Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Philosophical Fragments', 'Ethics and Language' and 'Identity, Essence and Indiscernibility'

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4 ideas

7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 5. Reason for Existence

16007	I assume existence, rather than reasoning towards it [Kierkegaard]
	Full Idea: I always reason from existence, not towards existence.
	From: Søren Kierkegaard (Philosophical Fragments [1844], p.40)
	A reaction: Kierkegaard's important premise to help show that theistic proofs for God's existence don't actually prove existence, but develop the content of a conception. [SY]

9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 3. Unity Problems / c. Statue and clay

14381	A statue is essentially the statue, but its lump is not essentially a statue, so statue isn't lump [Yablo, by Rocca]
	Full Idea: Yablo proposes the argument that Statue A is essentially a statue, and Lump 1 is not essentially a statue, so Statue A is not identical with Lump 1.
	From: report of Stephen Yablo (Identity, Essence and Indiscernibility [1987]) by Michael della Rocca - Essentialists and Essentialism I
	A reaction: Della Rocca and Yablo unashamedly elide necessary properties with essential properties, so this argument doesn't bother me too much. It concerns the statue and the clay having different modal properties.

10. Modality / A. Necessity / 2. Nature of Necessity

16013	Nothing necessary can come into existence, since it already 'is' [Kierkegaard]
	Full Idea: Can the necessary come into existence? That is a change, and everything that comes into existence demonstrates that it is not necessary. The necessary already 'is'.
	From: Søren Kierkegaard (Philosophical Fragments [1844], p.74)
	A reaction: [SY]

22. Metaethics / A. Ethics Foundations / 2. Source of Ethics / h. Expressivism

23689	Moral words have an inherited power from expressing attitudes in emotional situations [Stevenson,CL]
	Full Idea: A term is moral because of the power that the word acquires, on account of its history in emotional situations, to evoke or directly express attitudes, as distinct from describing or designating them.
	From: Charles Leslie Stevenson (Ethics and Language [1944], p.33), quoted by John Hacker-Wright - Philippa Foot's Moral Thought 1 'Ayer'
	A reaction: Invites the question of what the words meant before they acquired this patina of historical usage. If 'good' orginally meant 'hurray!', its repeated usage doesn't seem to change that. If it was descriptive, why would that change with time?