31 ideas
| 1642 | We must fight fiercely for knowledge, understanding and intelligence [Plato] |
| Full Idea: We need to use every argument we can to fight against anyone who does away with knowledge, understanding, and intelligence, but at the same time asserts anything at all about anything. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 249c) | |
| A reaction: Thus showing that reason is only central if you want to put a high value on it? |
| 1645 | The desire to split everything into its parts is unpleasant and unphilosophical [Plato] |
| Full Idea: To try to set apart everything from everything is not only especially jangling, but it is the mark of someone altogether unmusical and unphilosophic. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 259e) |
| 287 | Good analysis involves dividing things into appropriate forms without confusion [Plato] |
| Full Idea: It takes expertise in dialectic to divide things by kinds and not to think that the same form is a different one or that a different form is the same. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 253d) |
| 1644 | Dialectic should only be taught to those who already philosophise well [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The dialectical capacity - you won't give it to anyone else, I suspect, except to whoever philosophises purely and justly. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 253e) |
| 20478 | In discussion a person's opinions are shown to be in conflict, leading to calm self-criticism [Plato] |
| Full Idea: They collect someone's opinions together during the discussion, put them side by side, and show that they conflict with each other at the same time on the same subjects.... The person sees this, gets angry at themselves, and calmer towards others. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 230b) | |
| A reaction: He goes on to say that the process is like a doctor purging a patient of internal harms. If anyone talks for long enough (even a good philosopher), their opinions will probably be seen to be in conflict. But which opinions do you abandon? |
| 11278 | What does 'that which is not' refer to? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: What should the name 'that which is not' be applied to? | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 237c) | |
| A reaction: This leads into a discussion of the problem, in The Sophist. It became a large issue when modern logic was being developed by Frege and Russell. |
| 1643 | If statements about non-existence are logically puzzling, so are statements about existence [Plato] |
| Full Idea: When the question was put to us as to the name of 'that which is not', to whatever one must apply it, we got stuck in every kind of perplexity. Are we now in any less perplexity about 'that which is'? | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 250d) | |
| A reaction: Nice. This precapitulates the whole story of modern philosophy of language. What started as a nagging doubt about reference to non-existents ends as bewilderment about everything we say. |
| 7022 | To be is to have a capacity, to act on other things, or to receive actions [Plato] |
| Full Idea: A thing really is if it has any capacity, either by nature to do something to something else or to have even the smallest thing done to it by the most trivial thing, even if it only happens once. I'll define those which are as nothing other than capacity. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 247e) | |
| A reaction: If philosophy is footnotes to Plato, this should be the foundational remark in all discussions of existence (though Parmenides might claim priority). It seems to say 'to be is to have a causal role (active or passive)'. It also seems essentialist. |
| 16554 | Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: Activities can be identified spatiotemporally, and individuated by rate, duration, and types of entity and property that engage in them. They also have modes of operation, directionality, polarity, energy requirements and a range. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
| A reaction: This is their attempt at making 'activity' one of the two central concepts of ontology, along with 'entity'. A helpful analysis. It just seems to be one way of slicing the cake. |
| 1641 | Some alarming thinkers think that only things which you can touch exist [Plato] |
| Full Idea: One group drags everything down to earth, insisting that only what offers tangible contact is, since they define being as the same as body, despising anyone who says that something without a body is. These are frightening men. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 246b) |
| 10784 | Whenever there's speech it has to be about something [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Whenever there's speech it has to be about something. It's impossible for it not to be about something. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 262e) | |
| A reaction: [Quoted by Marcus about ontological commitment] The interesting test case would be speech about the existence of circular squares. |
| 16556 | Penicillin causes nothing; the cause is what penicillin does [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: It is not the penicillin that causes the pneumonia to disappear, but what the penicillin does. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: This is a very neat example for illustrating how we slip into 'entity' talk, when the reality we are addressing actually concerns processes. Without the 'what it does', penicillin can't participate in causation at all. |
| 16122 | Good thinkers spot forms spread through things, or included within some larger form [Plato] |
| Full Idea: It takes dialectic to divide things by kinds...such a person can discriminate a single form spread through a lot of separate things…and forms included in a single outside form…or a form connected as a unit through many wholes. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 253d) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This is very helpful in indicating the complex structure of the Forms that Plato envisages. If you talk of the meanings of words (other than names), though, it comes to the same thing. Wise people fully understand their language. |
| 10422 | The not-beautiful is part of the beautiful, though opposed to it, and is just as real [Plato] |
| Full Idea: So 'the not beautiful' turns out to be ..both marked off within one kind of those that are, and also set over against one of those that are, ..and the beautiful is no more a being than the not beautiful. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 257d) | |
| A reaction: [dialogue eliminated] This is a highly significant passage, for two reasons. It suggests that the Form of the beautiful can have parts, and also that the negations of Forms are Forms themselves (both of which come as a surprise). |
| 15855 | If we see everything as separate, we can then give no account of it [Plato] |
| Full Idea: To dissociate each thing from everything else is to destroy totally everything there is to say. The weaving together of forms is what makes speech [logos] possible for us. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 259e) | |
| A reaction: This I take to be the lynchpin of metaphysics. We are forced to see the world in a way which enables us to give some sort of account of it. Our metaphysics is 'inference to the best logos'. |
| 16562 | We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: The intelligibility of a phenomenon consists in the mechanisms being portrayed in terms of a field's bottom out entities and activities. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
| A reaction: In other words, we understand complex things by reducing them to things we do understand. It would, though, be illuminating to see a nest of interconnected activities, even if we understood none of them. |
| 1637 | A soul without understanding is ugly [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The soul that lacks understanding must be set down as ugly. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 228d) | |
| A reaction: The teleological view of things understands their nature in things of their perfection. and the essence of beauty is perfection. It is the mind's nature to know. Failing to know is as ugly as allowing your crops to die. |
| 16563 | The explanation is not the regularity, but the activity sustaining it [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: It is not regularities that explain but the activities that sustain the regularities. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
| A reaction: Good, but we had better not characterise the 'activities' in terms of regularities. |
| 16555 | Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: It is common to speak of functions as properties 'had by' entities, …but they should rather be understood in terms of the activities by virtue of which entities contribute to the workings of a mechanism. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
| A reaction: I'm certainly quite passionately in favour of cutting down on describing the world almost entirely in terms of entities which have properties. An 'activity', though, is a bit of an elusive concept. |
| 16528 | Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: One should not think of mechanisms as exclusively mechanical (push-pull) systems. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
| A reaction: The difficulty seems to be that you could broaden the concept of 'mechanism' indefinitely, so that it covered history, mathematics, populations, cultural change, and even mathematics. Where to stop? |
| 16529 | Mechanisms are systems organised to produce regular change [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: Mechanisms are entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular change from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
| A reaction: This is their initial formal definition of a mechanism. Note that a mere 'activity' can be included. Presumably the mechanism might have an outcome that was not the intended outcome. Does a random element disqualify it? Are hands mechanisms? |
| 16530 | A mechanism explains a phenomenon by showing how it was produced [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: To give a description of a mechanism for a phenomenon is to explain that phenomenon, i.e. to explain how it was produced. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 1) | |
| A reaction: To 'show how' something happens needs a bit of precisification. It is probably analytic that 'showing how' means 'revealing the mechanism', though 'mechanism' then becomes the tricky concept. |
| 16553 | Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: We emphasise the activities in mechanisms. This is explicitly dualist. Substantivalists speak of entities with dispositions to act. Process ontologists reify activities and try to reduce entities to processes. We try to capture both intuitions. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3) | |
| A reaction: [A quotation of selected fragments] The problem here seems to be the raising of an 'activity' to a central role in ontology, when it doesn't seem to be primitive, and will typically be analysed in a variety of ways. |
| 16559 | Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: Nested hierachical descriptions of mechanisms typically bottom out in lowest level mechanisms. …Bottoming out is relative …the explanation comes to an end, and description of lower-level mechanisms would be irrelevant. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me exactly the right story about mechanism, and it is a story I am associating with essentialism. The relevance is ties to understanding. The lower level is either fully understood, or totally baffling. |
| 16564 | There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: There are four bottom-out kinds of activities: geometrico-mechanical, electro-chemical, electro-magnetic and energetic. These are abstract means of production that can be fruitfully applied in particular cases to explain phenomena. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 7) | |
| A reaction: I like that. It gives a nice core for a metaphysics for physicalists. I suspect that 'mechanical' can be reduced to something else, and that 'energetic' will disappear in the final story. |
| 16561 | We can abstract by taking an exemplary case and ignoring the detail [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: Abstractions may be constructed by taking an exemplary case or instance and removing detail. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 5.3) | |
| A reaction: I love 'removing detail'. That's it. Simple. I think this process is the basis of our whole capacity to formulate abstract concepts. Forget Frege - he's just describing the results of the process. How do we decide what is 'detail'? Essentialism! |
| 1636 | Wickedness is an illness of the soul [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Wickedness is a sedition and illness of the soul. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 228b) |
| 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. |
| 1638 | Didactic education is hard work and achieves little [Plato] |
| Full Idea: With a lot of effort the admonitory species of education accomplishes little. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 230a) |
| 16558 | Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
| Full Idea: The traditional notion of a law of nature has few, if any, applications in neurobiology or molecular biology. | |
| From: Machamer,P/Darden,L/Craver,C (Thinking About Mechanisms [2000], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: This is a simple and self-evident fact, and bad news for anyone who want to build their entire ontology around laws of nature. I take such a notion to be fairly empty, except as a convenient heuristic device. |
| 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. |