16 ideas
| 22396 | We take courage, temperance, wisdom and justice as moral, but Aristotle takes wisdom as intellectual [Foot] |
| Full Idea: For us there are four cardinal moral virtues: courage, temperance, wisdom and justice. But Aristotle and Aquinas call only three of these virtues moral virtues; practical wisdom (phronesis, prudentia) they class with the intellectual virtues. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Virtues and Vices [1978], p.2) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure about 'for us'. How many of us rank temperance as a supreme virtue? Aristotle ranks phronesis (which I think of as 'common sense') as the key enabler of the moral virtues, making it unlike the other intellectual virtues. |
| 22397 | Wisdom is open to all, and not just to the clever or well trained [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Knowledge that can be acquired only by someone who is clever or who has access to special training is not counted as part of wisdom. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Virtues and Vices [1978], p.6) | |
| A reaction: Consider Pierre's peasant friend Platon Karatayev in 'War and Peace'. I assume 'special training' rules out anyone with a philosophy degree. |
| 17488 | Empiricist theories are sets of laws, which give explanations and reductions [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: In the empiricist tradition theories were understood to be deductive closures of sets of laws, explanations were understood as arguments from covering laws, and reduction was understood as a deductive relationship between laws of different theories. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: A lovely crisp summary of the whole tradition of philosophy of science from Comte through to Hempel. Mechanism and essentialism are the new players in the game. |
| 19398 | Minds are best explained by their ends, and bodies by efficient causes [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Whatever concerns reasonable substances (the minds of men) is more naturally explained by the consideration of ends, whereas other substances (bodies) are better explained by efficient causes. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (Geometrical Method and Metaphysics [1712], p.89) | |
| A reaction: That is, I take it, that the type of causal explanation considered most appropriate is the one that leads to the greatest understanding. So there is no absolute or correct answer as to which type of causation is the more important. |
| 17493 | Modern mechanism need parts with spatial, temporal and function facts, and diagrams [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: Modern champions of mechanisms say models should identify both the parts and their spatial, temporal and functional organisation, ...and the practical importance of diagrams in addition to or in place of linguistic representations of mechanisms. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Discover') | |
| A reaction: Apparently chemists obtain much more refined models by using mathematics than they did by diagrams or 3D models (let alone verbal descriptions). For that reason, I'm thinking that 'model' might be a better term than 'mechanism'. |
| 17487 | Mechanistic philosophy of science is an alternative to the empiricist law-based tradition [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: To a significant degree, a mechanistic philosophy of science can be seen as an alternative to an earlier logical empiricist tradition in philosophy of science that gave pride of place to laws of nature. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Lovely! Someone who actually spells out what's going on here. Most philosophers are far too coy about explaining what their real game is. Mechanism is fine in chemistry and biology. How about in 'mathematical' physics, or sociology? |
| 17489 | Mechanisms are either systems of parts or sequences of activities [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: There are two sorts of mechanisms: systems consist of collections of parts that interact to produce some behaviour, and processes are sequences of activities which produce some outcome. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: [compressed] The second one is important because it is more generic, and under that account all kinds the features of the world that need to be explained can be subsumed. E.g. hyperinflation in an economy is a 'mechanism'. |
| 17490 | 17th century mechanists explained everything by the kinetic physical fundamentals [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: 17th century mechanists said that interactions governed by chemical, electrical or gravitational forces would have to be explicable in terms of the operation of some atomistic (or corpuscular) kinetic mechanism. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: Glennan says science has rejected this, so modern mechanists do not reduce mechanisms to anything in particular. |
| 17491 | Unlike the lawlike approach, mechanistic explanation can allow for exceptions [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: One of the advantages of the move from nomological to mechanistic modes of explanation is that the latter allows for explanations involving exception-ridden generalizations. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'regular') | |
| A reaction: The lawlike approach has endless problems with 'ceteris paribus' ('all things being equal') laws, where specifying all the other 'things' seems a bit tricky. |
| 22402 | Most people think virtues can be displayed in bad actions [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Hardly anyone sees any difficulty in the thought that virtues may sometimes be displayed in bad actions. The courage of the villain can be spoken of as quite unproblematic. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Virtues and Vices [1978], III) | |
| A reaction: She cites Peter Geach as a sole opponent of this view. The courage of the entire German army in WWII seems to fall into this category. The boldness of villains has to impress the virtuous but timid. |
| 23145 | Virtues are intended to correct design flaws in human beings [Foot, by Driver] |
| Full Idea: A popular view (expressed by Philippa Foot) is that the virtues work to 'correct' for the baser human impulses and motives. …Virtues are solutions to design flaws in human beings. | |
| From: report of Philippa Foot (Virtues and Vices [1978]) by Julia Driver - The Virtues and Human Nature 1 | |
| A reaction: Quite a plausible thought. Not so much design flaws, though, as natural traits of character that suited hunter gatherers but not modern cosmopolitan capitalists. Driver disagrees. |
| 22401 | Actions can be in accordance with virtue, but without actually being virtuous [Foot] |
| Full Idea: Some actions are in accordance with virtue without requiring virtue for their performance, whereas others are both in accordance with virtue and such as to show possession of a virtue. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Virtues and Vices [1978], p.13) | |
| A reaction: She cites the case of an honest trader, who is honest because of self-interest. She is disentangling Kant from his daft idea that only dutiful (and reluctant) actions are virtuous. Kant was only thinking of 'in accordance' cases. |
| 22398 | Virtues are corrective, to resist temptation or strengthen motivation [Foot] |
| Full Idea: The virtues are corrective, each one standing at a point at which there is some temptation to be resisted or deficiency of motivation to be made good. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Virtues and Vices [1978], II) | |
| A reaction: A beautifully simple and accurate observation, which I don't remember meeting in Aristotle (...though she cites him as saying that virtues concern what is difficult for us). Justice and charity are given as examples of inadequate motivation. |
| 22403 | Temperance is not a virtue if it results from timidity or excessive puritanism [Foot] |
| Full Idea: In some people temperance is not a virtue, but is rather connected with timidity or with a grudging attitude to the acceptance of good things. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Virtues and Vices [1978], III) | |
| A reaction: Timidity seems right. The grudging attitude may result from some larger doubts about pleasure, which could be plausible. |
| 22400 | Courage overcomes the fears which should be overcome, and doesn't overvalue personal safety [Foot] |
| Full Idea: The fears that count against a man's courage are those that we think he should overcome, and among them, in a special class, those that reflect the fact that he values his safety too much. | |
| From: Philippa Foot (Virtues and Vices [1978], II) | |
| A reaction: I think that sentence tells us more accurately what courage is than anything in Aristotle's discussion. Ask yourself which of your fears really ought to be overcome, and particularly beware of over-valuing your own safety. But stay safe if you can! |
| 17494 | Since causal events are related by mechanisms, causation can be analysed in that way [Glennan] |
| Full Idea: Causation can be analyzed in terms of mechanisms because (except for fundamental causal interactions) causally related events will be connected by intervening mechanisms. | |
| From: Stuart Glennan (Mechanisms [2008], 'causation') | |
| A reaction: This won't give us the metaphysics of causation (which concerns the fundamentals), but this strikes me as a very coherent and interesting proposal. He mentions electron interaction as non-mechanistic causation. |