18 ideas
| 14092 | Philosophers are often too fussy about words, dismissing perfectly useful ordinary terms [Rosen] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers can sometimes be too fussy about the words they use, dismissing as 'unintelligible' or 'obscure' certain forms of language that are perfectly meaningful by ordinary standards, and which may be of some real use. | |
| From: Gideon Rosen (Metaphysical Dependence [2010], 01) | |
| A reaction: Analytic philosophers are inclined to drop terms they can't formalise, but there is more to every concept than its formalisation (Frege's 'direction' for example). I want to rescue 'abstraction' and 'essence'. Rosen says distinguish, don't formalise. |
| 14100 | Figuring in the definition of a thing doesn't make it a part of that thing [Rosen] |
| Full Idea: From the simple fact that '1' figures in the definition of '2', it does not follow that 1 is part of 2. | |
| From: Gideon Rosen (Metaphysical Dependence [2010], 10) | |
| A reaction: He observes that quite independent things can be mentioned on the two sides of a definition, with no parthood relation. You begin to wonder what a definition really is. A causal chain? |
| 14096 | Explanations fail to be monotonic [Rosen] |
| Full Idea: The failure of monotonicity is a general feature of explanatory relations. | |
| From: Gideon Rosen (Metaphysical Dependence [2010], 05) | |
| A reaction: In other words, explanations can always shift in the light of new evidence. In principle this is right, but some explanations just seem permanent, like plate-tectonics as explanation for earthquakes. |
| 14097 | Things could be true 'in virtue of' others as relations between truths, or between truths and items [Rosen] |
| Full Idea: Our relation of 'in virtue of' is among facts or truths, whereas Fine's relation (if it is a relation at all) is a relation between a given truth and items whose natures ground that truth. | |
| From: Gideon Rosen (Metaphysical Dependence [2010], 07 n10) | |
| A reaction: This disagreement between two key players in the current debate on grounding looks rather significant. I think I favour Fine's view, as it seems more naturalistic, and less likely to succumb to conventionalism. |
| 14095 | Facts are structures of worldly items, rather like sentences, individuated by their ingredients [Rosen] |
| Full Idea: Facts are structured entities built up from worldly items rather as sentences are built up from words. They might be identified with Russellian propositions. They are individuated by their constituents and composition, and are fine-grained. | |
| From: Gideon Rosen (Metaphysical Dependence [2010], 04) | |
| A reaction: I'm a little cautious about the emphasis on being sentence-like. We have Russell's continual warnings against imposing subject-predicate structure on things. I think we should happily talk about 'facts' in metaphysics. |
| 14093 | An 'intrinsic' property is one that depends on a thing and its parts, and not on its relations [Rosen] |
| Full Idea: One intuitive gloss on 'intrinsic' property is that a property is intrinsic iff whether or not a thing has it depends entirely on how things stand with it and its parts, and not on its relation to some distinct thing. | |
| From: Gideon Rosen (Metaphysical Dependence [2010], 02) | |
| A reaction: He offers this as a useful reward for reviving 'depends on' in metaphysical talk. The problem here would be to explain the 'thing' and its 'parts' without mentioning the target property. The thing certainly can't be a bundle of tropes. |
| 15959 | If the substantial form of brass implies its stability, how can it melt and remain brass? [Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: If we account for the stability of a piece of brass by reference to the substantial form of brass, then it is mysterious how it can be melted and yet remain brass. | |
| From: Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 02.3) | |
| A reaction: [Alexander is discussing Boyle] |
| 15956 | The peripatetics treated forms and real qualities as independent of matter, and non-material [Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: The peripatetic philosophers, in spite of their disagreements, all treated forms and real qualities as independent of matter and not to be understood in material terms. | |
| From: Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 54) | |
| A reaction: This is the simple reason why hylomorphism became totally discredited, in the face of the 'mechanical philosophy'. But there must be a physical version of hylomorphism, and I don't think Aristotle himself would reject it. |
| 14094 | The excellent notion of metaphysical 'necessity' cannot be defined [Rosen] |
| Full Idea: Many of our best words in philosophy do not admit of definition, the notion of metaphysical 'necessity' being one pertinent example. | |
| From: Gideon Rosen (Metaphysical Dependence [2010], 03) | |
| A reaction: Rosen is busy defending words in metaphysics which cannot be pinned down with logical rigour. We are allowed to write □ for 'necessary', and it is accepted by logicians as being stable in a language. |
| 14101 | Are necessary truths rooted in essences, or also in basic grounding laws? [Rosen] |
| Full Idea: Fine says a truth is necessary when it is a logical consequence of the essential truths, but maybe it is a consequence of the essential truths together with the basic grounding laws (the 'Moorean connections'). | |
| From: Gideon Rosen (Metaphysical Dependence [2010], 13) | |
| A reaction: I'm with Fine all the way here, as we really don't need to clog nature up with things called 'grounding laws', which are both obscure and inexplicable. Fine's story is the one for naturalistically inclined philosophers. |
| 15975 | Can the qualities of a body be split into two groups, where the smaller explains the larger? [Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: Is there any way of separating the qualities that bodies appear to have into two groups, one as small as possible and the other as large as possible, such that the smaller group can plausibly be used to explain the larger? | |
| From: Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 5.02) | |
| A reaction: Alexander implies that this is a question Locke asked himself. This is pretty close to what I take to be the main question for essentialism, though I am cautious about couching it in terms of groups of qualities. I think this was Aristotle's question. |
| 14099 | 'Bachelor' consists in or reduces to 'unmarried' male, but not the other way around [Rosen] |
| Full Idea: It sounds right to say that Fred's being a bachelor consists in (reduces to) being an unmarried male, but slightly off to say that Fred's being an unmarried male consists in (or reduces to) being a bachelor. There is a corresponding explanatory asymmetry. | |
| From: Gideon Rosen (Metaphysical Dependence [2010], 10) | |
| A reaction: This emerging understanding of the asymmetry of the idea shows that we are not just dealing with a simple semantic identity. Our concepts are richer than our language. He adds that a ball could be blue in virtue of being cerulean. |
| 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. |
| 15963 | Science has been partly motivated by the belief that the universe is run by God's laws [Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: The idea of a designed universe has not been utterly irrelevant to the scientific project; it is one of the beliefs that can give a scientist the faith that there are laws, waiting to be discovered, that govern all phenomena. | |
| From: Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 03.3) | |
| A reaction: Of course if you start out looking for the 'laws of God' that is probably what you will discover. Natural selection strikes me as significant, because it shows no sign of being a procedure appropriate to a benevolent god. |
| 15951 | Alchemists tried to separate out essences, which influenced later chemistry [Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: The alchemists sought the separation of the 'pure essences' of substances from unwanted impurities. This last goal was of great importance for the development of modern chemistry at the hands of Boyle and his successors. | |
| From: Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 01.1) | |
| A reaction: In a nutshell this gives us the reason why essences are so important, and also why they became discredited. Time for a clear modern rethink. |
| 15981 | Absolute space either provides locations, or exists but lacks 'marks' for locations [Alexander,P] |
| Full Idea: There are two conceptions of absolute space. In the first, empty space is independent of objects but provides a frame of reference so an object has a location. ..In the second space exists independently, but has no 'marks' into which objects can be put. | |
| From: Peter Alexander (Ideas, Qualities and Corpuscles [1985], 6) | |
| A reaction: He says that Locke seems to reject the first one, but accept the second one. |
| 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. |
| 14098 | An acid is just a proton donor [Rosen] |
| Full Idea: To be an acid just is to be a proton donor. | |
| From: Gideon Rosen (Metaphysical Dependence [2010], 10) | |
| A reaction: My interest here is in whether we can say that we have found the 'essence' of an acid - so we want to know whether something 'deeper' explains the proton-donation. I suspect not. Being a proton donor happens to have a group of related consequences. |