Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Content Preservation', 'Eliminative Materialism and Prop. Attitudes' and 'Saundaranandakavya'

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6 ideas

1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 2. Invocation to Philosophy

7910	Pursue truth with the urgency of someone whose clothes are on fire [Ashvaghosha]
	Full Idea: As though your turban or your clothes were on fire, so with a sense of urgency should you apply your intellect to the comprehension of the truths.
	From: Ashvaghosha (Saundaranandakavya [c.50], XVI)
	A reaction: The best philosophers need no such urging. I retain a romantic view that we should be 'natural' in these things. See Plato's views in Idea 2153 and 1638. However, maybe I should be confronted with this quotation every morning when I awake.

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

9382	Subjects may be unaware of their epistemic 'entitlements', unlike their 'justifications' [Burge]
	Full Idea: I call 'entitlement' (as opposed to justification) the epistemic rights or warrants that need not be understood by or even be accessible to the subject.
	From: Tyler Burge (Content Preservation [1993]), quoted by Paul Boghossian - Analyticity Reconsidered §III
	A reaction: I espouse a coherentism that has both internal and external components, and is mediated socially. In Burge's sense, animals will sometimes have 'entitlement'. I prefer, though, not to call this 'knowledge'. 'Entitled true belief' is good.

17. Mind and Body / E. Mind as Physical / 3. Eliminativism

4988	Folk psychology may not be reducible, but that doesn't make it false [Kirk,R on Churchland,PM]
	Full Idea: It may well be that completed neuroscience will not include a reduction of folk psychology, but why should that be a reason to regard it as false? It would only be a reason if irreducibility entailed that they could not possibly both be true.
	From: comment on Paul M. Churchland (Eliminative Materialism and Prop. Attitudes [1981]) by Robert Kirk - Mind and Body §3.9
	A reaction: If all our behaviour had been explained by a future neuro-science, this might not falsify folk psychology, but it would totally marginalise it. It is still possible that dewdrops are placed on leaves by fairies, but this is no longer a hot theory.

4987	Eliminative materialism says folk psychology will be replaced, not reduced [Churchland,PM]
	Full Idea: Eliminative materialism says our common-sense conception of psychological phenomena is a radically false theory, so defective that both the principles and the ontology of that theory will eventually be displaced (rather than reduced).
	From: Paul M. Churchland (Eliminative Materialism and Prop. Attitudes [1981], Intro)
	A reaction: It is hard to see what you could replace the idea of a 'belief' with in ordinary conversation. We may reduce beliefs to neuronal phenomena, but we can't drop the vocabulary of the macro-phenomena. The physics of weather doesn't eliminate 'storms'.

29. Religion / C. Spiritual Disciplines / 3. Buddhism

7909	The Eightfold Path concerns morality, wisdom, and tranquillity [Ashvaghosha]
	Full Idea: The Eightfold Path has three steps concerning morality - right speech, right bodily action, and right livelihood; three of wisdom - right views, right intentions, and right effort; and two of tranquillity - right mindfulness and right concentration.
	From: Ashvaghosha (Saundaranandakavya [c.50], XVI)
	A reaction: Most of this translates quite comfortably into the aspirations of western philosophy. For example, 'right effort' sounds like Kant's claim that only a good will is truly good (Idea 3710). The Buddhist division is interesting for action theory.

29. Religion / D. Religious Issues / 2. Immortality / d. Heaven

7908	At the end of a saint, he is not located in space, but just ceases to be disturbed [Ashvaghosha]
	Full Idea: When an accomplished saint comes to the end, he does not go anywhere down in the earth or up in the sky, nor into any of the directions of space, but because his defilements have become extinct he simply ceases to be disturbed.
	From: Ashvaghosha (Saundaranandakavya [c.50], XVI)
	A reaction: To 'cease to be disturbed' is the most attractive account of heaven I have encountered. It all sounds a bit dull though. I wonder, as usual, how they know all this stuff.