Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Classical Cosmology (frags)', 'Belief Truth and Knowledge' and 'Personal Identity and Individuation'

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     specify just one area for these texts

---

4 ideas

12. Knowledge Sources / B. Perception / 7. Causal Perception

3900	Maybe experience is not essential to perception, but only to the causing of beliefs [Armstrong, by Scruton]
	Full Idea: Armstrong has argued that experience, as normally understood, is not necessary to perception. To perceive is to acquire beliefs, through a causal process.
	From: report of David M. Armstrong (Belief Truth and Knowledge [1973]) by Roger Scruton - Modern Philosophy:introduction and survey 23.4

13. Knowledge Criteria / C. External Justification / 1. External Justification

4253	Externalism says knowledge involves a natural relation between the belief state and what makes it true [Armstrong]
	Full Idea: Externalist accounts of non-inferential knowledge say what makes a true non-inferential belief a case of knowledge is some natural relation which holds between the belief state and the situation which makes the belief true.
	From: David M. Armstrong (Belief Truth and Knowledge [1973], 11.III.6)
	A reaction: Armstrong's concept is presumably a response to Quine's desire to 'naturalise epistemology'. Bad move, I suspect. It probably reduces knowledge to mere true belief, and hence a redundant concept.

16. Persons / D. Continuity of the Self / 2. Mental Continuity / b. Self as mental continuity

7946	The memory criterion has a problem when one thing branches into two things [Williams,B, by Macdonald,C]
	Full Idea: The memory criterion for personal identity permits 'branching' (where two things can later meet the criteria of persistence of a single earlier thing), which presents it with serious problems.
	From: report of Bernard Williams (Personal Identity and Individuation [1956]) by Cynthia Macdonald - Varieties of Things Ch.4
	A reaction: Of course, any notion of personal identity would have serious problem if people could branch into two, like fissioning amoeba. If that happened, we probably wouldn't have had a strong notion of personal identity in the first place. See Parfit.

27. Natural Reality / E. Cosmology / 1. Cosmology

5994	Is the cosmos open or closed, mechanical or teleological, alive or inanimate, and created or eternal? [Robinson,TM, by PG]
	Full Idea: The four major disputes in classical cosmology were whether the cosmos is 'open' or 'closed', whether it is explained mechanistically or teleologically, whether it is alive or mere matter, and whether or not it has a beginning.
	From: report of T.M. Robinson (Classical Cosmology (frags) [1997]) by PG - Db (ideas)
	A reaction: A nice summary. The standard modern view is closed, mechanistic, inanimate and non-eternal. But philosophers can ask deeper questions than physicists, and I say we are entitled to speculate when the evidence runs out.