8 ideas
| 1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
| Full Idea: Thales was the first thinker in the west to believe that the arché (the basis of things) was intelligible. | |
| From: comment on Thales (fragments/reports [c.585 BCE]) by David Roochnik - The Tragedy of Reason p.138 |
| 3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Necessity is the strongest of things, for it rules everything. | |
| From: report of Thales (fragments/reports [c.585 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 01.2.9 |
| 21096 | The only purpose of government is to administer justice, which brings security [Hume] |
| Full Idea: Man is engaged to establish political society in order to administer justice, without which there could be no peace among them, nor safety, nor mutual intercourse. ...Government has no other purpose but the distribution of justice. | |
| From: David Hume (Of the Origin of Government [1750], p.28) | |
| A reaction: The need for a society in order to ensure mutual intercourse sounds like Hobbes, and a pessimism about trust. By 'justice' he means the administration of law. |
| 20579 | Modern totalitarianism results from lack of social ties or shared goals [Arendt, by Oksala] |
| Full Idea: Arendt claims that modern totalitarianism's primary condition is an atomised mass society: isolated individuals who have no strong ties to communities and who are indifferent to shared political goals. | |
| From: report of Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism [1968]) by Johanna Oksala - Political Philosophy: all that matters Ch.9 | |
| A reaction: I think the lack of ties simply describes large modern cities. Not sure about the lack of shared goals. Hitler and Stalin rode on the back of apparent shared goals. Working classes strike me as sharing more goals than middle classes. |
| 20580 | The ideal subject for dictators is not a fanatic, but someone who can't distinguish true from false [Arendt, by Oksala] |
| Full Idea: The ideal subject of totalitarianism is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but anyone who has lost the ability to make distinctions between fact and fiction and between true and false. | |
| From: report of Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism [1968]) by Johanna Oksala - Political Philosophy: all that matters Ch.9 | |
| A reaction: We are currently living with an apparent attempt by Donald Trump to become a totalitarian President of the U.S.A., by constantly disseminating lies, and labelling all of his critics as 'fake news'. |
| 1494 | Thales said water is the first principle, perhaps from observing that food is moist [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Thales says water is the first principle (which is why he declared the earth is on water); perhaps he concluded this from seeing that all food is moist. | |
| From: report of Thales (fragments/reports [c.585 BCE], A12) by Aristotle - Metaphysics 983b12 |
| 1713 | Thales must have thought soul causes movement, since he thought magnets have soul [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Thales seems, from what is recorded of him, to have supposed that the soul is something productive of movement, if he really said that the magnet has soul because it produces movement in iron. | |
| From: report of Thales (fragments/reports [c.585 BCE]) by Aristotle - De Anima 405a20 |
| 1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: When asked whether a man who did wrong could escape the notice of the gods, Thales is said to have replied: 'No, not even if he thinks wrong.' | |
| From: report of Thales (fragments/reports [c.585 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 01.Th.9 |