35 ideas
| 14519 | It is a great good to show reverence for a wise man [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: To show reverence for a wise man is itself a great good for him who reveres [the wise man]. | |
| From: Epicurus (Principle Doctrines ('Kuriai Doxai') (frags) [c.290 BCE], 32) | |
| A reaction: It is characteristic of Epicurus to move up a level in his thinking, and not merely respect wisdom, but ask after the value of his own respect. Compare Idea 14517. Nice. |
| 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. |
| 14518 | In the study of philosophy, pleasure and knowledge arrive simultaneously [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: In philosophy the pleasure accompanies the knowledge. For the enjoyment does not come after the learning but the learning and the enjoyment are simultaneous. | |
| From: Epicurus (Principle Doctrines ('Kuriai Doxai') (frags) [c.290 BCE], 27) |
| 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. |
| 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) |
| 14524 | Bodies are combinations of shape, size, resistance and weight [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: Epicurus said that body was conceived as an aggregate of shape and size and resistance and weight. | |
| From: Epicurus (Principle Doctrines ('Kuriai Doxai') (frags) [c.290 BCE]) | |
| A reaction: [Source Sextus 'Adversus Mathematicos' 10.257] Note that this is how we 'conceive' them. They might be intrinsically different, except that Epicurus is pretty much a phenomenalist. |
| 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) |
| 2957 | Brain bisection suggests unity of mind isn't all-or-nothing [Nagel, by Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Nagel argues (because of brain bisection experiments) that we should jettison our commonsense assumption that the unity of consciousness is an all-or-nothing affair. | |
| From: report of Thomas Nagel (Brain Bisection and Unity of Consciousness [1971]) by Michael Lockwood - Mind, Brain and the Quantum p.84 | |
| A reaction: It seems wrong to call it 'commonsense'. It is an assumption that precedes any judgement, but if you rapidly grasp that your mind is in your brain, it becomes common sense that you can cut lumps out of your mind. |
| 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. |
| 3285 | We may be unable to abandon personal identity, even when split-brains have undermined it [Nagel] |
| Full Idea: As a result of the evidence of split-brains, it is possible that the ordinary, simple idea of a single person will come to seem quaint some day, …but we may be unable to abandon the idea, no matter what we discover. | |
| From: Thomas Nagel (Brain Bisection and Unity of Consciousness [1971], p.164) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure what grounds you can have for a claim that we can't abandon our current view of selves, even when the new reality will be utterly different. Rather conservative? I would expect future concepts to roughly match future reality. |
| 14521 | If everything is by necessity, then even denials of necessity are by necessity [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: He who claims that everything occurs by necessity has no complaint against him who claims that everything does not occur by necessity. For he makes the very claim in question by necessity. | |
| From: Epicurus (Principle Doctrines ('Kuriai Doxai') (frags) [c.290 BCE], 40) |
| 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. |
| 14522 | What happens to me if I obtain all my desires, and what if I fail? [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: One should bring this question to bear on all one's desires: what will happen to me if what is sought by desire is achieved, and what will happen if it is not? | |
| From: Epicurus (Principle Doctrines ('Kuriai Doxai') (frags) [c.290 BCE], 71) | |
| A reaction: Yet another example of Epicurus moving up a level in his thinking about ethical issues, as in Idea 14517 and Idea 14519. The mark of a true philosopher. This seems to be a key idea for wisdom - to think further ahead than merely what you desire. |
| 3563 | Pleasure and virtue entail one another [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: It is not possible to live pleasantly without living intelligently and finely and justly, nor to live intelligently and finely and justly without living pleasantly. | |
| From: Epicurus (Principle Doctrines ('Kuriai Doxai') (frags) [c.290 BCE], 5), quoted by Julia Annas - The Morality of Happiness Ch.16 | |
| A reaction: A person with all these virtues might still suffer from depression. And I don't see why having limited intelligence should stop someone from living pleasantly. Just be warm-hearted. |
| 3560 | Justice is merely a contract about not harming or being harmed [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: There is no such things as justice in itself; in people's relations with one another in any place and at any time it is a contract about not harming or being harmed. | |
| From: Epicurus (Principle Doctrines ('Kuriai Doxai') (frags) [c.290 BCE], 33), quoted by Julia Annas - The Morality of Happiness 13.2 |
| 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) |
| 14517 | We value our own character, whatever it is, and we should respect the characters of others [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: We value our characters as our own personal possessions, whether they are good and envied by men or not. We must regard our neighbours' characters thus too, if they are respectable. | |
| From: Epicurus (Principle Doctrines ('Kuriai Doxai') (frags) [c.290 BCE], 15) | |
| A reaction: I like this because it introduces a metaethical dimension to the whole problem of virtue. We should value our own character - so should we try to improve it? Should we improve so much as to become unrecognisable? |
| 14513 | Justice is a pledge of mutual protection [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: The justice of nature is a pledge of reciprocal usefulness, neither to harm one another nor to be harmed. | |
| From: Epicurus (Principle Doctrines ('Kuriai Doxai') (frags) [c.290 BCE], 31) | |
| A reaction: Notice that justice is not just reciprocal usefulness, but a 'pledge' to that effect. This implies a metaethical value of trust and honesty in keeping the pledge. Is it better to live by the pledge, or to be always spontaneously useful? |
| 14515 | A law is not just if it is not useful in mutual associations [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: If someone passes a law and it does not turn out to be in accord with what is useful in mutual associations, this no longer possesses the nature of justice. | |
| From: Epicurus (Principle Doctrines ('Kuriai Doxai') (frags) [c.290 BCE], 37) |
| 14520 | It is small-minded to find many good reasons for suicide [Epicurus] |
| Full Idea: He is utterly small-minded for whom there are many plausible reasons for committing suicide. | |
| From: Epicurus (Principle Doctrines ('Kuriai Doxai') (frags) [c.290 BCE], 38) | |
| A reaction: It is a pity that the insult of 'small-minded' has slipped out of philosophy. The Greeks use it all the time, and know exactly what it means. We all recognise small-mindedness, and it is a great (and subtle) vice. |
| 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. |