59 ideas
| 15447 | We shouldn't always follow where the argument leads! [Lewis on Plato] |
| Full Idea: There comes a time not to go on following where the argument leads! | |
| From: comment on Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 667b) by David Lewis - Against Structural Universals 'Variant' | |
| A reaction: Lewis is a fine one to talk, since he follows argument that take him past innumerable incredulous stares of onlookers. |
| 243 | It is foolish to quarrel with the mind's own reasoning processes [Plato] |
| Full Idea: When the soul quarrels with knowledge or opinion or reason, its natural ruling principles, you have there what I call 'folly'. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 689b) |
| 241 | We ought to follow where the argument leads us [Plato] |
| Full Idea: We ought to follow where the argument leads us. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 667a) |
| 21264 | Mortals are incapable of being fully rational [Plato] |
| Full Idea: We mustn't assume that mortal eyes will ever be able to look upon reason and get to know it adequately. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 897d) | |
| A reaction: This is in the context of the rational control of the whole Cosmos. I presume Plato would be flabbergasted by the findings of recent physics and cosmology. Did Kant believe that he was being completely rational about ethics? |
| 9376 | A sentence may simultaneously define a term, and also assert a fact [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: It doesn't follow from the fact that a given sentence is being used to implicitly define one of its ingredient terms, that it is not a factual statement. 'This stick is a meter long at t' may define an ingredient terms and express something factual. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: This looks like a rather good point, but it is tied in with a difficulty about definition, which is deciding which sentences are using a term, and which ones are defining it. If I say 'this stick in Paris is a meter long', I'm not defining it. |
| 251 | Truth has the supreme value, for both gods and men [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Truth heads the list of all things good, for gods and men alike. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 730c) |
| 9375 | Conventionalism agrees with realists that logic has truth values, but not over the source [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: Conventualism is a factualist view: it presupposes that sentences of logic have truth values. It differs from a realist view in its conception of the source of those truth values, not on their existence. I call the denial of truths Non-Factualism. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: It barely seems to count as truth is we say 'p is true because we say so'. It is a truth about an agreement, not a truth about logic. Driving on the left isn't a truth about which side of the road is best. |
| 21259 | To grasp a thing we need its name, its definition, and what it really is [Plato] |
| Full Idea: There are three elements in any given thing: the first is what the object actually is, the second is the definition of this, and the third is the name. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 895d) | |
| A reaction: I take the importance of this to be its distinction between what it is, and the definition of what it is. Aristotle maintains this distinction, but some modern Aristotelians seem to get the confused. Plato worried a lot more about names than we do. |
| 9369 | 'Snow is white or it isn't' is just true, not made true by stipulation [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: Isn't it overwhelmingly obvious that 'Either snow is white or it isn't' was true before anyone stipulated a meaning for it, and that it would have been true even if no one had thought about it, or chosen it to be expressed by one of our sentences? | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §I) | |
| A reaction: Boghossian would have to believe in propositions (unexpressed truths) to hold this - which he does. I take the notion of truth to only have relevance when there are minds around. Otherwise the so-called 'truths' are just the facts. |
| 9367 | The a priori is explained as analytic to avoid a dubious faculty of intuition [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: The central impetus behind the analytic explanation of the a priori is a desire to explain the possibility of a priori knowledge without having to postulate a special evidence-gathering faculty of intuition. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §I) | |
| A reaction: I don't see at all why one has to postulate a 'faculty' in order to talk about intuition. I take an intuition to be an apprehension of a probable truth, combined with an inability to articulate how the conclusion was arrived at. |
| 9373 | That logic is a priori because it is analytic resulted from explaining the meaning of logical constants [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: The analytic theory of the apriority of logic arose indirectly, as a by-product of the attempt to explain in what a grasp of the meaning of the logical constants consists. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: Preumably he is referring to Wittgenstein's anguish over the meaning of the word 'not' in his World War I notebooks. He first defined the constants by truth tables, then asserted that they were purely conventional - so logic is conventional. |
| 9380 | We can't hold a sentence true without evidence if we can't agree which sentence is definitive of it [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: If there is no sentence I must hold true if it is to mean what it does, then there is no basis on which to argue that I am entitled to hold it true without evidence. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: He is exploring Quine's view. Truth by convention depends on agreeing which part of the usage of a term constitutes its defining sentence(s), and that may be rather tricky. Boghossian says this slides into the 'dreaded indeterminacy of meaning'. |
| 9384 | We may have strong a priori beliefs which we pragmatically drop from our best theory [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: It is consistent with a belief's being a priori in the strong sense that we should have pragmatic reasons for dropping it from our best overall theory. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], n 6) | |
| A reaction: Does 'dropping it' from the theory mean just ignoring it, or actually denying it? C.I. Lewis is the ancestor of this view. Could it be our 'best' theory, while conflicting with beliefs that were strongly a priori? Pragmatism can embrace falsehoods. |
| 9374 | If we learn geometry by intuition, how could this faculty have misled us for so long? [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: If we learn geometrical truths by intuition, how could this faculty have misled us for so long? | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: This refers to the development of non-Euclidean geometries, though the main misleading concerns parallels, which involves infinity. Boghossian cites 'distance' as a concept the Euclideans had misunderstood. Why shouldn't intuitions be wrong? |
| 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. |
| 21260 | Soul is what is defined by 'self-generating motion' [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The entity which we call 'soul' is precisely that which is defined by the expression 'self-generating motion'. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 896a) | |
| A reaction: We may suspect that he defines soul in this way for a particular context, aimed at proving the existence of a First Mover. He must think there is more to soul than the generation of movement. |
| 276 | My individuality is my soul, which carries my body around [Plato] |
| Full Idea: While I am alive I have nothing to thank for my individuality except my soul, whereas my body is just the likeness that I carry around with me. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 959a) |
| 9378 | If meaning depends on conceptual role, what properties are needed to do the job? [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: Conceptual Role Semantics must explain what properties an inference or sentence involving a logical constant must have, if that inference or sentence is to be constitutive of its meaning. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: This is my perennial request that if something is to be defined by its function (or role), we must try to explain what properties it has that make its function possible, and those properties will be the more basic explanation. |
| 9377 | 'Conceptual role semantics' says terms have meaning from sentences and/or inferences [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: 'Conceptual role semantics' says the logical constants mean what they do by virtue of figuring in certain inferences and/or sentences involving them and not others, ..so some inferences and sentences are constitutive of an expression's meaning. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §III) | |
| A reaction: If the meaning of the terms derives from the sentences in which they figure, that seems to be meaning-as-use. The view that it depends on the inferences seems very different, and is a more interesting but more risky claim. |
| 9372 | Could expressions have meaning, without two expressions possibly meaning the same? [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: Could there be a fact of the matter about what each expression means, but no fact of the matter about whether they mean the same? | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §II) | |
| A reaction: He is discussing Quine's attack on synonymy, and his scepticism about meaning. Boghossian and I believe in propositions, so we have no trouble with two statements having the same meaning. Denial of propositions breeds trouble. |
| 17721 | There are no truths in virtue of meaning, but there is knowability in virtue of understanding [Boghossian, by Jenkins] |
| Full Idea: Boghossian distinguishes metaphysical analyticity (truth purely in virtue of meaning, debunked by Quine, he says) from epistemic analyticity (knowability purely in virtue of understanding - a notion in good standing). | |
| From: report of Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996]) by Carrie Jenkins - Grounding Concepts 2.4 | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This fits with Jenkins's claim that we have a priori knowledge just through understanding and relating our concepts. She, however, rejects that idea that a priori is analytic. |
| 9368 | Epistemological analyticity: grasp of meaning is justification; metaphysical: truth depends on meaning [Boghossian] |
| Full Idea: The epistemological notion of analyticity: a statement is 'true by virtue of meaning' provided that grasp of its meaning alone suffices for justified belief in its truth; the metaphysical reading is that it owes its truth to its meaning, not to facts. | |
| From: Paul Boghossian (Analyticity Reconsidered [1996], §I) | |
| A reaction: Kripke thinks it is neither, but is a purely semantic notion. How could grasp of meaning alone be a good justification if it wasn't meaning which was the sole cause of the statement's truth? I'm not convinced by his distinction. |
| 249 | People who value beauty above virtue insult the soul by placing the body above it [Plato] |
| Full Idea: When a man values beauty above virtue, the disrespect he shows his soul is total and fundamental, because he argues that the body is more to be honoured than the soul. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 727e) |
| 265 | An action is only just if it is performed by someone with a just character and outlook [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The description 'just' is applicable only to the benefit conferred or injury inflicted by someone with a just character and outlook. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 862b) | |
| A reaction: How should we describe the occasional administering of good justice by a generally wicked judge. Greeks focus on character, but moderns focus on actions. |
| 269 | Attempted murder is like real murder, but we should respect the luck which avoided total ruin [Plato] |
| Full Idea: An attempted murder should be treated like a successful one, but with respect shown for the luck which saved him from total ruin. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 877a) | |
| A reaction: The earliest reference to moral luck, I think. 'Repect' sounds vague, but it is asking judges to 'take it into consideration', which is quite practical. Attempted murderers are just as dangerous. |
| 240 | It would be strange if the gods rewarded those who experienced the most pleasure in life [Plato] |
| Full Idea: It would be strange if the gods gave the greatest rewards in heaven to those who led the most pleasant life, rather than the most just. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 662c) | |
| A reaction: All of philosophy is just footnotes to Plato.... See Idea 1454. |
| 264 | The conquest of pleasure is the noblest victory of all [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The conquest of pleasure is the noblest victory of all. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 840c) | |
| A reaction: Plato's puritanical streak. Even Aristotle doesn't agree with this. Self-control does not imply conquest of pleasure. Has a good professional wine taster conquered pleasure? |
| 263 | The only worthwhile life is one devoted to physical and moral perfection [Plato] |
| Full Idea: A life devoted to every physical perfection and every moral virtue is the only life worth the name. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 807c) |
| 4332 | Virtue is a concord of reason and emotion, with pleasure and pain trained to correct ends [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Virtue is the general concord of reason and emotion, but there is one key element, which is the correct formation of our feelings of pleasure and pain, which makes us hate what we ought to hate, and love what we ought to love. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 653c) | |
| A reaction: An important truth, taken up by Aristotle. To see another person humiliated gives some people pleasure and other people pain. |
| 248 | A serious desire for moral excellence is very rare indeed [Plato] |
| Full Idea: People who are anxious to attain moral excellence with all possible speed are pretty thin on the ground. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 718e) |
| 253 | Every crime is the result of excessive self-love [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The cause of each and every crime we commit is precisely this excessive love of ourselves. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 731e) |
| 235 | Virtue is the aim of all laws [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Virtue is the aim of the laws the legislator lays down. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 631a) |
| 277 | The Guardians must aim to discover the common element in the four cardinal virtues [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The guardians of the state should aim to get an exact idea of the common element in all the four virtues. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 965d) |
| 254 | Excessive laughter and tears must be avoided [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Excessive laughter and tears must be avoided. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 732c) |
| 266 | Injustice is the mastery of the soul by bad feelings, even if they do not lead to harm [Plato] |
| Full Idea: My general description of injustice is this: the mastery of the soul by anger, fear, pleasure, pain, envy and desires, whether they lead to actual damage or not. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 863e) |
| 242 | The best people are produced where there is no excess of wealth or poverty [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The community in which neither wealth nor poverty exists will produce the finest characters. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 679b) |
| 256 | Virtue and great wealth are incompatible [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Virtue and great wealth are quite incompatible. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 742e) |
| 245 | Totalitarian states destroy friendships and community spirit [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Excessively authoritarian government destroys all friendship and community of spirit in the state. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 697d) |
| 239 | Education in virtue produces citizens who are active but obedient [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Education in virtue produces a keen desire to become a perfect citizen who knows how to rule and be ruled as justice demands. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 643e) |
| 1402 | Friendship is impossible between master and slave, even if they are made equal [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Even if you proclaim that a master and a slave shall have equal status, friendship between them is inherently impossible. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 757a) |
| 262 | Men and women should qualify equally for honours on merit [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Men and women who have shown conspicuous merit should qualify for all honours without distinction of sex. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 802a) |
| 236 | Sound laws achieve the happiness of those who observe them [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Sound laws achieve the happiness of those who observe them. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 631b) |
| 259 | Justice is granting the equality which unequals deserve [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Justice consists of granting the 'equality' which unequals deserve to get. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 757d) | |
| A reaction: Beautifully simple, and hard to improve on. It shows the close link between equality and justice, but shows why they are not the same. The main debate about justice concerns the criteria for 'deserving'. |
| 257 | Mathematics has the widest application of any subject on the curriculum [Plato] |
| Full Idea: For domestic and public purposes, and all professional skills, no branch of a child's education has as big a range of applications as mathematics. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 747a) |
| 260 | Control of education is the key office of state, and should go to the best citizen [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The Minister of Education is by far the most important of all the supreme offices of the state; the best all-round citizen in the state should be appointed. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 765e) |
| 238 | Children's games should channel their pleasures into adult activity [Plato] |
| Full Idea: We should use children's games to channel their pleasures and desires towards activities in which they will have to engage when they are adult. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 643c) |
| 250 | The best way to educate the young is not to rebuke them, but to set a good example [Plato] |
| Full Idea: The best way to educate the younger generation (as well as yourself) is not to rebuke them but patently to practise all your life what you preach to others. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 729c) |
| 4331 | Education is channelling a child's feelings into the right course before it understands why [Plato] |
| Full Idea: I call 'education' the initial acquisition of virtue by the child, when the feelings of pleasure and affection, pain and hatred, are channelled in the right courses before he can understand the reason why. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 653b) | |
| A reaction: A precursor of Aristotle's view (Ethics 1104b11). A profound, simple and important insight. |
| 275 | Creation is not for you; you exist for the sake of creation [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Creation is not for your benefit; you exist for the sake of the universe. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 903c) |
| 273 | Movement is transmitted through everything, and it must have started with self-generated motion [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Motion is transmitted to innumerable things, and this must spring from some initial principle, which must be the change effected by self-generated motion. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 895a) |
| 8004 | In 'The Laws', to obey the law is to be obey god [Plato, by MacIntyre] |
| Full Idea: The divine is important in 'The Laws' because it is identified with law; to be obedient before the law is to be obedient before god. | |
| From: report of Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE]) by Alasdair MacIntyre - A Short History of Ethics Ch.6 | |
| A reaction: Christian conservativism in a nutshell. Plato is rejecting his view in Euthyphro that piety (etc.) must precede the will of the gods. The obvious problem is bad laws, made by corrupt rulers. |
| 21257 | Self-generating motion is clearly superior to all other kinds of motion [Plato] |
| Full Idea: We can't resist the conclusion that the motion which can generate itself is infinitely superior, and all the others are inferior to it. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 894d) | |
| A reaction: Who said you can't get values from facts! Not that the argument depends on superiority. There could be an inferior First Mover, as a bus driver is subservient to the passengers, or (my favourite) a head teacher is inferior to the pupils. |
| 21261 | Self-moving soul has to be the oldest thing there is [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Soul, being the source of motion, is the most ancient thing there is. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 896b) | |
| A reaction: Plato seems to assume that the First Mover must still exist, which doesn't follow from anything in the argument. The First Pusher could be dead before the last domino falls. Why can't activity be the default state of everything? |
| 21258 | The only possible beginning for the endless motions of reality is something self-generated [Plato] |
| Full Idea: When the motion in reality is transmitted to thousands of things one after another, the entire sequence of their movements must surely spring from some initial principle, which can hardly be anything except the change effected by self-generated motion. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 895a) | |
| A reaction: This gives a domino picture of reality, with all of reality responding inertly to a first kick. Much better is to see self-generated motion in the active qualities of all matter, as seen in the sea of virtual subatomic particles at the smallest level. |
| 274 | Soul must be the cause of all the opposites, such as good and evil or beauty and ugliness [Plato] |
| Full Idea: Soul must be cause of good and evil, beauty and ugliness, justice and injustice, and all the opposites. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 896d) |
| 21263 | If all the motions of nature reflect calculations of reason, then the best kind of soul must direct it [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If the movement of the heavens and all that is in them reflects the motion and revolution and calculation of reason ...then clearly we have to admit that it is the best kind of soul that cares for the entire universe and directs it along the best path. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 897c) | |
| A reaction: Most of this passage reflects the cosmological argument - that without some initiating source natural events could not occur - but this slides into the design argument. So who designed mud (which is too inferior to have a Form)? |
| 278 | If astronomical movements are seen as necessary instead of by divine will, this leads to atheism [Plato] |
| Full Idea: If a man studying astronomy sees events apparently happening by necessity rather than being directed by the intention of a benevolent will, he will turn into an atheist. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 967a) |
| 21265 | The heavens must be full of gods, controlling nature either externally or from within [Plato] |
| Full Idea: A soul or souls have been shown to be cause of all the phenomena, and whether it is by their living presence in matter that they direct all the heavens, or by some other means, we insist that these souls are gods. So 'everything is full of gods'. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 899b) | |
| A reaction: This seems to have little to do with the pagan gods on Olympus. It is also notably not monotheistic. It is somewhere between animism and panpsychism. Does he think the rivers and woods contain gods? Probably not. Just the orderly heavens. |
| 21262 | There must be at least two souls controlling the cosmos, one doing good, the other the opposite [Plato] |
| Full Idea: There must be more than one soul (not fewer than two) controlling movement and the heavens: that which does good, and that which has the opposite capacity. | |
| From: Plato (The Laws [c.348 BCE], 896e) | |
| A reaction: [Wording compressed - as often with the dialogues] This idea of controlling opposites is found in Empedocles. Presumably this good soul defers to the Form of the Good, as implied by the Euthyphro Question. |