33 ideas
| 3600 | Slow and accurate thought makes the greatest progress [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Those who go forward only very slowly can progress much further if they always keep to the right path, than those who run and wander off it. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §1.2) | |
| A reaction: Like Descartes' 'Method'. This seems to place a low value on 'nous' or intuition. |
| 3601 | Most things in human life seem vain and useless [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Looking at the various activities and enterprises of mankind with the eye of a philosopher, there is hardly one which does not seem to me vain and useless. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §1.3) | |
| A reaction: Well, yes. The obvious retort is that everything is vain and useless; or if not, then certainly metaphysics is. Useful for what? Is ornamental gardening useless, or sport? Art? What is the use of cosmology? He's right, of course. |
| 3602 | Almost every daft idea has been expressed by some philosopher [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: There is nothing one can imagine so strange or so unbelievable that has not been said by one or other of the philosophers. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §2.16) | |
| A reaction: Actually I think that extensive areas of logical possibilities for existence remain totally unexplored. On the other hand, most of the metaphysical beliefs of most of the human race, including the majority of philosophers, strike me as being false. |
| 13917 | Metaphysics aims to identify categories of being, and show their interdependency [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The central task of metaphysics is to chart the possibilities of existence by identifying the categories of being and the relations of ontological dependency in which beings of different categories stand to one another. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I am beginning to think that he is right about the second one, and that dependency and grounding relations are the name of the game. I don't have Lowe's confidence that philosophers can parcel up reality in neat and true ways. |
| 13919 | Philosophy aims not at the 'analysis of concepts', but at understanding the essences of things [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: The central task of philosophy is the cultivation of insights into natures or essences, and not the 'analysis of concepts', with which it is apt to be confused. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 1) | |
| A reaction: This immediately strikes me as a false dichotomy. I like the idea of trying to understand the true natures of things, but how are we going to do it in our armchairs? |
| 3603 | Methodical thinking is cautious, analytical, systematic, and panoramic [Descartes, by PG] |
| Full Idea: Descartes' four principles for his method of thinking are: be cautious, analyse the problem, be systematic from simple to complex, and keep an overview of the problem | |
| From: report of René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §2.18) by PG - Db (ideas) |
| 3612 | Clear and distinct conceptions are true because a perfect God exists [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: That the things we grasp very clearly and very distinctly are all true, is assured only because God is or exists, and because he is a perfect Being. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.38) |
| 3610 | Truth is clear and distinct conception - of which it is hard to be sure [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I take it as a general rule that the things we conceive very clearly and very distinctly are all true, but that there is merely some difficulty in properly discerning which are those which we distinctly conceive. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.33) |
| 13918 | Holes, shadows and spots of light can coincide without being identical [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Holes are things of such a kind that they can coincide without being identical - as are, for example, shadows and spots of light. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 1) | |
| A reaction: His point is that they thereby fail one of the standard tests for being an 'object'. |
| 13921 | All things must have an essence (a 'what it is'), or we would be unable to think about them [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Things must have an essence, in the sense of 'what it is to be the individual of that kind', or it would make no sense to say we can talk or think comprehendingly about things at all. If we don't know what it is, how can we think about it? | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 2) | |
| A reaction: Lowe presents this as a sort of Master Argument for essences. I think he is working with the wrong notion of essence. All he means is that things must have identities to be objects of thought. Why equate identity with essence, and waste a good concept? |
| 13922 | Knowing an essence is just knowing what the thing is, not knowing some further thing [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: To know something's essence is not to be acquainted with some further thing of a special kind, but simply to understand what exactly that thing is. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 2) | |
| A reaction: I think he is wrong about this, or at least is working with an unhelpful notion of essence. Identity is one thing, and essence is another. I take essences to be certain selected features of things, which explain their nature. |
| 13920 | Each thing has to be of a general kind, because it belongs to some category [Lowe] |
| Full Idea: Any individual thing must be a thing of some general kind - because, at the very least, it must belong to some ontological category. | |
| From: E.J. Lowe (Two Notions of Being: Entity and Essence [2008], 2) | |
| A reaction: Where does the law that 'everything must have a category' come from? I'm baffled by remarks of this kind. Where do we get the categories from? From observing the individuals. So which has priority? Not the categories. Is God a kind? |
| 3605 | We can believe a thing without knowing we believe it [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The action of thought by which one believes a thing, being different from that by which one knows that one believes it, they often exist the one without the other. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §3.23) |
| 1583 | In morals Descartes accepts the conventional, but rejects it in epistemology [Roochnik on Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Descartes' procedure for treating values (accepting normal conventions when faced with uncertainty) is the exact antithesis of that used to attain knowledge. | |
| From: comment on René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §3.23) by David Roochnik - The Tragedy of Reason p.73 |
| 3607 | In thinking everything else false, my own existence remains totally certain [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: While I decided to think that everything was false, it followed necessarily that I who thought thus must be something; the truth 'I think therefore I am' was so certain that the most extravagant scepticism could never shake it. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.32) |
| 3617 | I aim to find the principles and causes of everything, using the seeds within my mind [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I have tried to find in general the principles or first causes of everything which is or which may be in the world, ..without taking them from any other source than from certain seeds of truth which are naturally in our minds. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §6.64) |
| 3611 | Understanding, rather than imagination or senses, gives knowledge [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Neither our imagination nor our senses could ever assure us of anything, if our understanding did not intervene. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.37) |
| 3606 | I was searching for reliable rock under the shifting sand [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: My whole plan had for its aim simply to give me assurance, and the rejection of shifting ground and sand in order to find rock or clay. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §3.29) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be characteristic of an age when religion is being quietly rocked by the revival of ancient scepticism. If he'd settled for fallibilism, our civilization would have gone differently. |
| 3604 | When rebuilding a house, one needs alternative lodgings [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Before beginning to rebuild the house in which one lives…. one must also provide oneself with some other accommodation in which to be lodge conveniently while the work is going on. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §3.22) |
| 3618 | Only experiments can settle disagreements between rival explanations [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I observe almost no individual effect without immediately knowing that it can be deduced in many different ways, ..and I know of no way to resolve this but by experiments such that the results are different according to different explanations. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §6.65) |
| 3615 | Little reason is needed to speak, so animals have no reason at all [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Animals not only have less reason than men, but they have none at all; for we see that very little of it is required in order to be able to speak. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §5.58) |
| 3609 | I am a thinking substance, which doesn't need a place or material support [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I concluded that I was a substance, of which the whole essence or nature consists in thinking, and which, in order to exist, needs no place and depends on no material thing. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.33) | |
| A reaction: To me that sounds like "I concluded that I wasn't a human being", which highlights the bizarre wishful thinking that seems to have gripped the human race for the first few thousand years of its serious thinking. |
| 3608 | I can deny my body and the world, but not my own existence [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I could pretend that I had no body, and that there was no world or place that I was in, but I could not, for all that, pretend that I did not exist. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §4.32) | |
| A reaction: He makes the (in my opinion) appalling blunder of thinking that because he can pretend that he has no body, that therefore he might not have one. I can pretend that gold is an unusual form of cheese. However, "I don't exist" certainly sounds wrong. |
| 3613 | Reason is universal in its responses, but a physical machine is constrained by its organs [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Whereas reason is a universal instrument which can serve on any kind of occasion, the organs of a machine need a disposition for each action; so it is impossible to have enough different organs in a machine to respond to all the occurrences of life. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §5.57) | |
| A reaction: How can Descartes know that reason is 'universal' rather than just 'very extensive'? Is there any information which cannot be encoded in a computer? It doesn't feel as if there any intrinsic restrictions to reason, but note Idea 4688. |
| 3616 | The soul must unite with the body to have appetites and sensations [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: It is not sufficient that the reasonable soul should be lodged in the body like a pilot in a ship, unless perhaps to move its limbs, but it needs to be united more closely with the body in order to have sensations and appetites, and so be a true man. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §5.59) | |
| A reaction: The idea that the pineal gland is the link suggests that Descartes has the 'pilot' view, but this idea shows that he believes in very close and complex interaction between mind and body. But how can a mind 'have' appetites if it has no physical needs? |
| 3614 | A machine could speak in response to physical stimulus, but not hold a conversation [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: One may conceive of a machine made so as to emit words, and even emit them in response to a change in its bodily organs, such as being touched, but not to reply to the sense of everything said in its presence, as the most unintelligent men can. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §5.56) | |
| A reaction: A critique of the Turing Test, written in 1637! You have to admire. Because of the advent of the microprocessor, we can 'conceive' more sophisticated, multi-level machines than Descartes could come up with. |
| 1581 | Greeks elevate virtues enormously, but never explain them [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The ancient pagans place virtues on a high plateau and make them appear the most valuable thing in the world, but they do not sufficiently instruct us about how to know them. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], §1.8) |
| 22808 | Liberalism is minimal government, or individual rights, or equality [Avineri/De-Shalit] |
| Full Idea: Liberalism has been defended as a theory of minimal government, or as a theory of basic individual rights, or as an egalitarian philosophy. | |
| From: Avineri,S/De-Shalit,A (Intro to 'Communitarianism and Individualism' [1992], §5) | |
| A reaction: Minimal government tends towards anarchist liberalism, but then what grounds the right to be free of government? Presumably any sensible theory of rights has to be egalitarian. What could ground unequal rights? |
| 22803 | Can individualist theories justify an obligation to fight in a war? [Avineri/De-Shalit] |
| Full Idea: How can an individualist theory justify an obligation to fight for the state in the case of war? | |
| From: Avineri,S/De-Shalit,A (Intro to 'Communitarianism and Individualism' [1992], §4) | |
| A reaction: The most dramatic example of obliging citizens to contribute to the state, the notable other case being taxes. Some imagined ancient 'social contract' doesn't seem sufficient for later generations. Does being naturally sociable create such obligations? |
| 22804 | Autonomy is better achieved within a community [Avineri/De-Shalit] |
| Full Idea: Communitarians often argue that personal autonomy is better achieved within the community. | |
| From: Avineri,S/De-Shalit,A (Intro to 'Communitarianism and Individualism' [1992], §4) | |
| A reaction: Hegel is the source of this view. The simplest version of the point is that autonomy can only be asserted if a person has rights, which can be asserted and defended, and only a society can provide that. That is plausible. |
| 22806 | Communitarians avoid oppression for the common good, by means of small mediating communities [Avineri/De-Shalit] |
| Full Idea: Because of the mediating structures of small communities, communitarians are less fearful [than liberals] of the emergence of an oppressive government as a result of the politics of the common good. | |
| From: Avineri,S/De-Shalit,A (Intro to 'Communitarianism and Individualism' [1992], §5) | |
| A reaction: A politics of the common good has an obvious implicit conservatism because the central consensus is always likely to disapprove of errant individuals, of all sorts. Only individual rights can block an oppressive government. |
| 22807 | If our values are given to us by society then we have no grounds to criticise them [Avineri/De-Shalit] |
| Full Idea: If communitarians are right that we are not free to choose, but rather that our values are determined by our community, the individualists say, then there is no reason to criticise the values of one's society. | |
| From: Avineri,S/De-Shalit,A (Intro to 'Communitarianism and Individualism' [1992], §5) | |
| A reaction: This is an obvious challenge, but if one's concept of community is a forum for free debate then it can be overcome. There is no avoiding the fact, though, that a good community always needs a high degree of consensus. |
| 16686 | God has established laws throughout nature, and implanted ideas of them within us [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I have noticed certain laws that God has so established in nature, and of which he has implanted such notions in our souls, that …we cannot doubt that they are exactly observed in everything that exists or occurs in the world. | |
| From: René Descartes (A Discourse on Method [1637], pt 5), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 15.5 | |
| A reaction: This is the view of laws which still seems to be with us (and needs extirpating) - that some outside agency imposes them on nature. I suspect that even Richard Feynman thought of laws like that, because he despised philosophy, and was thus naïve. |