23 ideas
| 8361 | What is true used to be possible, but it may no longer be so [Wright,GHv] |
| Full Idea: It is not very natural to say of that which is true that it is also possible. ...What is true was possible - but whether it still is a potency of the world is not certain. | |
| From: G.H. von Wright (Logic and Epistemology of Causal Relations [1973], §5) | |
| A reaction: A simple and rather important distinction. Before encountering this, I would certainly have been happy to affirm that the actual is possible, but actually it may not be. The power to create differs from the power to sustain. Could God re-create the world? |
| 24016 | Consciousness always transcends itself [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: It is of the essence of consciousness to transcend itself | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |
| A reaction: As usual, I am a bit baffled by these sorts of pronouncement. Sounds like an oxymoron to me. Maybe it is a development of Schopenhauer's thought. |
| 24013 | An emotion and its object form a unity, so emotion is a mode of apprehension [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Emotion returns to its object every moment, and feeds upon it. …The emotional subject and the object of the emotion are united in an indissoluble synthesis. Emotion is a specific manner of apprehending the world. …[39] It is a transformation of the world. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |
| A reaction: The last sentence is the essence (or existence?) of Sartre's core theory of the emotions. They are, it seems, a mode of perception, like a colour filter added to a camera. I don't think I agree. I see them as a response to perceptions, not part of them. |
| 24017 | Emotion is one of our modes of understanding our Being-in-the-World [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Emotion is not an accident, it is a mode of our conscious existence, one of the ways in which consciousness understands (in Heidegger's sense of verstehen) its Being-in-the-World. …It has a meaning. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |
| A reaction: Calling emotions a 'mode' suggests that this way of understanding is intermittent, which seems wrong. Even performing arithmetical calculations is coloured by emotions, so they go deeper than a 'mode'. |
| 24014 | Emotions are a sort of bodily incantation which brings a magic to the world [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Joy is the magical behaviour which tries, by incantation, to realise the possession of the desired object as an instantaneous totality. [47] Emotions are all reducible to the constitution of a magic world by using our bodies as instruments of incantation. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |
| A reaction: I can't pretend to understand this, but I am reminded of the fact that the so-called primary qualities of perception are innately boring, and it is only the secondary qualities (like colour and smell) which make the world interesting. |
| 24015 | Emotions makes us believe in and live in a new world [Sartre] |
| Full Idea: Emotion is a phenomenon of belief. Consciousness does not limit itself to the projection of affective meanings upon the world around it; it lives the new world it has thereby constituted. | |
| From: Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939], §III) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be an implied anti-realism in this, since the emotions prevent us from relating more objectively to the world. The 'magic' seems to be compulsory. |
| 2705 | How can intuitionists distinguish universal convictions from local cultural ones? [Hare] |
| Full Idea: There are convictions which are common to most societies; but there are others which are not, and no way is given by intuitionists of telling which are the authoritative data. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.454) | |
| A reaction: It seems unfair on intuitionists to say they haven't given a way to evaluate such things, given that they have offered intuition. The issue is what exactly they mean by 'intuition'. |
| 2712 | You can't use intuitions to decide which intuitions you should cultivate [Hare] |
| Full Idea: If it comes to deciding what intuitions and dispositions to cultivate, we cannot rely on the intuitions themselves, as intuitionists do. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.461) | |
| A reaction: Makes intuitionists sound a bit dim. Surely Hume identifies dispositions (such as benevolence) which should be cultivated, because they self-evidently improve social life? |
| 2706 | Emotivists mistakenly think all disagreements are about facts, and so there are no moral reasons [Hare] |
| Full Idea: Emotivists concluded too hastily that because naturalism and intuitionism are false, you cannot reason about moral questions, because they assumed that the only questions you can reason about are factual ones. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.455) | |
| A reaction: Personally I have a naturalistic view of ethics (based on successful functioning, as indicated by Aristotle), so not my prob. Why can't we reason about expressive emotions? We reason about art. |
| 2708 | An 'ought' statement implies universal application [Hare] |
| Full Idea: In any 'ought' statement there is implicit a principle which says that the statement applies to all precisely similar situations. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.456) | |
| A reaction: No two situations can ever be 'precisely' similar. Indeed, 'precisely similar' may be an oxymoron (at least for situations). Kantians presumably like this idea. |
| 2704 | If morality is just a natural or intuitive description, that leads to relativism [Hare] |
| Full Idea: Non-descriptivists (e.g. prescriptivists) reject descriptivism in its naturalist or intuitionist form, because they are both destined to collapse into relativism. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.453) | |
| A reaction: I'm not clear from this why prescriptism would not also turn out to be relativist, if it includes evaluations along with facts. |
| 2703 | Descriptivism say ethical meaning is just truth-conditions; prescriptivism adds an evaluation [Hare] |
| Full Idea: Ethical descriptivism is the view that ethical sentence-meaning is wholly determined by truth-conditions. …Prescriptivists think there is a further element of meaning, which expresses prescriptions or evaluations or attitudes which we assent to. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.452) | |
| A reaction: Not sure I understand either of these. If all meaning consists of truth-conditions, that will apply to ethics. If meaning includes evaluations, that will apply to non-ethics. |
| 2707 | If there can be contradictory prescriptions, then reasoning must be involved [Hare] |
| Full Idea: Prescriptivists claim that there are rules of reasoning which govern non-descriptive as well as descriptive speech acts. The standard example is possible logical inconsistency between contradictory prescriptions. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.455) | |
| A reaction: The example doesn't seem very good. Inconsistency can appear in any area of thought, but that isn't enough to infer full 'rules of reasoning'. I could desire two incompatible crazy things. |
| 2711 | Prescriptivism implies a commitment, but descriptivism doesn't [Hare] |
| Full Idea: Prescriptivists hold that moral judgements commit the speaker to motivations and actions, but non-moral facts by themselves do not do this. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.459) | |
| A reaction: Surely hunger motivates to action? I suppose the key word is 'commit'. But lazy people are allowed to make moral judgements. |
| 2709 | Prescriptivism sees 'ought' statements as imperatives which are universalisable [Hare] |
| Full Idea: Universal prescriptivists hold that 'ought'-judgements are prescriptive like plain imperatives, but differ from them in being universalisable. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.457) | |
| A reaction: Sounds a bit tautological. Which comes first, the normativity or the universalisability? |
| 2710 | Moral judgements must invoke some sort of principle [Hare] |
| Full Idea: To make moral judgements is implicitly to invoke some principle, however specific. | |
| From: Richard M. Hare (Universal Prescriptivism [1991], p.458) |
| 20491 | States have a monopoly of legitimate violence [Sartre, by Wolff,J] |
| Full Idea: Max Weber observed that states possess a monopoly of legitimate violence. | |
| From: report of Jean-Paul Sartre (Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions [1939]) by Jonathan Wolff - An Introduction to Political Philosophy (Rev) 2 'State' | |
| A reaction: This sounds rather hair-raising, and often is, but it sounds quite good if we describe it as a denial of legitimate violence to individual citizens. Hobbes would like it, since individual violence breaches some sort of natural contract. Guns in USA. |
| 8363 | p is a cause and q an effect (not vice versa) if manipulations of p change q [Wright,GHv] |
| Full Idea: What makes p a cause-factor relative to the effect-factor q (rather than vice versa) is the fact that by manipulating p, producing changes in it 'at will', we could bring about changes in q. | |
| From: G.H. von Wright (Logic and Epistemology of Causal Relations [1973], §8) | |
| A reaction: As a solution to the direction-of-causation problem, I suspect that this proposal is begging the question. Will a causal explanation be offered of the action of manipulation? If he mistook his manipulation for a cause when it is actually an effect... |
| 8364 | We can imagine controlling floods by controlling rain, but not vice versa [Wright,GHv] |
| Full Idea: Given our present knowledge of the laws of nature, we can imagine ways of controlling floods by controlling rainfall, but not the other way round. That is should be so, however, is contingent. | |
| From: G.H. von Wright (Logic and Epistemology of Causal Relations [1973], §8) | |
| A reaction: Despite my objections to Idea 8363, this is a good example. It won't establish the metaphysics of the direction of causation, though, because God might control rainfall by controlling floods. Maybe causation is more like a motorway pile-up than dominoes. |
| 8366 | The very notion of a cause depends on agency and action [Wright,GHv] |
| Full Idea: There is an implicit dependence of the very notion of a cause on a concept of agency and action. | |
| From: G.H. von Wright (Logic and Epistemology of Causal Relations [1973], §10) | |
| A reaction: This is because he thinks experimental intervention is the key to the concept of causation (see Ideas 8362 and 8363). Others go further, and say that the concept of causation arises from subjective experience of performing actions. I quite like that. |
| 8362 | We give regularities a causal character by subjecting them to experiment [Wright,GHv] |
| Full Idea: What confers on observed regularities the character of causal or nomic connections is the possibility of subjecting cause-factors to experimental test by interfering with the 'natural' course of events. | |
| From: G.H. von Wright (Logic and Epistemology of Causal Relations [1973], §7) | |
| A reaction: This is von Wright's distinctive proposal, making causation a feature of the culture of science, rather than of ordinary life. But see Idea 2461. Causation is becoming too epistemological for my taste. Either it is a feature of reality, or forget it. |
| 8360 | We must further analyse conditions for causation, into quantifiers or modal concepts [Wright,GHv] |
| Full Idea: We may be able to analyse causation into conditionship relations between events or states of affairs, ...but conditions cannot be regarded as logical primitives, ... and must be analysed into quantifiers, or modal concepts. | |
| From: G.H. von Wright (Logic and Epistemology of Causal Relations [1973], §2) | |
| A reaction: [very compressed] A nice illustration of the aim of analytical philosophy - to analyse the elements of reality down to logical primitives. This is the dream of Descartes and Leibniz, continued by Russell and co. Do we still have this aspiration? |
| 8365 | Some laws are causal (Ohm's Law), but others are conceptual principles (conservation of energy) [Wright,GHv] |
| Full Idea: Not all laws are causal 'experimentalist' laws, such as those for falling bodies, or the Gas Law, or Ohm's Law. Some are more like conceptual principles, giving a frame of reference, such as inertia, or conservation of energy, or the law of entropy. | |
| From: G.H. von Wright (Logic and Epistemology of Causal Relations [1973], §9) | |
| A reaction: An interesting and important distinction, whenever one is exploring the links between theories of causation and of laws of nature. If one wished to attack the whole concept of 'laws of nature', this might be a good place to start. |