14 ideas
23269 | Philosophy must start from clearly observed facts [Galen] |
Full Idea: True philosophers concern themselves first and foremost to take clearly observed facts as their point of departure. | |
From: Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170], Kiv.11.817) | |
A reaction: I love this one, especially the desire that the facts be 'clearly observed'. That, thank goodness, eliminates quantum mechanics. If you don't love history and the physical sciences, you are not a philosopher. Oh, and reliable gossip. |
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. |
21386 | We should accept as explanations all the plausible ways in which something could come about [Epicurus] |
Full Idea: The phases of the Moon could happen in all the ways [at least four] which the phenomena in our experience suggest for the explanation of this kind of thing - as long as one is not so enamoured of unique explanations as to groundlessly reject the others. | |
From: Epicurus (Letter to Pythocles [c.292 BCE], 94) | |
A reaction: Very interesting, for IBE. While you want to embrace the 'best', it is irrational to reject all of the other candidates, simply because you want a single explanation, if there are no good grounds for the rejection. |
23266 | The spirit in the soul wants freedom, power and honour [Galen] |
Full Idea: The spirited part of the soul is desiderative of freedom, victory, power, authority, reputation, and honour. | |
From: Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170], Kiv.2.772) | |
A reaction: This is the concept of 'thumos' [spirit], taken straight from Plato's tripartite account of the soul, in 'Republic'. Note that it includes a desire for freedom (in an age of slavery). |
23219 | Stopping the heart doesn't terminate activity; pressing the brain does that [Galen, by Cobb] |
Full Idea: Even when an animals heart was stopped [by hand] it continued its muted whimpers, …but when the brain was pressed the animal stopped making a noise and became unconscious. | |
From: report of Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170]) by Matthew Cobb - The Idea of the Brain 1 | |
A reaction: It's not that the ancients didn't do science. It's that ancient people paid no attention to what their scientists discovered. |
23264 | Philosophers think faculties are in substances, and invent a faculty for every activity [Galen] |
Full Idea: Philosophers conceive of faculties as things which inhabit 'substances' much as we inhabit houses, not realising that causes of events are conceived in relational terms. We therefore attribute as many faculties to a substance as activities. | |
From: Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170], Kiv.2.769) | |
A reaction: This seems to demolish speculative faculties, but they were revived during the Enlightenment. I am happy to talk of 'philosophical faculties' where they are presumed to originate a type of thought, without commitment to any neuroscience. |
23220 | The brain contains memory and reason, and is the source of sensation and decision [Galen] |
Full Idea: The brain is the principal organ of the psychical members. For within the brain is seated memory, reason and intellect, and from the brain is distributed the power, sensation and voluntary motion. | |
From: Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170]), quoted by Matthew Cobb - The Idea of the Brain 1 | |
A reaction: [not sure of ref] Interesting that he assigns the whole of mind to the brain, and not just some aspect of it. He had done experiments. Understanding the role of the brain was amazingly slow. Impeded by religion, I guess. |
23265 | The rational part of the soul is the desire for truth, understanding and recollection [Galen] |
Full Idea: That part of the soul which we call rational is desiderative: …it desires truth, knowledge, learning, understanding, and recollection - in short, all the good things. | |
From: Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170], Kiv.2.772) | |
A reaction: Truth is no surprise, but recollection is. Note the separation of knowledge from understanding. This is a very good characterisation of rationality. For the Greeks it has a moral dimension, of wanting what is good. |
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). |
23268 | We execute irredeemable people, to protect ourselves, as a deterrent, and ending a bad life [Galen] |
Full Idea: We kill the irredeemably wicked, for three reasons: that they may no longer harm us; as a deterrent to others like them; and because it is actually better from their own point of view to die, when their souls are so damaged they cannot be improved. | |
From: Galen (The soul's dependence on the body [c.170], Kiv.11.816) | |
A reaction: The third one sounds like a dubious rationalisation, given that the prisoner probably disagrees. Nowadays we are not so quick to judge someone as irredeemable. The first one works when they run wild, but not after their capture. |
14051 | A cosmos is a collection of stars and an earth, with some sort of boundary, movement and shape [Epicurus] |
Full Idea: A cosmos is a circumscribed portion of the heavens containing stars and an earth; it is separated from the unlimited, with a boundary which is rare or dense; it is revolving or stationary; it is round or triangular, or some shape. All these are possible. | |
From: Epicurus (Letter to Pythocles [c.292 BCE], 88) | |
A reaction: Notice that there seem to exist the 'heavens' which extend beyond the cosmos. See Idea 14036, saying that there are many other cosmoi in the heavens. |
1828 | God does not intervene in heavenly movements, but is beyond all action and perfectly happy [Epicurus] |
Full Idea: Let us beware of making the Deity interpose in heavenly movements, for that being we ought to suppose exempt from all occupation and perfectly happy. | |
From: Epicurus (Letter to Pythocles [c.292 BCE]), quoted by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 10.25 |