Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Classical Cosmology (frags)', 'Paper of December 1676' and 'Belief Truth and Knowledge'

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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.

17. Mind and Body / A. Mind-Body Dualism / 7. Zombies

12727	It's impossible, but imagine a body carrying on normally, but with no mind [Leibniz]
	Full Idea: If it could be supposed that a body exists without a mind, then a man would do everything in the same way as if he did not have a mind, and men would speak and write the same things, without knowing what they do. ...But this supposition is impossible.
	From: Gottfried Leibniz (Paper of December 1676 [1676], A6.3.400), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 5
	A reaction: This is clearly the zombie dream, three centuries before Robert Kirk's modern invention of the idea. Leibniz's reason for denying the possibility of zombies won't be the modern physicalist reason.

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.