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All the ideas for '', 'Autobiography' and 'Reasons and Persons'

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6 ideas

5. Theory of Logic / A. Overview of Logic / 1. Overview of Logic

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.

5. Theory of Logic / E. Structures of Logic / 2. Logical Connectives / a. Logical connectives

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.

19. Language / F. Communication / 3. Denial

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).

22. Metaethics / C. The Good / 2. Happiness / d. Routes to happiness

7076	Mill wondered if he would be happy if all his aims were realised, and answered no [Mill, by Critchley]
	Full Idea: Mill, in his crisis of 1827, asked himself whether he would be happy if all his objects in life were realised, and had to answer that he would not.
	From: report of John Stuart Mill (Autobiography [1870]) by Simon Critchley - Continental Philosophy - V. Short Intro Ch.3
	A reaction: The reply is either that happiness is in the striving, or that his aims in life were wrong, or that happiness is impossible. It seems to contradict Kant's definition (Idea 1452).

23. Ethics / E. Utilitarianism / 1. Utilitarianism

9762	We should focus less on subjects of experience, and more on the experiences themselves [Parfit]
	Full Idea: It becomes more plausible, when thinking morally, to focus less upon the person, the subject of experiences, and instead to focus more upon the experiences themselves.
	From: Derek Parfit (Reasons and Persons [1984], §116)
	A reaction: This pinpoints how Parfit moves from a view of persons in terms of continuity of consciousness to a utilitarian morality. It brings out nicely what is wrong with utilitarianism - the reductio of a great ball of nice experiences, with no one having them.