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All the ideas for 'A Discourse on Method', 'The Human Animal' and 'How Things Persist'

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63 ideas

1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 1. Philosophy
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.
1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 7. Despair over Philosophy
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.
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.
Philosophers are good at denying the obvious [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Philosophers are skilled at resisting even the most inviting thoughts.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5)
     A reaction: Not exactly 'despair', but it does show how far philosophers are able to stray from common sense. Monads, real possible worlds, real sets… Thomas Reid, the philosopher of common sense, might be the antidote.
2. Reason / A. Nature of Reason / 4. Aims of Reason
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)
2. Reason / F. Fallacies / 4. Circularity
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)
3. Truth / A. Truth Problems / 8. Subjective Truth
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)
5. Theory of Logic / F. Referring in Logic / 1. Naming / b. Names as descriptive
Part of the sense of a proper name is a criterion of the thing's identity [Hawley]
     Full Idea: A Fregean dictum is that part of the sense of proper name is a criterion of identity for the thing in question.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.8)
     A reaction: [She quotes Dummett 1981:545] We are asked to choose between this and the Kripke rigid/dubbing/causal account, with effectively no content.
7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 5. Supervenience / d. Humean supervenience
A homogeneous rotating disc should be undetectable according to Humean supervenience [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Imagine a perfectly homogeneous non-atomistic disc. A record of all the non-relational information about the world at that moment will not reveal whether the disc is rotating about a vertical axis through. This tells against Humean supervenience.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.2)
     A reaction: [Armstrong 1980 originated this, and it is famously discussed by Kripke in lectures] There will, of course, be dispositions present because of the rotation, but Lewis excludes any such modal truths.
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 10. Vagueness / b. Vagueness of reality
Non-linguistic things cannot be indeterminate, because they don't have truth-values at all [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Non-linguistic objects, properties, and states of affairs cannot be indeterminate because they cannot have determinate truth-values either. No cloud is indeterminate, just as no cloud is either determinately true or determinately false.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1)
     A reaction: If vagueness must be linguistic, this means animals can never experience it, which I doubt. Presumably 'this is a cloud' is only made vague by the vagueness of the object, rather than by the vagueness of the sentence?
Maybe for the world to be vague, it must be vague in its foundations? [Hawley]
     Full Idea: There is a question of whether there must be 'vagueness all the way down' for the world to be vague. One view is that if there is a base level of precisely describably facts, upon which all the others supervene, then the world is not really vague.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.5)
     A reaction: My understanding of the physics is that it is non-vague all the way down, and then you get to the base level which is hopelessly vague!
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 10. Vagueness / c. Vagueness as ignorance
Epistemic vagueness seems right in the case of persons [Hawley]
     Full Idea: The epistemic account of vagueness is particularly attractive where persons are concerned.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.14)
     A reaction: You'll have to see her text for details. Interesting that there might be different views of what vagueness is for different cases. Or putting it another way, absolutely everything (said, thought, existing or done) might be vague in some way!
7. Existence / D. Theories of Reality / 10. Vagueness / f. Supervaluation for vagueness
Supervaluation refers to one vaguely specified thing, through satisfaction by everything in some range [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Supervaluationists take a present-tense predication as concerning a single, but vaguely specified, moment. …It is indeterminate which of a range of moments enters into the truth conditions, but it is true if satisfied by every member of the range.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.7)
     A reaction: She is discussing stage theory, but this is a helpful clarification of the idea of supervaluation. Something can be satisfied by a whole bunch of values, even though you are not sure which one.
Supervaluationism takes what the truth-value would have been if indecision was resolved [Hawley]
     Full Idea: A supervaluationist approach involves consideration of what the truth value of the utterance would have been if semantic indecision had been resolved in this way or that.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1)
     A reaction: At last, a lovely account of supervaluation in plain English that anyone can understand! Why don't they all do that? Well, done Katherine Hawley! ['semantic indecision' is uncertainty about what your words mean!]
8. Modes of Existence / B. Properties / 1. Nature of Properties
Maybe the only properties are basic ones like charge, mass and spin [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Some philosophers suspect that properties are few and far between, that there are only properties like charge, mass, spin, and so on.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.1)
     A reaction: I think properties are very sparse, and mainly consist of physical powers, but I am not sure what I think of this. It may be 'mere semantics'. Complex properties still seem to be properties. Powers combine to make properties, I suggest.
9. Objects / A. Existence of Objects / 1. Physical Objects
An object is 'natural' if its stages are linked by certain non-supervenient relations [Hawley]
     Full Idea: I suggest that our distinction between natural and unnatural (gerrymandered) objects corresponds to a distinction between series of stages which are and are not linked by certain non-supervenient relations.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.5)
     A reaction: See Idea 16213 for the nature of these 'relations'. I don't understand how an abstraction (as I take it) like a relation can unify a physical object. A trout-turkey is unified by a relation of some sort. Hawley defends Stage Theory.
9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 3. Unity Problems / b. Cat and its tail
Are sortals spatially maximal - so no cat part is allowed to be a cat? [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Many philosophers believe that sortal predicates are spatially maximal - for example, that no cat can be a proper spatial part of a cat.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.1)
     A reaction: This sounds reasonable until you cut the tail off a cat. Presumably what remains is a cat? So presumably that smaller part was always a cat? Only essentialism can make sense of this! You can't just invent rules for sortals.
9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 3. Unity Problems / c. Statue and clay
The modal features of statue and lump are disputed; when does it stop being that statue? [Hawley]
     Full Idea: It is difficult to establish a consensus about the modal features of the statue and the lump. Could that statue be made of a different lump? Could that statue of Goliath have been spherical? Not a realistic statue of Goliath, but still the same statue?
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6)
     A reaction: The problem is with a wild wacky sculptor, who might say it is a statue of Goliath no matter what shape the lump takes. 'Goliath had a spherical character'. Sometimes we will say (pace Evans) it is 'roughly identical' to the original statue.
Perdurantists can adopt counterpart theory, to explain modal differences of identical part-sums [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Perdurance theory claims that lumps and statues differ modally whilst always being made of the same parts. A natural way to make this less mysterious is for perdurantists to adopt counterpart theory, where objects in different worlds are never identical.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6.2)
     A reaction: This, of course, is exactly the system created by David Lewis. Personally I rather like counterparts, but perdurance seems a tad crazy.
9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 3. Unity Problems / e. Vague objects
Vagueness is either in our knowledge, in our talk, or in reality [Hawley]
     Full Idea: There are three main views of vagueness: the Epistemic view says we talk precisely, but don't know what we talk precisely about; the Semantic view is that it is loose talk, or semantic indecision; the Ontic view says it is part of how the world is.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1)
     A reaction: [My summary of two paragraphs] She associates Williamson with the first view, Lewis with the second, and Van Inwagen with the third.
Indeterminacy in objects and in properties are not distinct cases [Hawley]
     Full Idea: There is no important distinction to be drawn between cases where indeterminacy is due to the object involved and cases where indeterminacy is due to the property involved.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.2)
     A reaction: You could always paraphrase the object's situation propertywise, or the property's situation objectwise. 'His baldness is indeterminate'; 'where does the mountainous terrain end?'
9. Objects / C. Structure of Objects / 6. Constitution of an Object
The constitution theory is endurantism plus more than one object in a place [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Constitution theorists are endurance theorists who believe that there can be more than one object exactly occupying a spatial region at a certain moment.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.1)
     A reaction: I increasingly think that this is a ridiculous view. The constitution of an object isn't a further object. A constitution is a necessary requirement for a physical object. Hylomorphism! Constitutions can't be separate - they must constitute something!
Constitution theory needs sortal properties like 'being a sweater' to distinguish it from its thread [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Constitution theorists need to posit sortal properties of 'being a thread' or 'being a sweater', as grounds for the differences betwween the sweater and the thread that constitutes it.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.1)
     A reaction: This is further grounds for thinking the constitution view ridiculous, because there are no such properties. 'Being a sweater' is a category, which something belongs in if it has all the properties of a sweater. The final property triggers sweaterhood.
If the constitution view says thread and sweater are two things, why do we talk of one thing? [Hawley]
     Full Idea: The constitution theorists, who claim that the sweater and the thread are different things, should offer some explanation of why we tend to say that there is just one thing there. They must simply claim that we 'do not count by identity'.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.8)
     A reaction: Her example is a sweater knitted from a single piece of thread. Presumably we could count by sortal identity, so there is one thread here, and there is one sweater here. We just can't add the two together. No ontological arithmetic.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 2. Objects that Change
'Adverbialism' explains change by saying an object has-at-some-time a given property [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Another strategy for the problem of change says that instantiation - the having of properties - is time-indexed, or relative to times, although properties themselves are not. This 'adverbialism' says that object has-at-t some property.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.5)
     A reaction: [She cites Johnson, Lowe and Haslanger for this] Promising. The question is whether the time index is attached to the object, to the property, or to the instantiation. The middle one is wrong. There aren't two properties - green-at-t1 and green-at-t2.
Presentism solves the change problem: the green banana ceases, so can't 'relate' to the yellow one [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Adopting presentism solves the problem of change, since it means that, once the banana is yellow, there just is no green banana, and the question of the relationship between yesterday's green banana and today's yellow one therefore does not arise.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.7)
     A reaction: Change remains kind of odd, but it is no longer the puzzlement of two things being the same when they are admitted to be different. There is only ever one thing. This is my preferred account, I think. I certainly hope past bananas don't exist.
The problem of change arises if there must be 'identity' of a thing over time [Hawley]
     Full Idea: It is the insistence on identity between objects wholly present at different times which gives rise to the problem of change.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.2)
     A reaction: My solution is to say things are the 'same', in a slightly loose non-transitive way, rather than formally identical, which is a concept from maths, not from reality.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 3. Three-Dimensionalism
Endurance theory can relate properties to times, or timed instantiations to properties [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Endurance theory might claim a banana stands (atemporally) in different relations to different times (being-green-at to Monday), ..or has different instantiation relations to different properties (instantiates-on-Monday to being green).
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.3)
     A reaction: She suggests that the first approach is more plausible for endurantists. I think she is right (assuming these are the only two options). Monday awaits a banana, but yellow doesn't.
Endurance is a sophisticated theory, covering properties, instantiation and time [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Endurance theory is not just a default 'no-theory' theory, for it must incorporate a sophisticated account of properties and instantiation, and requires a certain view of time if it is even to be formulable.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.8)
     A reaction: A bit odd to claim it is a sophisticated theory when it is held (at least in our culture) by absolutely everyone apart from a few philosophers and physicists. The sophistication may come with trying to describe it using current metaphysical vocabulary.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 4. Four-Dimensionalism
How does perdurance theory explain our concern for our own future selves? [Hawley]
     Full Idea: A question for perdurance theory is whether it can account for the special concern we feel for our own future selves.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.8)
     A reaction: That is one of those questions that begins to look very mysterious whatever your theory. I favour endurantism, but me next year looks a very remote person for me to be concerned about, in comparison with the people around me now.
Perdurance needs an atemporal perspective, to say that the object 'has' different temporal parts [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Perdurance relies on our having an 'atemporal' perspective from which we can truly say a banana has both yellow and green parts, where this 'has' is not in the present tense. ..Perdurance theory cannot be expressed straightforwardly in the present tense.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.2)
     A reaction: This seems to require the tenseless B-series view of time. It seems to need a tenseless view of the past, but what does it have to say about the future?
If an object is the sum of all of its temporal parts, its mass is staggeringly large! [Hawley]
     Full Idea: The mass of an object is the sum of its nonoverlapping parts. Analogy would suggest that a persisting banana has, atemporally speaking, a mass that is the sum of all the masses of the 100g temporal parts, a worryingly large figure.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.1)
     A reaction: This is an objection to the Perdurance view that an object is the sum of all of its temporal parts. Their duration tends towards instantaneous, so the aggregate mass tends towards infinity. She says they should deny atemporal mass.
Perdurance says things are sums of stages; Stage Theory says each stage is the thing [Hawley]
     Full Idea: According to Perdurance Theory, it is long-lived sums of stages which are tennis balls, whereas according to Stage Theory, it is the stages themselves which are tennis balls.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.2)
     A reaction: These seem to be the two options if you are a four-dimensionalist, though Fine says you could be a weird three-dimensionalist and choose stage theory.
If a life is essentially the sum of its temporal parts, it couldn't be shorter or longer than it was? [Hawley]
     Full Idea: It seems that perdurance theory should identify Descartes with the sum of his temporal parts, but that means Descartes essentially lived for 54 years, which seems absurd, as he could have lived longer or less long than he in fact did.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6.10)
     A reaction: [She credits Van Inwagen with this] I'm not clear why a counterpart of Descartes could not have a shorter or longer sum of parts, and still be Descartes. If the sum is rigidly designated, that is a problem for endurance too.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 5. Temporal Parts
Stages must be as fine-grained in length as change itself, so any change is a new stage [Hawley]
     Full Idea: To account for change, stages and temporal parts must be as fine-grained as change: a material thing must have as many stages or parts as it is in incompatible states during its lifetime.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.4)
     A reaction: There seems to be a dilemma for stages here, of being so fat that they are divisible and change, or so thin that they barely exist. Lose-lose, I'd say.
Stage Theory seems to miss out the link between stages of the same object [Hawley]
     Full Idea: The first worry for Stage Theory is that many present stages are bananas, and many stages tomorrow are bananas, but this seems to omit the important fact that some of those stages are intimately linked, that certain stages are the same banana.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.3)
     A reaction: Hawley has a theory to do with external relations, which I didn't find very persuasive. Just to say stages have a 'relation' seems too abstract. Stages of disparate things can also have 'relations', but presumably the wrong sort.
Stage Theory says every stage is a distinct object, which gives too many objects [Hawley]
     Full Idea: The second worry for Stage Theory is that there are far too many bananas in the world on this account.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.3)
     A reaction: The point is that each (instantaneous) stage is considered to be a whole banana (as opposed to one sum of all the stages of the banana, in the Perdurance view). A pretty serious problem, which she tries to deal with.
An isolated stage can't be a banana (which involves suitable relations to other stages) [Hawley]
     Full Idea: A single isolated stage could not be a banana, because in order to be a banana a stage must be suitably related to other stages with appropriate properties.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.4.1)
     A reaction: This seems at odds with the claim that each stage is the whole thing (rather than the long temporal 'worm' of perdurance theory). Isolated stages are instantaneous, so can't be anything, really. Her 'relations' seem hand-wavy to me. Connections?
Stages of one thing are related by extrinsic counterfactual and causal relations [Hawley]
     Full Idea: I claim that there are relations between the distinct stages of a persisting object which are not determined by the intrinsic properties of those stages. …The later stages depend, counterfactually and causally, upon the earlier stages.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.5)
     A reaction: This is the heart of her theory. How can there be a causal link between two stages which is not the result of intrinsic properties of the stages? This begins to sound like Malebranche's Occasionalism.
The stages of Stage Theory seem too thin to populate the world, or to be referred to [Hawley]
     Full Idea: A third worry for Stage Theory is that the momentary stages themselves are just too thin to populate the world, and too thin to be the objects of reference.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.3)
     A reaction: Her three objections to her own theory add up to sufficient to refute it, in my view, though a large chunk of her book is spent trying to refute the objections.
9. Objects / F. Identity among Objects / 8. Leibniz's Law
If two things might be identical, there can't be something true of one and false of the other [Hawley]
     Full Idea: We can call the 'transference principle' the claim that if it is indeterminate whether two objects are identical, then nothing determinately true of one can be determinately false of the other.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.9)
     A reaction: The point is that Leibniz's Law could immediately be invoked to show there is no possibility of their identity.
10. Modality / E. Possible worlds / 3. Transworld Objects / c. Counterparts
To decide whether something is a counterpart, we need to specify a relevant sortal concept [Hawley]
     Full Idea: When asked whether a possible object is a counterpart of something, we need to specify which sortal we are interested in.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6.2)
     A reaction: The compares this to the 'respect' in which two things are similar. For example, what would count as a counterpart of the current British Prime Minister? De re or de dicto reference?
11. Knowledge Aims / A. Knowledge / 4. Belief / a. Beliefs
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)
11. Knowledge Aims / B. Certain Knowledge / 1. Certainty
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
11. Knowledge Aims / B. Certain Knowledge / 4. The Cogito
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)
12. Knowledge Sources / A. A Priori Knowledge / 6. A Priori from Reason
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)
12. Knowledge Sources / C. Rationalism / 1. Rationalism
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)
13. Knowledge Criteria / B. Internal Justification / 4. Foundationalism / a. Foundationalism
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.
13. Knowledge Criteria / D. Scepticism / 6. Scepticism Critique
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)
14. Science / A. Basis of Science / 3. Experiment
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)
15. Nature of Minds / A. Nature of Mind / 7. Animal Minds
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)
16. Persons / B. Nature of the Self / 3. Self as Non-physical
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.
16. Persons / B. Nature of the Self / 7. Self and Body / a. Self needs body
Maybe our persistence conditions concern bodies, rather than persons [Olson, by Hawley]
     Full Idea: Instead of attributing person-like persistence conditions to bodies, we could attribute body-like persistence conditions to persons, …so human persons are identical with human organisms.
     From: report of Eric T. Olson (The Human Animal [1997]) by Katherine Hawley - How Things Persist 5.10
     A reaction: In the case of pre-birth and advanced senility, Olson thinks we could have the body without the person, so person is a 'phase sortal' of bodies. A good theory, which seems to answer a lot of questions. 'Person' may be an abstraction.
For 'animalism', I exist before I became a person, and can continue after it, so I am not a person [Olson, by Lowe]
     Full Idea: According to 'animalism', I existed before I was a person and I may well go one existing for some time after I cease to be a person; hence, I am not essentially a person, but a human organism.
     From: report of Eric T. Olson (The Human Animal [1997]) by E.J. Lowe - Introduction to the Philosophy of Mind Ch.10
     A reaction: There is a very real sense in which an extremely senile person has 'ceased to exist' (e.g. as the person I used to love). On the whole, though, I think that Olson is right, and yet 'person' is an important concept. Neither concept is all-or-nothing.
16. Persons / D. Continuity of the Self / 5. Concerns of the Self
On any theory of self, it is hard to explain why we should care about our future selves [Hawley]
     Full Idea: It is rather difficult to say why one should care about one's future self, even on an endurance theory account of the self.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.9)
     A reaction: A nice passing remark, that strikes me forcibly as one of those basic mysteries of experience that philosophers can only gawp at, and have no theory to offer.
17. Mind and Body / A. Mind-Body Dualism / 1. Dualism
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.
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.
17. Mind and Body / A. Mind-Body Dualism / 2. Interactionism
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?
18. Thought / B. Mechanics of Thought / 6. Artificial Thought / c. Turing Test
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.
23. Ethics / C. Virtue Theory / 1. Virtue Theory / d. Virtue theory critique
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)
26. Natural Theory / C. Causation / 9. General Causation / c. Counterfactual causation
Causation is nothing more than the counterfactuals it grounds? [Hawley]
     Full Idea: Counterfactual accounts of causation say that a causal connection is exhausted by the counterfactuals it appears to ground.
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.5)
     A reaction: I am bewildered as to how this became a respectable view in philosophy. I quite understand that this might exhaust the 'logic' of causal relations. Presumably you can have counterfactuals in mathematics which are not causal?
26. Natural Theory / D. Laws of Nature / 7. Strictness of Laws
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.
27. Natural Reality / D. Time / 3. Parts of Time / b. Instants
Time could be discrete (like integers) or dense (rationals) or continuous (reals) [Hawley]
     Full Idea: There seem to be three possible ways for time to be fine-grained. The ordering of instants could be discrete (like the integers), dense (like the rational numbers) or continuous (like the real numbers).
     From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.5)
     A reaction: She seems to assume that time must be 'grained', but I would take the continuous view to imply that there is no grain at all (which is bad news for her version of stage theory).