26 ideas
| 9593 | Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The incremental progress which I envisage for philosophy lacks the drama after which some philosophers still hanker, and that hankering is itself a symptom of the intellectual immaturity that helps hold philosophy back. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This could stand as a motto for the whole current profession of analytical philosophy. It means that if anyone attempts to be dramatic they can make their own way out. They'll find Kripke out there, smoking behind the dustbins. |
| 9594 | Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Even if talk of truth as correspondence to the facts is metaphorical, it is a bad metaphor for analytic truth in a way that it is not for synthetic truth. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: A very simple and rather powerful point. Maybe the word 'truth' should be withheld from such cases. You might say that accepted analytic truths are 'conventional'. If that is wrong, then they correspond to natural facts at a high level of abstraction. |
| 9601 | The realist/anti-realist debate is notoriously obscure and fruitless [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The debate between realism and anti-realism has become notorious in the rest of philosophy for its obscurity, convolution, and lack of progress. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], After) | |
| A reaction: I find this reassuring, because fairly early on I decided that this problem was not of great interest, and quietly tiptoed away. I take the central issue to be whether nature has 'joints', to which the answer appears to be 'yes'. End of story. |
| 9599 | There cannot be vague objects, so there may be no such thing as a mountain [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: It is sometimes argued that if there is such a thing as a mountain it would be a vague object, but it is logically impossible for an object to be vague, so there is no such thing as a mountain. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 7.2) | |
| A reaction: I don't take this to be a daft view. No one is denying the existence of the solid rock that is involved, but allowing such a vague object may be a slippery slope to the acceptance of almost anything as an 'object'. |
| 9602 | Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The constraints of common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], After) | |
| A reaction: Wiliamson has described himself (in my hearing) as a 'rottweiller realist', but presumably the problem of vagueness interests a lot of people precisely because it pushes us away from common sense and classical logic. |
| 9598 | Modal thinking isn't a special intuition; it is part of ordinary counterfactual thinking [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The epistemology of metaphysical modality requires no dedicated faculty of intuition. It is simply a special case of the epistemology of counterfactual thinking, a kind of thinking tightly integrated with our thinking about the spatio-temporal world. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.6) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to be spot-on, though it puts the focus increasingly on the faculty of imagination, as arguably an even more extraordinary feature of brains than the much-vaunted normal consciousness. |
| 16536 | Williamson can't base metaphysical necessity on the psychology of causal counterfactuals [Lowe on Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The psychological mechanism that Williamson proposes as the supposedly reliable source of our knowledge of necessities only seems applicable to counterfactuals that are distinctively causal, not metaphysical, in character. | |
| From: comment on Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007]) by E.J. Lowe - What is the Source of Knowledge of Modal Truths? 5 | |
| A reaction: My rough impression of Williamson's account is that it is correct but unilluminating. We have to assess necessities by counterfactual thinking, because nothing else is available (apart from evaluating the coherence of the findings). |
| 9596 | We scorn imagination as a test of possibility, forgetting its role in counterfactuals [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: The epistemology of modality often focuses on (and pours scorn on) imagination or conceivability as a test of possibility, while ignoring the role of the imagination in the assessment of mundane counterfactuals. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.4) | |
| A reaction: Good point. I've been guilty of this easy scorn myself. Williamson gives our modal capacities an evolutionary context. What is needed is well-informed imagination, rather than wild fantasy. |
| 21227 | The Cogito demands a bridge to the world, and ends in isolating the ego [Velarde-Mayol] |
| Full Idea: All philosophies inspired in the Cogito have the problem of building a bridge from the starting point of consciousness to the external world. The result of this is the isolation and solitude of the very ego. | |
| From: Victor Velarde-Mayol (On Husserl [2000], 4.7.2) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as a pretty good reason not to develop a philosophy which is inspired by the Cogito. |
| 9597 | There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: There is extensive 'armchair knowledge' in which experience plays no strictly evidential role, but it may not fit the stereotype of the a priori, because the contribution of experience was more than enabling, such as armchair truths about our environment. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: Once this point is conceded we have no idea where to draw the line. Does 'if it is red it can't be green' derive from experience? I think it might. |
| 21215 | The representation may not be a likeness [Velarde-Mayol] |
| Full Idea: Representationalism is the doctrine that maintains that the object is represented in consciousness by means of an image. ...One should not confuse an image with a likeness. | |
| From: Victor Velarde-Mayol (On Husserl [2000], 2.4.3) | |
| A reaction: Helpful reminder that sense-data or whatever may not be a likeness. But then how do they represent? Symbolic representation needs massive interpretation. |
| 9592 | Intuition is neither powerful nor vacuous, but reveals linguistic or conceptual competence [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Crude rationalists postulate a special knowledge-generating faculty of rational intuition. Crude empiricists regard intuition as an obscurantist term of folk psychology. Linguistic/conceptual philosophy says it reveals linguistic or conceptual competence. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Kripke seems to think that it is the basis of logical competence. I would use it as a blank term for any insight in which we have considerable confidence, and yet are unable to articulate its basis; roughly, for rational thought that evades logic. |
| 20181 | When analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they present intuitions as their evidence [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: 'Intuition' plays a major role in contemporary analytic philosophy's self-understanding. ...When contemporary analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they appeal to intuitions. ...Thus intuitions are presented as our evidence in philosophy. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], p.214-5), quoted by Herman Cappelen - Philosophy without Intuitions 01.1 | |
| A reaction: Williamson says we must investigate this 'scandal', but Cappelen's book says analytic philosophy does not rely on intuition. |
| 9595 | You might know that the word 'gob' meant 'mouth', but not be competent to use it [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Someone who acquires the word 'gob' just by being reliably told that it is synonymous with 'mouth' knows what 'gob' means without being fully competent to use it. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 4.7) | |
| A reaction: Not exactly an argument against meaning-as-use, but a very nice cautionary example to show that 'knowing the meaning' of a word may be a rather limited, and dangerous, achievement. |
| 8239 | If the King likes music then there is hope for the state [Mengzi (Mencius)] |
| Full Idea: If the King has a great fondness for music, then perhaps there is hope for the state of Ch'i. | |
| From: Mengzi (Mencius) (The Mengzi (Mencius) [c.332 BCE], 1.B.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be Shakespeare's attitude to music as well. The general idea must be that love of music requires a selfless state of mind, where the mind revels in the beauty of something outside of itself. Respect is the desirable result. |
| 23398 | Human nature is naturally compassionate and good (as a 'sprout'), but people may not be good [Mengzi (Mencius), by Norden] |
| Full Idea: Mengzi does not claim that humans are innately good; he claims that human nature is innately good. …He says that 'the heart of compassion' (manifested when anyone sees a child about to fall into a well) is the 'sprout of benevolence'. | |
| From: report of Mengzi (Mencius) (The Mengzi (Mencius) [c.332 BCE]) by Bryan van Norden - Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy 6.II | |
| A reaction: There is a nice distinction here between the 'sprout' of human nature and the finished product. Seeds have the potential to produce tall healthy plants, but circumstances can warp them. |
| 23400 | Righteousness is extending the unthinkable, to reveal what must be done [Mengzi (Mencius)] |
| Full Idea: People all have things they will not do. To extend this reaction to that which they will do is righteousness. | |
| From: Mengzi (Mencius) (The Mengzi (Mencius) [c.332 BCE], 7B31), quoted by Bryan van Norden - Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy 6.IV | |
| A reaction: Very nice! Kekes points out the enormous importance of unthinkable deeds. Depravity is when the unthinkable gradually begins to look possible, which is probably a social phenomenon, a creeping cancer in a culture. |
| 23399 | Each correct feeling relies on an underlying virtue [Mengzi (Mencius)] |
| Full Idea: The heart of compassion is benevolence. The heart of disdain is righteousness. The heart of respect is propriety. The heart of approval and disapproval is wisdom. | |
| From: Mengzi (Mencius) (The Mengzi (Mencius) [c.332 BCE], 6A6), quoted by Bryan van Norden - Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy 6.III | |
| A reaction: 'Disdain' seems to be the response to anyone who is disrespectful. Note that wisdom concerns judgements. Respect seems to be more of a social convention than an actual concern for others. |
| 8235 | Should a coward who ran fifty paces from a battle laugh at another who ran a hundred? [Mengzi (Mencius)] |
| Full Idea: If two soldiers were fleeing from a battle, and one stopped after a hundred paces and the other stopped after a fifty paces, what would you think if the latter, as one who only ran fifty paces, were to laugh at the former who ran a hundred? | |
| From: Mengzi (Mencius) (The Mengzi (Mencius) [c.332 BCE], 1.A.3) | |
| A reaction: A nice illustration, in my view, of the universality of truths about human virtue. In no culture would this laughter be appropriate. Nevertheless, there must be degrees of dishonour. Better to flee than join in with the likely winners. |
| 9600 | If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson] |
| Full Idea: Given empirical evidence for the approximate intertranslatability of all human languages, and a universal innate basis of human cognition, we may wonder how 'other' any human culture really is. | |
| From: Timothy Williamson (The Philosophy of Philosophy [2007], 8.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems to be a fairly accurate account of the situation. In recent centuries people seem to have been over-impressed by superficial differences in cultural behaviour, but we increasingly see the underlying identity. |
| 8240 | A true king shares his pleasure with the people [Mengzi (Mencius)] |
| Full Idea: If you shared your enjoyment of music or of hunting with the people, you would be a true King. | |
| From: Mengzi (Mencius) (The Mengzi (Mencius) [c.332 BCE], 1.B.1) | |
| A reaction: I suspect that this is a great truth for dictators and traditional monarchs. One pictures the successful ones attending public entertainments, and allowing the public to see their own. Tyrants keep entertainment private. Nero is a counterexample! |
| 8237 | Extend the treatment of the old and young in your family to the rest of society [Mengzi (Mencius)] |
| Full Idea: Treat the aged of your own family in a manner befitting their venerable age and extend this treatment to the aged of other families. Treat your own young in a manner befitting their tender age, and extend this to the young of other families. | |
| From: Mengzi (Mencius) (The Mengzi (Mencius) [c.332 BCE], 1.A.7) | |
| A reaction: This seems to me to articulate the ideal of communitarianism very nicely. Morality is not just about healthy adults in war and peace. It must include the children and the old. The values of the family are above the values of contracts and calculations. |
| 8241 | Only put someone to death if the whole population believes it is deserved [Mengzi (Mencius)] |
| Full Idea: When close attendants say a man deserves death, do not listen; when all the councillors say so, do not listen; when everyone says so, have the case investigated. If he is guilty, put him to death; he was put to death by the whole country. | |
| From: Mengzi (Mencius) (The Mengzi (Mencius) [c.332 BCE], 1.B.7) | |
| A reaction: The jury system is a gesture in this direction. Compare Idea 95. In Mencius's time, no doubt, everyone believed that capital punishment was sometimes right. Nowadays, when many people (e.g. me) reject it, the procedure won't work. |
| 8238 | Seeking peace through war is like looking for fish up a tree [Mengzi (Mencius)] |
| Full Idea: Your desire to extend your territory by war, in order to bring peace, is like looking for fish by climbing a tree. | |
| From: Mengzi (Mencius) (The Mengzi (Mencius) [c.332 BCE], 1.A.7) | |
| A reaction: Mencius had a flair for analogies. Just occasionally I suppose he might be wrong on this point, but I would think that experiments in the laboratory of history have shown that he is right in nearly all cases. |
| 8236 | Avoid the animals you are going to eat, as it is hard once you have got to know them [Mengzi (Mencius)] |
| Full Idea: Once a gentleman has seen animals alive, he cannot bear to see them die, and once having heard their cry, he cannot bear to eat their flesh. That is why the gentleman keeps his distance from the kitchen. | |
| From: Mengzi (Mencius) (The Mengzi (Mencius) [c.332 BCE], 1.A.7) | |
| A reaction: If you applied this to a Gestapo officer and his victims, it would obviously be the epitome of wickedness. But it is complex. Compassion is expected when we encounter suffering, but we are not obliged to seek out suffering. Or are we? |
| 21219 | Find the essence by varying an object, to see what remains invariable [Velarde-Mayol] |
| Full Idea: Eidetic Reduction consists of producing variations in the individual object until we see what is invariable in it. What is invariable is its essence or Eidos. | |
| From: Victor Velarde-Mayol (On Husserl [2000], 3.2.2) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as an excellent idea. It more or less describes the method of science. Chemical atoms were thought to be unsplittable, until someone tried a new variation for dealing with them. |