Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Philosophical Explanations', 'Postscripts on supervenience' and 'History of Ancient Art'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     specify just one area for these texts

---

5 ideas

7. Existence / C. Structure of Existence / 5. Supervenience / c. Significance of supervenience

13745	Supervenience is not a dependence relation, on the lines of causal, mereological or semantic dependence [Kim]
	Full Idea: It is a mistake, or at least misleading, to think of supervenience itself as a special and distinctive type of dependence relation, alongside causal dependence, mereological dependence, semantic dependence, and others.
	From: Jaegwon Kim (Postscripts on supervenience [1993], 2)
	A reaction: The point, I take it, is that supervenience is something which requires explanation, rather than being a conclusion to the debate. Why are statues beautiful? Why do brains generate minds?

13746	Supervenience is just a 'surface' relation of pattern covariation, which still needs deeper explanation [Kim]
	Full Idea: Supervenience itself is not an explanatory relation, not a 'deep' metaphysical relation; rather it is a 'surface' relation that reports a pattern of property covariation, suggesting the presence of an interesting dependency relation that might explain it.
	From: Jaegwon Kim (Postscripts on supervenience [1993], 2)
	A reaction: I think the underlying idea here is that supervenience appeals to the Humean view of physical laws as mere regularities, but it is no good for those who seek underlying mechanisms to explain the patterns and regularities. Humeans are wrong.

11. Knowledge Aims / A. Knowledge / 4. Belief / c. Aim of beliefs

3570	Maybe knowledge is belief which 'tracks' the truth [Nozick, by Williams,M]
	Full Idea: Nozick suggests that knowledge is just belief which 'tracks the truth' (hence leaving out justification).
	From: report of Robert Nozick (Philosophical Explanations [1981]) by Michael Williams - Problems of Knowledge Ch. 2

13. Knowledge Criteria / C. External Justification / 4. Tracking the Facts

2748	A true belief isn't knowledge if it would be believed even if false. It should 'track the truth' [Nozick, by Dancy,J]
	Full Idea: Nozick says Gettier cases aren't knowledge because the proposition would be believed even if false. Proper justification must be more sensitive to the truth ("track the truth").
	From: report of Robert Nozick (Philosophical Explanations [1981], 3.1) by Jonathan Dancy - Intro to Contemporary Epistemology 3.1
	A reaction: This is a bad idea. I see a genuine tree in my garden and believe it is there, so I know it. That I might have believed it if I was in virtually reality, or observing a mirror, won't alter that.

21. Aesthetics / B. Nature of Art / 4. Art as Expression

8119	Art aims only at beauty, of form, of idea, and (above all) of expression [Winckelmann, by Tolstoy]
	Full Idea: According to Winckelmann, the law and aim of all art is beauty, independent of goodness. The three kinds of beauty are of form, of idea, and of expression (the highest aim, attainable only when the other two are present).
	From: report of Johann Winckelmann (History of Ancient Art [1764]) by Leo Tolstoy - What is Art? Ch.3
	A reaction: This sounds very like 'art for art's sake', but a hundred years earlier. This is quite a good distinction, and I particularly like the 'beauty of idea', which is often overlooked.