3 ideas
| 22086 | The most important aspect of a human being is not reason, but passion [Kierkegaard, by Carlisle] |
| Full Idea: Kierkegaard insisted that the most important aspect of a human being is not reason, but passion. | |
| From: report of Søren Kierkegaard (works [1845]) by Clare Carlisle - Kierkegaard: a guide for the perplexed Intro | |
| A reaction: Hume comes to mind for a similar view, but in character Hume was far more rational than Kierkegaard. |
| 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? |
| 13440 | Causation is the power of one property to produce another, and this gives time its direction [Esfeld] |
| Full Idea: The metaphysics of causation in terms of powers is linked with an intrinsic direction of time. There is a causal connection if an F-property produces a G. One can argue that causation thus is the basis for the direction of time. | |
| From: Michael Esfeld (Humean metaphysics vs metaphysics of Powers [2010], 7.2) | |
| A reaction: I think this is my preferred metaphysic - that both time and causation are primitive, but the direction of time is the result of the causal process. Viewing some new world, we would just say that time went in whichever direction the causation went. |