Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'Symposium', 'Intro to 'Philosophical Essays'' and 'Rights of Man'

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

---

4 ideas

1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 1. Philosophy

9786	Philosophers working like teams of scientists is absurd, yet isolation is hard [Cartwright,R]
	Full Idea: The notion that philosophy can be done cooperatively, in the manner of scientists or engineers engaged in a research project, seems to me absurd. And yet few philosophers can survive in isolation.
	From: Richard Cartwright (Intro to 'Philosophical Essays' [1987], xxi)
	A reaction: This why Nietzsche said that philosophers were 'rare plants'.

2. Reason / A. Nature of Reason / 6. Coherence

9784	A false proposition isn't truer because it is part of a coherent system [Cartwright,R]
	Full Idea: You do not improve the truth value of a false proposition by calling attention to a coherent system of propositions of which it is one.
	From: Richard Cartwright (Intro to 'Philosophical Essays' [1987], xi)
	A reaction: We need to disentangle the truth-value from the justification here. If it is false, then we can safely assume that is false, but we are struggling to decide whether it is false, and we want all the evidence we can get. Falsehood tends towards incoherence.

22. Metaethics / B. Value / 2. Values / h. Fine deeds

5845	Niceratus learnt the whole of Homer by heart, as a guide to goodness [Xenophon]
	Full Idea: Niceratus said that his father, because he was concerned to make him a good man, made him learn the whole works of Homer, and he could still repeat by heart the entire 'Iliad' and 'Odyssey'.
	From: Xenophon (Symposium [c.391 BCE], 3.5)
	A reaction: This clearly shows the status which Homer had in the teaching of morality in the time of Socrates, and it is precisely this acceptance of authority which he was challenging, in his attempts to analyse the true basis of virtue

24. Political Theory / B. Nature of a State / 3. Constitutions

23261	A people, not government, creates a constitution, which is essential for legitimacy [Paine]
	Full Idea: A constitution is not the act of a government, but of a people constituting a government, and a government without a constitution is power without right.
	From: Thomas Paine (Rights of Man [1792], Ch.7), quoted by A.C. Grayling - The Good State 5
	A reaction: A constitution looks like the ultimate focus of a social contract (though Greeks had them long ago). It is hard to say why a government should consider itself to be sovereign if it hasn't got it in writing.