7 ideas
23889 | Among the Greeks Aristotle is the only philosopher in the modern style [Weil] |
Full Idea: In Greece, Aristotle is perhaps the only philosopher in the modern sense, and he is entirely outside the Greek tradition. | |
From: Simone Weil (God in Plato [1942], p.45) | |
A reaction: She sees Plato as embodying the true tradition. Everything Aristotle writes is 'peri phusis' (about nature), and that is a standard topic of philosophy right from the start. She emphasises Plato long historical roots. Pythagoras is key. |
11211 | If a sound conclusion comes from two errors that cancel out, the path of the argument must matter [Rumfitt] |
Full Idea: If a designated conclusion follows from the premisses, but the argument involves two howlers which cancel each other out, then the moral is that the path an argument takes from premisses to conclusion does matter to its logical evaluation. | |
From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], II) | |
A reaction: The drift of this is that our view of logic should be a little closer to the reasoning of ordinary language, and we should rely a little less on purely formal accounts. |
11210 | Standardly 'and' and 'but' are held to have the same sense by having the same truth table [Rumfitt] |
Full Idea: If 'and' and 'but' really are alike in sense, in what might that likeness consist? Some philosophers of classical logic will reply that they share a sense by virtue of sharing a truth table. | |
From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000]) | |
A reaction: This is the standard view which Rumfitt sets out to challenge. |
11212 | The sense of a connective comes from primitively obvious rules of inference [Rumfitt] |
Full Idea: A connective will possess the sense that it has by virtue of its competent users' finding certain rules of inference involving it to be primitively obvious. | |
From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], III) | |
A reaction: Rumfitt cites Peacocke as endorsing this view, which characterises the logical connectives by their rules of usage rather than by their pure semantic value. |
4871 | A thing is free if it acts only by the necessity of its own nature [Spinoza] |
Full Idea: I say that a thing is free, which exists and acts solely by the necessity of its own nature. | |
From: Baruch de Spinoza (Letter to G.H. Schaller [1674], 1674.10) | |
A reaction: Of course, this isn't 'freedom' at all, but it seems to exactly right as an account of so-called freedom. In the case of a human being the 'necessity of our own nature' is character, and virtue and vice are the expressions of the necessities of character. |
11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
Full Idea: The standard view is that affirming not-A is more complex than affirming the atomic sentence A itself, with the latter determining its sense. But we could learn 'not' directly, by learning at once how to either affirm A or reject A. | |
From: Ian Rumfitt ("Yes" and "No" [2000], IV) | |
A reaction: [compressed] This seems fairly anti-Fregean in spirit, because it looks at the psychology of how we learn 'not' as a way of clarifying what we mean by it, rather than just looking at its logical behaviour (and thus giving it a secondary role). |
23892 | The only legitimate proof of God by order derives from beauty [Weil] |
Full Idea: The only legitimate proof [of God's existence] from the order of the world is the proof from the beauty of the world. | |
From: Simone Weil (God in Plato [1942], p.89) | |
A reaction: She finds this proof in Plato. Hume's critique never (I think) mentions beauty, although in the 18thC love of the sublime could play that role. For me, the human experience of beauty doesn't have such cosmic significance. |