21 ideas
| 1922 | Spiritual qualities only become advantageous with the growth of wisdom [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If virtue is a beneficial attribute of spirit, it must be wisdom; for spiritual qualities are not in themselves advantageous, but become so with wisdom…..Hence men cannot be good by nature. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 88c) | |
| A reaction: Personally I haven't got any 'spiritual qualities', so I don't really understand this. |
| 11259 | How can you seek knowledge of something if you don't know it? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: How will you aim to search for something you do not know at all? If you should meet with it, how will you know that this is the thing that you did not know? | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 80d05) | |
| A reaction: Vasilis Politis cites this as a nice example of the 'aporiai' (puzzles) which Aristotle said were the foundation of enquiry. Nowadays the problem is called the 'paradox of enquiry'. |
| 20219 | True opinions only become really valuable when they are tied down by reasons [Plato] |
| Full Idea: True opinions are a fine thing and all they do is good, …but they escape from a man's mind, so they are not worth much until one ties them down by (giving) an account of the reason why. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 98a3) | |
| A reaction: This gives justification the role of guarantee, stabilising and securing true beliefs (rather than triggering some new thing called 'knowledge'). |
| 5985 | Seeking and learning are just recollection [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Seeking and learning are in fact nothing but recollection. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 81d) | |
| A reaction: This is a prelude to the famous conversation with the slave boy about geometry. You don't have to follow Plato into the doctrine of reincarnation; this remark is a key slogan for all rationalists. As pupils in maths lessons, we pull knowledge from within. |
| 5986 | The slave boy learns geometry from questioning, not teaching, so it is recollection [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The slave boy's knowledge of geometry will not come from teaching but from questioning; he will recover it for himself, and the spontaneous recovery of knowledge that is in him is recollection. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 85d) | |
| A reaction: Of course, if maths and geometry are huge tautological axiom systems, we would expect to be able to derive them (with hints from a teacher) entirely from their axioms. It is not clear why we might be able to derive the truths of all nature a priori. |
| 22167 | Our images of bodies are not produced by the bodies, but by our own minds [Augustine, by Aquinas] |
| Full Idea: Augustine says bodies don't form images in our spirit; our spirit does that itself with amazing quickness. ...So the appearances under which mind knows things aren't drawn from the things themselves. | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Thomas Aquinas - Quodlibeta 8.2.1 | |
| A reaction: This is Augustine's theory of 'illumination' - that God creates experience within us. His theory was soon discarded by the early scholastics. |
| 22117 | Our minds grasp reality by direct illumination (rather than abstraction from experience) [Augustine, by Matthews] |
| Full Idea: Instead of supposing that what we know can be abstracted from sensible particulars that instantiate such knowledge, Augustine insists that our mind is so constituted as to see 'intelligible realities' directly by inner illumination. | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.74 | |
| A reaction: His 'theory of illumination'. This seems to be a sort of super-rationalism. This doesn't make clear the role of sensations. Surely he doesn't thing that we just bypass them? |
| 1923 | As a guide to action, true opinion is as good as knowledge [Plato] |
| Full Idea: True opinion is as good a guide as knowledge for the purpose of acting rightly. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 97b) | |
| A reaction: This is the germ of Peirce's epistemology - that knowledge is an interesting theoretical concept, but opinion/belief is what matters, and most needs explanation. |
| 1919 | You don't need to learn what you know, and how do you seek for what you don't know? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: You could argue that a man cannot discover what he does know or what he doesn't. The first needs no discovery, and how do you begin looking for the second? | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 80e) |
| 22118 | Augustine created the modern concept of the will [Augustine, by Matthews] |
| Full Idea: The modern concept of the will is often said to originate with Augustine. | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.74 | |
| A reaction: I'm beginning to think that this is the source of the trouble. How can a thing be intrinsically free? Surely freedom is always a contextual concept? |
| 4348 | Love, and do what you will [Augustine] |
| Full Idea: Love, and do what you will. | |
| From: Augustine (works [c.415]) | |
| A reaction: This sounds libertarian, but Augustine had a stern concept of what love required. It nicely captures one of the essential ideas of virtue ethics. |
| 5845 | Niceratus learnt the whole of Homer by heart, as a guide to goodness [Xenophon] |
| Full Idea: Niceratus said that his father, because he was concerned to make him a good man, made him learn the whole works of Homer, and he could still repeat by heart the entire 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey'. | |
| From: Xenophon (Symposium [c.391 BCE], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: This clearly shows the status which Homer had in the teaching of morality in the time of Socrates, and it is precisely this acceptance of authority which he was challenging, in his attempts to analyse the true basis of virtue |
| 7821 | Pagans produced three hundred definitions of the highest good [Augustine, by Grayling] |
| Full Idea: Augustine claimed that the pagan schools between them had produced nearly three hundred different definitions of the highest good. | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by A.C. Grayling - What is Good? Ch.5 | |
| A reaction: I would expect the right definition to be in there somewhere, but no doubt Augustine's definition made it 301. Perhaps the biggest problem of human life is that (as with the Kennedy assassination) proliferating stories obscure the true story. |
| 1913 | Is virtue taught, or achieved by practice, or a natural aptitude, or what? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Is virtue something that can be taught, or does it come by practice, or is it a natural aptitude, or something else? | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 70a) |
| 1921 | If virtue is a type of knowledge then it ought to be taught [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If virtue is some sort of knowledge, then clearly it could be taught. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 87c) |
| 1927 | It seems that virtue is neither natural nor taught, but is a divine gift [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If our discussion is right, virtue is acquired neither by nature nor by teaching. Whoever has it gets it by divine dispensation, without taking thought. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 99e) |
| 1918 | How can you know part of virtue without knowing the whole? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Does anyone know what a part of virtue is without knowing the whole? | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 79c) |
| 1916 | Even if virtues are many and various, they must have something in common to make them virtues [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Even if virtues are many and various, at least they all have some common character which makes them all virtues. | |
| From: Plato (Meno [c.385 BCE], 72c) |
| 22119 | Augustine said (unusually) that 'ought' does not imply 'can' [Augustine, by Matthews] |
| Full Idea: Augustine insisted that 'ought' does not, in any straightforward way, imply 'can' - which distinguishes him from most modern ethicists. | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.74 | |
| A reaction: Not unreasonable. I ought to help my ailing friend who lives abroad, but I haven't the time or money to do it. We can experience impossibilities as duties. Impossibilities are just excuses. Augustine is opposing the Pelagian heresy. |
| 22116 | Augustine identified Donatism, Pelagianism and Manicheism as the main heresies [Augustine, by Matthews] |
| Full Idea: Augustine did the most to define Christian heresy. The three most prominent were Donatism, Pelagianism (that humans are perfectible), and Manicheism (that good and evil are equally basic metaphysical realities). | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.73 | |
| A reaction: Manicheans had presumably been studying Empedocles. (I suppose it's too late to identify Christianity as a heresy?). |
| 19338 | Augustine said evil does not really exist, and evil is a limitation in goodness [Augustine, by Perkins] |
| Full Idea: Augustine solution to the problem of evil was to say that, strictly speaking, evil does not exist. Human beings are not part evil and part good, but rather just a limited amount of goodness. | |
| From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.III | |
| A reaction: Augustine was rebelling against Manicheanism, which he espoused when young, which proposed a good and an evil force. An apathetic slob seems devoid of goodness, but is not evil. It takes extra effort to perform active evil. |