12 ideas
22167 | Our images of bodies are not produced by the bodies, but by our own minds [Augustine, by Aquinas] |
Full Idea: Augustine says bodies don't form images in our spirit; our spirit does that itself with amazing quickness. ...So the appearances under which mind knows things aren't drawn from the things themselves. | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Thomas Aquinas - Quodlibeta 8.2.1 | |
A reaction: This is Augustine's theory of 'illumination' - that God creates experience within us. His theory was soon discarded by the early scholastics. |
22117 | Our minds grasp reality by direct illumination (rather than abstraction from experience) [Augustine, by Matthews] |
Full Idea: Instead of supposing that what we know can be abstracted from sensible particulars that instantiate such knowledge, Augustine insists that our mind is so constituted as to see 'intelligible realities' directly by inner illumination. | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.74 | |
A reaction: His 'theory of illumination'. This seems to be a sort of super-rationalism. This doesn't make clear the role of sensations. Surely he doesn't thing that we just bypass them? |
19699 | A Gettier case is a belief which is true, and its fallible justification involves some luck [Hetherington] |
Full Idea: A Gettier case contains a belief which is true and well justified without being knowledge. Its justificatory support is also fallible, ...and there is considerable luck in how the belief combnes being true with being justified. | |
From: Stephen Hetherington (The Gettier Problem [2011], 5) | |
A reaction: This makes luck the key factor. 'Luck' is a rather vague concept, and so the sort of luck involved must first be spelled out. Or the varieties of luck that can produce this outcome. |
15119 | Aristotelian explanation by essence may need to draw on knowledge of other essences [Aristotle, by Koslicki] |
Full Idea: From Aristotle's biology we learn that a successful scientific explanation of the necessary (but non-essential) features of one type of phenomenon (e.g. camels) my require appeal to facts about the essences of other types of phenomena (stomachs). | |
From: report of Aristotle (The History of Animals [c.344 BCE]) by Kathrin Koslicki - Essence, Necessity and Explanation 13.4 |
22118 | Augustine created the modern concept of the will [Augustine, by Matthews] |
Full Idea: The modern concept of the will is often said to originate with Augustine. | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.74 | |
A reaction: I'm beginning to think that this is the source of the trouble. How can a thing be intrinsically free? Surely freedom is always a contextual concept? |
4348 | Love, and do what you will [Augustine] |
Full Idea: Love, and do what you will. | |
From: Augustine (works [c.415]) | |
A reaction: This sounds libertarian, but Augustine had a stern concept of what love required. It nicely captures one of the essential ideas of virtue ethics. |
7821 | Pagans produced three hundred definitions of the highest good [Augustine, by Grayling] |
Full Idea: Augustine claimed that the pagan schools between them had produced nearly three hundred different definitions of the highest good. | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by A.C. Grayling - What is Good? Ch.5 | |
A reaction: I would expect the right definition to be in there somewhere, but no doubt Augustine's definition made it 301. Perhaps the biggest problem of human life is that (as with the Kennedy assassination) proliferating stories obscure the true story. |
22119 | Augustine said (unusually) that 'ought' does not imply 'can' [Augustine, by Matthews] |
Full Idea: Augustine insisted that 'ought' does not, in any straightforward way, imply 'can' - which distinguishes him from most modern ethicists. | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.74 | |
A reaction: Not unreasonable. I ought to help my ailing friend who lives abroad, but I haven't the time or money to do it. We can experience impossibilities as duties. Impossibilities are just excuses. Augustine is opposing the Pelagian heresy. |
23302 | Plants have far less life than animals, but more life than other corporeal entities [Aristotle] |
Full Idea: The genus of plants, whilst it is devoid of life compared with an animal, is endowed with life as compared with other corporeal entities. In the sea there are certain objects which one would be at a loss to determine whether they be animal or vegetable. | |
From: Aristotle (The History of Animals [c.344 BCE], 588b09) | |
A reaction: It seems that Aristotle takes life to come in degrees, assessed by the amount of physical vitality observed. This seems to make lambs more alive than sheep, which isn't very plausible. This is part of his 'gradualist' view of nature. |
23301 | There is a gradual proceeding from the inanimate to animals, with no clear borderlines [Aristotle] |
Full Idea: Nature proceeds little by little from things lifeless to animal life so that it is impossible to determine the exact line of demarcation, nor on which side an intermediate form should lie. ...In plants there is a continuous ascent towards the animal. | |
From: Aristotle (The History of Animals [c.344 BCE], 588b04) | |
A reaction: This in itself should have alerted medieval Christians to the problematic nature of the idea that animal species were divinely created. |
22116 | Augustine identified Donatism, Pelagianism and Manicheism as the main heresies [Augustine, by Matthews] |
Full Idea: Augustine did the most to define Christian heresy. The three most prominent were Donatism, Pelagianism (that humans are perfectible), and Manicheism (that good and evil are equally basic metaphysical realities). | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Gareth B. Matthews - Augustine p.73 | |
A reaction: Manicheans had presumably been studying Empedocles. (I suppose it's too late to identify Christianity as a heresy?). |
19338 | Augustine said evil does not really exist, and evil is a limitation in goodness [Augustine, by Perkins] |
Full Idea: Augustine solution to the problem of evil was to say that, strictly speaking, evil does not exist. Human beings are not part evil and part good, but rather just a limited amount of goodness. | |
From: report of Augustine (works [c.415]) by Franklin Perkins - Leibniz: Guide for the Perplexed 2.III | |
A reaction: Augustine was rebelling against Manicheanism, which he espoused when young, which proposed a good and an evil force. An apathetic slob seems devoid of goodness, but is not evil. It takes extra effort to perform active evil. |