21 ideas
| 1642 | We must fight fiercely for knowledge, understanding and intelligence [Plato] |
| Full Idea: We need to use every argument we can to fight against anyone who does away with knowledge, understanding, and intelligence, but at the same time asserts anything at all about anything. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 249c) | |
| A reaction: Thus showing that reason is only central if you want to put a high value on it? |
| 1645 | The desire to split everything into its parts is unpleasant and unphilosophical [Plato] |
| Full Idea: To try to set apart everything from everything is not only especially jangling, but it is the mark of someone altogether unmusical and unphilosophic. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 259e) |
| 287 | Good analysis involves dividing things into appropriate forms without confusion [Plato] |
| Full Idea: It takes expertise in dialectic to divide things by kinds and not to think that the same form is a different one or that a different form is the same. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 253d) |
| 1644 | Dialectic should only be taught to those who already philosophise well [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The dialectical capacity - you won't give it to anyone else, I suspect, except to whoever philosophises purely and justly. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 253e) |
| 20478 | In discussion a person's opinions are shown to be in conflict, leading to calm self-criticism [Plato] |
| Full Idea: They collect someone's opinions together during the discussion, put them side by side, and show that they conflict with each other at the same time on the same subjects.... The person sees this, gets angry at themselves, and calmer towards others. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 230b) | |
| A reaction: He goes on to say that the process is like a doctor purging a patient of internal harms. If anyone talks for long enough (even a good philosopher), their opinions will probably be seen to be in conflict. But which opinions do you abandon? |
| 11278 | What does 'that which is not' refer to? [Plato] |
| Full Idea: What should the name 'that which is not' be applied to? | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 237c) | |
| A reaction: This leads into a discussion of the problem, in The Sophist. It became a large issue when modern logic was being developed by Frege and Russell. |
| 1643 | If statements about non-existence are logically puzzling, so are statements about existence [Plato] |
| Full Idea: When the question was put to us as to the name of 'that which is not', to whatever one must apply it, we got stuck in every kind of perplexity. Are we now in any less perplexity about 'that which is'? | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 250d) | |
| A reaction: Nice. This precapitulates the whole story of modern philosophy of language. What started as a nagging doubt about reference to non-existents ends as bewilderment about everything we say. |
| 7022 | To be is to have a capacity, to act on other things, or to receive actions [Plato] |
| Full Idea: A thing really is if it has any capacity, either by nature to do something to something else or to have even the smallest thing done to it by the most trivial thing, even if it only happens once. I'll define those which are as nothing other than capacity. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 247e) | |
| A reaction: If philosophy is footnotes to Plato, this should be the foundational remark in all discussions of existence (though Parmenides might claim priority). It seems to say 'to be is to have a causal role (active or passive)'. It also seems essentialist. |
| 1641 | Some alarming thinkers think that only things which you can touch exist [Plato] |
| Full Idea: One group drags everything down to earth, insisting that only what offers tangible contact is, since they define being as the same as body, despising anyone who says that something without a body is. These are frightening men. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 246b) | |
| A reaction: Intellectually speaking, Plato seems to have been rather timid. Dualism, and its world of ideas, seemed obvious to him, but physicalism is clearly more plausible in the age of neuroscience (even if it is still rejected). |
| 10784 | Whenever there's speech it has to be about something [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Whenever there's speech it has to be about something. It's impossible for it not to be about something. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 262e) | |
| A reaction: [Quoted by Marcus about ontological commitment] The interesting test case would be speech about the existence of circular squares. |
| 16122 | Good thinkers spot forms spread through things, or included within some larger form [Plato] |
| Full Idea: It takes dialectic to divide things by kinds...such a person can discriminate a single form spread through a lot of separate things…and forms included in a single outside form…or a form connected as a unit through many wholes. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 253d) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This is very helpful in indicating the complex structure of the Forms that Plato envisages. If you talk of the meanings of words (other than names), though, it comes to the same thing. Wise people fully understand their language. |
| 10422 | The not-beautiful is part of the beautiful, though opposed to it, and is just as real [Plato] |
| Full Idea: So 'the not beautiful' turns out to be ..both marked off within one kind of those that are, and also set over against one of those that are, ..and the beautiful is no more a being than the not beautiful. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 257d) | |
| A reaction: [dialogue eliminated] This is a highly significant passage, for two reasons. It suggests that the Form of the beautiful can have parts, and also that the negations of Forms are Forms themselves (both of which come as a surprise). |
| 15855 | If we see everything as separate, we can then give no account of it [Plato] |
| Full Idea: To dissociate each thing from everything else is to destroy totally everything there is to say. The weaving together of forms is what makes speech [logos] possible for us. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 259e) | |
| A reaction: This I take to be the lynchpin of metaphysics. We are forced to see the world in a way which enables us to give some sort of account of it. Our metaphysics is 'inference to the best logos'. |
| 1637 | A soul without understanding is ugly [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The soul that lacks understanding must be set down as ugly. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 228d) | |
| A reaction: The teleological view of things understands their nature in things of their perfection. and the essence of beauty is perfection. It is the mind's nature to know. Failing to know is as ugly as allowing your crops to die. |
| 3488 | Freud treats the unconscious as intentional and hence mental [Freud, by Searle] |
| Full Idea: Freud thinks that our unconscious mental states exist as occurrent intrinsic intentional states even when unconscious. Their ontology is that of the mental, even when they are unconscious. | |
| From: report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900]) by John Searle - The Rediscovery of the Mind Ch. 7.V | |
| A reaction: Searle states this view in order to attack it. Whether such states are labelled as 'mental' seems uninteresting. Whether unconscious states can be intentional is crucial, and modern scientific understanding of the brain strongly suggest they can. |
| 5689 | Freud and others have shown that we don't know our own beliefs, feelings, motive and attitudes [Freud, by Shoemaker] |
| Full Idea: Freud persuaded many that beliefs, wishes and feelings are sometimes unconscious, and even sceptics about Freud acknowledge that there is self-deception about motive and attitudes. | |
| From: report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900]) by Sydney Shoemaker - Introspection p.396 | |
| A reaction: This seems to me obviously correct. The traditional notion is that the consciousness is the mind, but now it seems obvious that consciousness is only one part of the mind, and maybe even a peripheral (epiphenomenal) part of it. |
| 23950 | Freud said passions are pressures of some flowing hydraulic quantity [Freud, by Solomon] |
| Full Idea: Freud argued that the passions in general …were the pressures of a yet unknown 'quantity' (which he simply designated 'Q'). He first thought this flowed through neurones, …and always couched the idea in the language of hydraulics. | |
| From: report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900]) by Robert C. Solomon - The Passions 3.4 | |
| A reaction: This is the main target of Solomon's criticism, because its imagery has become so widespread. It leads to talk of suppressing emotions, or sublimating them. However, it is not too different from Nietzsche's 'drives' or 'will to power'. |
| 22344 | Freud is pessimistic about human nature; it is ambivalent motive and fantasy, rather than reason [Freud, by Murdoch] |
| Full Idea: Freud takes a thoroughly pessimistic view of human nature. ...Introspection reveals only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive, and fantasy is a stronger force than reason. Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings. | |
| From: report of Sigmund Freud (works [1900], II) by Iris Murdoch - The Sovereignty of Good II | |
| A reaction: Interesting. His view seems to have coloured the whole of modern culture, reinforced by the hideous irrationality of the Nazis. Adorno and Horkheimer attacking the Enlightenment was the last step in that process. |
| 22489 | 'Good' is an attributive adjective like 'large', not predicative like 'red' [Geach, by Foot] |
| Full Idea: Geach puts 'good' in the class of attributive adjectives, such as 'large' and 'small', contrasting such adjectives with 'predicative' adjectives such as 'red'. | |
| From: report of Peter Geach (Good and Evil [1956]) by Philippa Foot - Natural Goodness Intro | |
| A reaction: [In Analysis 17, and 'Theories of Ethics' ed Foot] Thus any object can simply be red, but something can only be large or small 'for a rat' or 'for a car'. Hence nothing is just good, but always a good so-and-so. This is Aristotelian, and Foot loves it. |
| 1636 | Wickedness is an illness of the soul [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Wickedness is a sedition and illness of the soul. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 228b) |
| 1638 | Didactic education is hard work and achieves little [Plato] |
| Full Idea: With a lot of effort the admonitory species of education accomplishes little. | |
| From: Plato (The Sophist [c.359 BCE], 230a) |