people voluntarily give up their sovereignty, in a contract with a ruler [Hobbes, by Oksala] |
| Full Idea: While Hobbes had held that the people were the final source of political authority, he had argued that in entering the social contract they gave up their sovereignty by transferring all power to an absolute ruler. | |
| From: report of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651]) by Johanna Oksala - Political Philosophy: all that matters Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: Later the idea of 'inalienable' rights crept in. If you volunteer for exploitation or slavery, that still doesn't justify them. Sadism is presumably not justified by masochism. |
| 2366 | There is not enough difference between people for one to claim more benefit than another [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: The difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.13) |
| 20485 | Hobbes says people are roughly equal; Locke says there is no right to impose inequality [Hobbes, by Wolff,J] |
| Full Idea: Hobbes's principle of equality was a claim about the mental and physical capabilities of all people. For Locke it is a moral claim about rights: no person has a natural right to subordinate any other. | |
| From: report of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651]) by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) 1 'Locke' | |
| A reaction: There are obvious questions to ask about the claim that people are naturally equal. For the second one, does the lion have a natural right to subordinate the gazelle? Who cares! I'm inclined to be consequentialist about equality. |
| 2369 | If we seek peace and defend ourselves, we must compromise on our rights [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: From the first law of nature (that we seek peace, but also defend ourselves) comes the second: that a man be willing to lay down his rights to all things, and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.14) |
| 20484 | We should obey the laws of nature, provided other people are also obeying them [Hobbes, by Wolff,J] |
| Full Idea: Hobbes's position is that we have a duty to obey the Laws of Nature when others around us are known (or can reasonably be expected) to be obeying them too, and so our compliance will not be exploited. | |
| From: report of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651]) by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) 1 'Hobbes' | |
| A reaction: In particular, we should keep contracts. Hobbes doesn't seem fully committed to keeping facts and values separate. |
| 7573 | The legal positivism of Hobbes said law is just formal or procedural [Hobbes, by Jolley] |
| Full Idea: Hobbes was one of the first to propose the view known as 'legal positivism' - that the criterion for deciding whether a rule is a genuine law is entirely formal or procedural | |
| From: report of Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651]) by Nicholas Jolley - Leibniz Ch.7 | |
| A reaction: This was opposed to the tradition of natural law, deriving from Aquinas. It is part of a picture of values draining out of the world as science comes to dominate. The is/ought distinction is its culmination. Power replaces virtue, and Thrasymachus wins. |
| 2380 | Punishment should only be for reform or deterrence [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: We are forbidden to inflict punishment with any other design than for correction of the offender, or direction of others. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.15) |
| 2361 | If fear of unknown powers is legal it is religion, if it is illegal it is superstition [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind or imagined from tales publicly allowed, is religion; not allowed, is superstition. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.06) |
| 15886 | Science rests on the principle that nature is a hierarchy of natural kinds [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The animating principle behind the material and discursive practices of science is the thesis that nature exemplifies multiple hierarchies of natural kinds. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: I agree. I take it to be a brute fact that there seem to be lots of stable natural kinds, which are worth investigating as long as they stay stable. If they are unstable, there needs to be something stable to measure that by - or we give up. |
| 2364 | Causation is only observation of similar events following each other, with nothing visible in between [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: In knowing the meaning of 'causing', men can only observe and remember what they have seen to precede the like effect at some other time, without seeing between the antecedent and subsequent event any dependence or connexion at all. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.12) |
| 15864 | Classification is just as important as laws in natural science [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Classification systems, or taxonomies, are as important a part of the natural sciences as are the laws of nature. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: This illustrates how our view of science is radically shifted if we give biology equal prominence with physics. |
| 15865 | Newton's First Law cannot be demonstrated experimentally, as that needs absence of external forces [Harré] |
| Full Idea: We can never devise an experimental situation in which there are no external forces to act on a body. It follows that Newton's First Law could never be demonstrated by means of experiment or observation. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: It can't be wholly demonstrated, but certain observations conform to it, such as the movement of low friction bodies, or the movements of planetary bodies. |
| 15862 | Laws can come from data, from theory, from imagination and concepts, or from procedures [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Boyle's Law generalises a mass of messy data culled from an apparatus; Snell's Law is an experimentally derived law deducible from theory; Newton's First Law derives from concepts and thought experiments; Mendel's Law used an experimental procedure. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: Nice examples, especially since Boyle's and Newton's laws are divided by a huge gulf, and arrived at about the same time. On p.35 Harré says these come down to two: abstraction from experiment, and derivation from deep assumptions. |
| 15870 | Are laws of nature about events, or types and universals, or dispositions, or all three? [Harré] |
| Full Idea: What is Newton's First Law about? Is it about events? Is it about types or universals? Is it about dispositions? Or is it, in some peculiar way, about all three? | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: If laws merely chart regularities, then I suppose they are about events (which exhibit the regular patterns). If laws explain, which would be nice, then they are only about universals if you are a platonist. Hence laws are about dispositions. |
| 15871 | Are laws about what has or might happen, or do they also cover all the possibilities? [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Is Newton's First Law about what has actually happened or is it about what might, or could possibly happen? Is it about the actual events and states of the world, or possible events and states? | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: I presume the first sentence distinguishes between what 'might (well)' happen, and what 'could (just) possibly happen'. I take it for granted that laws predict the actual future. The question is are they true of situations which will never occur? |
| 15876 | Maybe laws of nature are just relations between properties? [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The idea of the Dretske-Armstrong-Tooley view is very simple: the laws of nature relate properties to properties. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the relations are necessary ones. I don't see why we need to mention these wretched 'universals' in order to expound this theory. It sounds much more plausible if you just say a property is defined by the way it relates to other properties. |
| 15860 | We take it that only necessary happenings could be laws [Harré] |
| Full Idea: We do not take laws to be recordings of what happens perchance or for the most part, but specifications of what happens necessarily | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a plausible necessary condition for a law, but it may not be a sufficient one. Are trivial necessities laws? On this view if there are no necessities then there are no laws. |
| 15867 | Laws describe abstract idealisations, not the actual mess of nature [Harré] |
| Full Idea: The laws of nature are not simple descriptions of what can be seen to happen. They are descriptions of abstractions and idealisations from a somewhat messy reality. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 1) | |
| A reaction: This view seems to have increasingly gripped modern philosophers, so that the old view of God decreeing a few simple equations to run the world has faded away. |
| 15872 | Must laws of nature be universal, or could they be local? [Harré] |
| Full Idea: Is a law of nature about everything in the universe or just about a restricted group of things? | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: I presume the answer is that while a law may only refer to a small group of things, the law would still have to apply if that group moved or spread or enlarged, so it would have to be universals. A laws confined to one time or place? Maybe. |
| 15892 | Laws of nature state necessary connections of things, events and properties, based on models of mechanisms [Harré] |
| Full Idea: A law of nature tells us what kinds of things, events and properties (all else being equal) go along with what. The 'must' of natural necessity has its place here because it is bound up with a model or analogy representing generative mechanisms. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 5) | |
| A reaction: This is Harré's final page summary of laws. I agree with it. I would say that the laws are therefore descriptive, of the patterns of behaviour that arise when generative mechanisms meet. Maybe laws concern 'transformations'. |
| 15875 | In counterfactuals we keep substances constant, and imagine new situations for them [Harré] |
| Full Idea: In drawing 'countefactual' conclusions we can be thought imaginatively to vary the conditions under which the substance, set-up etc. is manipulated or stimulated, while maintaining constant our conception of the nature of the being in question. | |
| From: Rom Harré (Laws of Nature [1993], 2) | |
| A reaction: Presumably you could vary the substance and keep the situation fixed, but then the counterfactual seems to be 'about' something different. Either that or the 'situation' is a actually a set of substances to be tested. |
| 13779 | The natural offspring of a lion is called a 'lion' (but what about the offspring of a king?) [Plato] |
| Full Idea: It seems to me that it is right to call a lion's offspring a 'lion' and a horse's offspring a 'horse' (I'm talking about natural offspring, not some monster). ...but by the same argument any offspring of a king should be called a 'king'. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 393b) | |
| A reaction: The standard modern difficulty is whether all descendants of dinosaurs are still called 'dinosaur', which they are not. |
| 13783 | Even the gods love play [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Even the gods love play. | |
| From: Plato (Cratylus [c.375 BCE], 406c) |
| 2365 | Religion is built on ignorance and misinterpretation of what is unknown or frightening [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: In these four things - opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion towards what men fear, and taking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seed of religion. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.12) |
| 2378 | Belief in an afterlife is based on poorly founded gossip [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: Knowledge of man's estate after death, and its rewards, is a belief grounded upon other men's sayings that they knew it supernaturally, or they knew those, that knew those, that knew others, that knew it supernaturally. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan [1651], 1.15) |