7 ideas
| 21677 | How can the not-true fail to be false, or the not-false fail to be true? [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: How can something that is not true not be false, or how can something that is not false not be true? | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (On Fate ('De fato') [c.44 BCE], 16.38) | |
| A reaction: We must at least distinguish between whether the contrary thing is not actually true, or whether we are prepared to assert that it is not true. The disjunction may seem to be a false dichotomy. 'He isn't good' may not entail 'he is evil'. |
| 2602 | What experience could prove 'If a=c and b=c then a=b'? [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: Please tell me what the corporeal motion is that is capable of forming some common notion to the effect that 'things which are equal to a third thing are equal to each other'. | |
| From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.366) |
| 16383 | Puzzled Pierre has two mental files about the same object [Recanati on Kripke] |
| Full Idea: In Kripke's puzzle about belief, the subject has two distinct mental files about one and the same object. | |
| From: comment on Saul A. Kripke (A Puzzle about Belief [1979]) by François Recanati - Mental Files 17.1 | |
| A reaction: [Pierre distinguishes 'London' from 'Londres'] The Kripkean puzzle is presented as very deep, but I have always felt there was a simple explanation, and I suspect that this is it (though I will leave the reader to think it through, as I'm very busy…). |
| 2600 | The mind's innate ideas are part of its capacity for thought [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: I have never written or taken the view that the mind requires innate ideas which are something distinct from its own faculty of thinking. | |
| From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365) |
| 2601 | Qualia must be innate, because physical motions do not contain them [Descartes] |
| Full Idea: The ideas of pains, colours, sounds etc. must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions. | |
| From: René Descartes (Comments on a Certain Broadsheet [1644], p.365) | |
| A reaction: Simple and brilliant! We know perfectly well that there is no redness zooming through the air from a tomato (or the air would be pink!). Redness occurs when the light arrives, so we add the redness, so it is innate. |
| 21667 | Oratory and philosophy are closely allied; orators borrow from philosophy, and ornament it [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: There is a close alliance between the orator and the philosophical system of which I am a follower, since the orator borrows subtlely from the Academy, and repays the loan by giving to it a copious and flowing style and rhetorical ornament. | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (On Fate ('De fato') [c.44 BCE], 02.03) | |
| A reaction: It is a misundertanding to think that rhetoric and philosophy are seen as in necessary opposition. Philosophers just seemed to think that oratory works a lot better if it is truthful. |
| 21678 | If desire is not in our power then neither are choices, so we should not be praised or punished [Cicero] |
| Full Idea: If the cause of desire is not situated within us, even desire itself is also not in our power. ...It follows that neither assent nor action is in our power. Hence there is no justice in either praise or blame, either honours or punishments. | |
| From: M. Tullius Cicero (On Fate ('De fato') [c.44 BCE], 17.40) | |
| A reaction: This is the view of 'old philosophers', but I'm unsure which ones. Cicero spurns this view. It is obvious that the causes of our desires are largely out of our control. Responsibility seems to concern what we do about our desires. |