8 ideas
| 9198 | It is no longer possible to be a sage, but we can practice the exercise of wisdom [Hadot] |
| Full Idea: Personally I firmly believe, perhaps naively, that it is possible for modern man to live, not as a sage (sophos) - most of the ancients did not hold this to be possible - but as a practitioner of the ever-fragile exercise of wisdom. | |
| From: Pierre Hadot (Philosophy as a way of life [1987], 7) | |
| A reaction: It seems to me quite plausible that the philosophical life might yet become a widespread ideal, even though philosophers seem to still be sheltering from storms two thousand years after Plato gave us that image. |
| 9197 | The logos represents a demand for universal rationality [Hadot] |
| Full Idea: The logos represents a demand for universal rationality. | |
| From: Pierre Hadot (Philosophy as a way of life [1987], 3.3) | |
| A reaction: That is at one end of the spectrum. At the other, in parts of 'Theaetetus', it is just a polite request to be given a few reasons, instead of a splattering of hopes and prejudices. |
| 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. |
| 5959 | Some philosophers say the soul is light [Plutarch] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers hold that the soul is in its essence light. | |
| From: Plutarch (75: Is 'Live Unknown' a Wise Precept? [c.85], §6) | |
| A reaction: A nice idea, to rival the stoic view that the soul is fire. It is understandable to propose that the soul is some sort of lightweight and fast moving matter. How else could thought be achieved physically? Nowadays, parallel processing is our only model. |
| 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). |
| 9196 | The pleasure of existing is the only genuine pleasure [Hadot] |
| Full Idea: For epicureans, the only genuine pleasure there is is the pleasure of existing. | |
| From: Pierre Hadot (Philosophy as a way of life [1987], 3.1) | |
| A reaction: I don't know Hadot's source for this claim, but it is a nice idea, which I shall endeavour to incorporate into my own attitude to daily living. I'm not quite clear, though, why the pleasure of music is not a 'genuine' one. |