11 ideas
| 3067 | A philosopher should have principles ready for understanding, like a surgeon with instruments [Aurelius] |
| Full Idea: As physicians have always their instruments and knives ready for cases which suddenly require their skill, so should you have principles ready for the understanding of things divine and human. | |
| From: Marcus Aurelius (The Meditations (To Himself) [c.170], 3.13) | |
| A reaction: Nice. Philosophy is the training ground where wisdom and good living are made possible, but it cannot be a substitute for living. |
| 3072 | Everything is changing, including yourself and the whole universe [Aurelius] |
| Full Idea: All things are changing; and you yourself are in continuous mutation and in a manner in continuous destruction, and the whole universe too. | |
| From: Marcus Aurelius (The Meditations (To Himself) [c.170], 9.19) |
| 3916 | Hopi consistently prefers verbs and events to nouns and things [Whorf] |
| Full Idea: Hopi, with its preference for verbs, as contrasted to our own liking for nouns, perpetually turns our propositions about things into propositions about events. | |
| From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.63) | |
| A reaction: This should provoke careful thought about ontology - without concluding that it is entirely relative to language. |
| 3917 | Scientific thought is essentially a specialised part of Indo-European languages [Whorf] |
| Full Idea: What we call "scientific thought" is a specialisation of the western Indo-European type of language. | |
| From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.246) | |
| A reaction: This is the beginnings of an absurd extreme relativist view of science, based on a confusion about meaning and thought. |
| 3066 | Nothing is evil which is according to nature [Aurelius] |
| Full Idea: Nothing is evil which is according to nature. | |
| From: Marcus Aurelius (The Meditations (To Himself) [c.170], 2.17) | |
| A reaction: A bit hopeful. Sounds tautological. I.e. anything which is agreed to be evil is probably immediately labelled as 'unnatural'. What would he agree was evil? |
| 3071 | Justice has no virtue opposed to it, but pleasure has temperance opposed to it [Aurelius] |
| Full Idea: In the constitution of the rational animal I see no virtue which is opposed to justice; but I see a virtue which is opposed to pleasure, and that is temperance. | |
| From: Marcus Aurelius (The Meditations (To Himself) [c.170], 8.39) | |
| A reaction: There are plenty of hideous things opposed to justice, but presumably that immediately disqualifies them from being virtues. |
| 3069 | The art of life is more like the wrestler's than the dancer's [Aurelius] |
| Full Idea: The art of life is more like the wrestler's than the dancer's. | |
| From: Marcus Aurelius (The Meditations (To Himself) [c.170], 7.61) |
| 3065 | Humans are naturally made for co-operation [Aurelius] |
| Full Idea: We are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of upper and lower teeth. To act against one another, then, is contrary to nature. | |
| From: Marcus Aurelius (The Meditations (To Himself) [c.170], 2.1) |
| 13304 | Learned men gain more in one day than others do in a lifetime [Posidonius] |
| Full Idea: In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes. | |
| From: Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]), quoted by Seneca the Younger - Letters from a Stoic 078 | |
| A reaction: These remarks endorsing the infinite superiority of the educated to the uneducated seem to have been popular in late antiquity. It tends to be the religions which discourage great learning, especially in their emphasis on a single book. |
| 20820 | Time is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed [Posidonius, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: Posidonius defined time thus: it is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed and slowness. | |
| From: report of Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.08.42 | |
| A reaction: Hm. Can we define motion or speed without alluding to time? Looks like we have to define them as a conjoined pair, which means we cannot fully understand either of them. |
| 3915 | The Hopi have no concept of time as something flowing from past to future [Whorf] |
| Full Idea: A Hopi has no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a past. | |
| From: Benjamin Lee Whorf (An American Indian model of the Universe [1936], p.57) | |
| A reaction: If true, this would not so much support relativism of language as the view that that conception of time is actually false. |