6 ideas
| 3900 | Maybe experience is not essential to perception, but only to the causing of beliefs [Armstrong, by Scruton] |
| Full Idea: Armstrong has argued that experience, as normally understood, is not necessary to perception. To perceive is to acquire beliefs, through a causal process. | |
| From: report of David M. Armstrong (Belief Truth and Knowledge [1973]) by Roger Scruton - Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey 23.4 |
| 4253 | Externalism says knowledge involves a natural relation between the belief state and what makes it true [Armstrong] |
| Full Idea: Externalist accounts of non-inferential knowledge say what makes a true non-inferential belief a case of knowledge is some natural relation which holds between the belief state and the situation which makes the belief true. | |
| From: David M. Armstrong (Belief Truth and Knowledge [1973], 11.III.6) | |
| A reaction: Armstrong's concept is presumably a response to Quine's desire to 'naturalise epistemology'. Bad move, I suspect. It probably reduces knowledge to mere true belief, and hence a redundant concept. |
| 3238 | 'Dead person' isn't a contradiction, so 'person' is somewhat vague [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: If we say (in opposition to a physical view of identity) that when Jones dies 'Jones ceases to exist' but 'Jones' body does not cease to exist', this shouldn't be pressed too hard, because it would make 'dead person' a contradiction. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Are Persons Bodies? [1970], p.74) | |
| A reaction: A good point, which nicely challenges the distinction between a 'human' and a 'person', but the problem case is much more the one where Jones gets advanced Alzheimer's, rather than dies. A dead body ceases as a mechanism, as well as as a personality. |
| 3239 | You can only really love a person as a token, not as a type [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: If you love a person as a type instead of as a token (i.e. a "person", instead of a physical body) you might prefer a run-down copy of them to no person at all, but at this point our idea of loving a person begins to crack. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Are Persons Bodies? [1970], p.81) | |
| A reaction: Very persuasive. If you love a person you can cope with them getting old. If you own an original watercolour, you can accept that it fades, but you would replace a reproduction of it if that faded. But what, then, is it that you love? |
| 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. |