4 ideas
| 23282 | If all that matters in morality is motive and intention, that makes moral luck irrelevant [Williams,B] |
| Full Idea: The idea that one's whole life can be immune to luck has not prevailed (e.g. in Christianity), …but its place has been taken by the idea that moral value can be immune, …if it is motive that counts, and in actions it is not worldly changes but intention. | |
| From: Bernard Williams (Moral Luck [1976], p.20) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] That is, that Kant offers a way to make luck irrelevant to morality. Williams disagrees, but says at least Kant offers 'solace to a sense of the world's unfairness'. |
| 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. |
| 13440 | Causation is the power of one property to produce another, and this gives time its direction [Esfeld] |
| Full Idea: The metaphysics of causation in terms of powers is linked with an intrinsic direction of time. There is a causal connection if an F-property produces a G. One can argue that causation thus is the basis for the direction of time. | |
| From: Michael Esfeld (Humean metaphysics vs metaphysics of Powers [2010], 7.2) | |
| A reaction: I think this is my preferred metaphysic - that both time and causation are primitive, but the direction of time is the result of the causal process. Viewing some new world, we would just say that time went in whichever direction the causation went. |