9 ideas
13157 | Choose the true hypothesis, which is the most intelligible one [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: One should choose the more intelligible hypothesis, and the truth is nothing but its intelligibility. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Copernicanism and Relativity of Motion [1689], p.91) | |
A reaction: This apparently simple observation strikes me as being rather profound. Our picture of the world is shaped entirely by what is intelligible to us. An odd notion of truth, though. The age of reason. See Idea 13158. |
21315 | A tree remains the same in the popular sense, but not in the strict philosophical sense [Butler] |
Full Idea: When a man swears to the same tree having stood for fifty years in the same place, he means ...not that the tree has been all that time the same in the strict philosophical sense of the word. ...In a loose and popular sense they are said to be the same. | |
From: Joseph Butler (Analogy of Religion [1736], App.1) | |
A reaction: A helpful distinction which we should hang on. Of course, by the standards of modern physics, nothing is strictly the same from one Planck time to the next. All is flux. So we either drop the word 'same' (for objects) or relax a bit. |
13158 | The Copernican theory is right because it is the only one offering a good explanation [Leibniz] |
Full Idea: The Copernican account is the truest theory, that is, the most intelligible theory and the only one capable of an explanation sufficient for a person of sound reason. | |
From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Copernicanism and Relativity of Motion [1689], p.92) | |
A reaction: The word 'intelligible' here seems to be linked to the notion of a best explanation. |
21317 | Despite consciousness fluctuating, we are aware that it belongs to one person [Butler] |
Full Idea: Though the successive consciousnesses which we have of our own existence are not the same, yet they are consciousnesses of one and the same thing or object; of the same person, self, or living agent. | |
From: Joseph Butler (Analogy of Religion [1736], App.1) | |
A reaction: Butler's arguments seems to be that he appears to be the same person, so he is the same person. He is explicitly disagreeing with Locke. |
21313 | If consciousness of events makes our identity, then if we have forgotten them we didn't exist then [Butler] |
Full Idea: Though consciousness of what is past does ascertain our personal identity to ourselves, yet to say that it makes personal identity, or is necessary to our being the same persons is to say a person has not existed a single moment but what he can remember. | |
From: Joseph Butler (Analogy of Religion [1736], App.1) | |
A reaction: An over-cautious scepticism has crept in about the reliability of bodily identity. Now we can have photographs and CCTV to prove that we experienced events we have forgotten. Butler is right. |
21314 | Consciousness presupposes personal identity, so it cannot constitute it [Butler] |
Full Idea: One would think it really self-evident that consciousness of personal identity presupposes, and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity, any more than knowledge can presuppose truth, which it presupposes. | |
From: Joseph Butler (Analogy of Religion [1736], App.1) | |
A reaction: It rather begs the question to dogmatically assert that mere consciousness presupposes a self, especially after Hume's criticisms. That consciousness implies a subject to experience needs arguing for. Is it the best explanation? |
21318 | If the self changes, we have no responsibilities, and no interest in past or future [Butler] |
Full Idea: If personality is a transient thing ...then it follows that it is a fallacy to charge ourselves with any thing we did, or to imagine our present selves interested in any thing which befell us yesterday, or what will befall us tomorrow. | |
From: Joseph Butler (Analogy of Religion [1736], App.1) | |
A reaction: We seem to care about the past and future of our children, without actually being our children. Can't my future self be my descendant, a close one, instead of me? |
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. |