17 ideas
| 7426 | Critical philosophy is what questions domination at every level [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: In its critical aspect, philosophy is that which calls into question domination at every level | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Ethics of the Concern for Self as Freedom [1984], p.300) | |
| A reaction: A very French view of the subject. It is tempting to say that they had their adolescent outburst in 1789, and it is time to grow up. With rights come responsibilities... |
| 7423 | Philosophy and politics are fundamentally linked [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: The relationship between philosophy and politics is permanent and fundamental. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Ethics of the Concern for Self as Freedom [1984], p.293) | |
| A reaction: This idea is one of the biggest gulfs between continental and analytical philosophy. Many aspects of philosophy are turning out to be much more social than analytical philosophers might have thought - epistemology, for example. |
| 7420 | When logos controls our desires, we have actually become the logos [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: Plutarch says if you have mastered principles then logos will silence your desires like a master silencing a dog - in which case the logos functions without intervention on your part - you have become the logos, or the logos has become you. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Ethics of the Concern for Self as Freedom [1984], p.286) | |
| A reaction: If you believe that logos is pure reason, you might be quite happy with this, but if you thought it was a cultural construct, you might feel that you had been cunningly enslaved. If I ask 'what is 7+6?', logos interrupts me to give the answer. |
| 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. |
| 8568 | A property is merely a constituent of laws of nature; temperature is just part of thermodynamics [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: Being a constituent of probabilistic laws of nature is all there is to being a property. There is no more to temperature than the thermodynamics and other laws they occur in. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: How could thermodynamics be worked out without a prior concept of temperature? I think it is at least plausible to deny that there are any 'laws' of nature. But even Quine can't deny that some things are too hot to touch. |
| 8564 | There is obviously a possible predicate for every property [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: To every property there obviously corresponds a possible predicate applying to all and only those particulars with that property. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Intro') | |
| A reaction: This doesn't strike me as at all obvious. If nature dictates the properties, there may be vastly more than any human language could cope with. It is daft to say that a property can only exist if humanity can come up with a predicate for it. |
| 8566 | We need universals for causation and laws of nature; the latter give them their identity [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: I take the main reason for believing in contingent universals to be the roles they play in causation and in laws of nature, and those laws are what I take to give those universals their identity. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: He agrees with Armstrong. Sounds a bit circular - laws are built on universals, and universals are identified by laws. It resembles a functionalist account of mental events. I think it is wrong. A different account of laws will be needed... |
| 8565 | If properties were just the meanings of predicates, they couldn't give predicates their meaning [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: One reason for denying that properties just are the meanings of our predicates is that, if they were, they could not give our predicates their meanings. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: Neither way round sounds quite right to me. Predicate nominalism is wrong, but what is meant by a property 'giving' a predicate its meaning? It doesn't seem to allow room for error in our attempts to name the properties. |
| 7424 | Saying games of truth were merely power relations would be a horrible exaggeration [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: When I talk about power relations and games of truth, I am absolutely not saying that games of truth are just concealed power relations - that would be a horrible exaggeration. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Ethics of the Concern for Self as Freedom [1984], p.296) | |
| A reaction: I take this to be a denial of the more absurd forms of relativism. I think there is an interesting convergence between this kind of continental thinking, and the social view of justification found in the later work of Alvin Goldman. |
| 7422 | A subject is a form which can change, in (say) political or sexual situations [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: The subject is not a substance but a form, which is not always identical to itself. You do not have the same relation to yourself when you go to vote and when you seek to fulfil your desires in a sexual relationship. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Ethics of the Concern for Self as Freedom [1984], p.290) | |
| A reaction: I don't think I believe this. If it were true, the concept of 'sexual politics' would mean nothing to me. A brutal or sympathetic nature is likely to express itself in both situations. |
| 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). |
| 7419 | Ethics is the conscious practice of freedom [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: What is ethics, if not the practice of freedom, the conscious [réfléchie] practice of freedom? | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Ethics of the Concern for Self as Freedom [1984], p.284) | |
| A reaction: Makes Foucault sound very existentialist. I'm not sure I understand this kind of remark, given that serial killers seem to be exceptionally good at 'practising their freedom'. However, the idea is akin to Kant's notion of a truly good will (Idea 3710). |
| 7425 | The aim is not to eliminate power relations, but to reduce domination [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: The problem is not to dissolve power relations in a utopia of transparent communications, but to acquire the rules of law, the management techniques, the morality, the practice of the self, that allows games of power with minimum domination. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Ethics of the Concern for Self as Freedom [1984], p.298) | |
| A reaction: If you are a democrat it is hard to disagree with this, though I am still unclear why being dominated should rank as a total disaster. A healthy personal relationship might involve domination. 'Management techniques' is interesting. |
| 7418 | The idea of liberation suggests there is a human nature which has been repressed [Foucault] |
| Full Idea: I am somewhat suspicious of the notion of liberation, because one runs the risk of falling back on the idea that there is a human nature, that has been concealed or alienated by mechanisms of repression. | |
| From: Michel Foucault (Ethics of the Concern for Self as Freedom [1984], p.282) | |
| A reaction: Personally I think there is (to some extent) a human nature, and that it fails to flourish if it gets too much 'liberation. However, the world contains a lot more repression than liberation, so we should all be fans of liberty. |
| 8567 | Singular causation requires causes to raise the physical probability of their effects [Mellor] |
| Full Idea: Singular causation entails physical probabilities or chances. ...Causal laws require causes to raise their effects' chances, as when fires have a greater chance of occurring when explosions do. | |
| From: D.H. Mellor (Properties and Predicates [1991], 'Props') | |
| A reaction: It seems fairly obvious that a probability can be increased without actually causing something. Just after a harmless explosion is a good moment for arsonists, especially if Mellor will be the investigating officer. |