15 ideas
| 12270 | Being is one [Melissus, by Aristotle] |
| Full Idea: Being is one. | |
| From: report of Melissus (fragments/reports [c.443 BCE]) by Aristotle - Topics 104b23 | |
| A reaction: I can only really understand this in terms of physics, as the belief that ultimately there is one simple theory which explains everything. That project doesn't look terribly promising, despite the lovely simplifications of modern physics. |
| 19284 | Asserting a necessity just expresses our inability to imagine it is false [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: To say that we dignify a truth as necessary we are expressing our own mental attitudes - our own inability to make anything of a possible way of thinking which denies it. It is this blank unimaginability which we voice when we use the modal vocabulary. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Spreading the Word [1984], 6.5) | |
| A reaction: Yes, but why are we unable to imagine it? I accept that the truth or falsity of Goldbach's Conjecture may well be necessary, but I have no imagination one way or the other about it. Philosophers like Blackburn are very alien to me! |
| 14629 | If we are told the source of necessity, this seems to be a regress if the source is not already necessary [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: If we ask why A must be the case, and A is then proved from B, that explains it if B must be so. If the eventual source cites some truth F, then if F just is so, there is strong pressure to feel that the original necessity has not been explained. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Morals and Modals [1987], 1) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Ross Cameron wrote a reply to this which I like. I'm fishing for the idea that essence is the source of necessity (as Kit Fine says), but that essence itself is not necessary (as only I say, apparently!). |
| 14529 | If something underlies a necessity, is that underlying thing necessary or contingent? [Blackburn, by Hale/Hoffmann,A] |
| Full Idea: Blackburn asks of what theorists propose as underlying the necessity of a proposition, the question whether they themselves are conceived as obtaining of necessity or merely contingently. | |
| From: report of Simon Blackburn (Morals and Modals [1987], p.120-1) by Bob Hale/ Aviv Hoffmann - Introduction to 'Modality' 1 | |
| A reaction: I've seen a reply to this somewhere: I think the thought was that a necessity wouldn't be any less necessary if it had a contingent source, any more than the father of a world champion boxer has to be a world champion boxer. |
| 6451 | Visual sense data are an inner picture show which represents the world [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: In the case of vision, sense data are a kind of inner picture show which itself only indirectly represents aspects of the external world. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy [1994], p.347) | |
| A reaction: I'm unsure whether this is correct. Russell says the 'roughness' of the table is the sense datum. If it is even a possibility that there are unsensed sense-data, then they cannot be an aspect of the mind, as Blackburn is suggesting they are. |
| 2866 | A true belief might be based on a generally reliable process that failed on this occasion [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: Reliabilism is open to the counterexample that a belief may be the result of some generally reliable process (a pressure gauge) which was in fact malfunctioning on this occasion, when we would be reluctant to attribute knowledge to the subject. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy [1994], p.327) | |
| A reaction: Russell's stopped clock that tells the right time twice a day. A good objection. Coming from a reliable source is very good criterion for good justification, but it needs critical assessment. |
| 3061 | Anaxarchus said that he was not even sure that he knew nothing [Anaxarchus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Anaxarchus said that he was not even sure that he knew nothing. | |
| From: report of Anaxarchus (fragments/reports [c.340 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 09.10.1 |
| 23996 | Akrasia is intelligible in hindsight, when we revisit our previous emotions [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: To make my emotion intelligible [in a weakness of will case] is to look back and recognise that my emotions and dispositions were not quite as I had taken them to be. It is quite useless in such a case to invoke a blanket diagnosis of 'irrationality'. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Ruling Passions [1998], p.191) | |
| A reaction: So Blackburn rejects the idea of akrasia, because there was never really a conflict. He says rational people always aim to maximise their utility (p.135), and if their own act surprises them, it is just a failure to understand their own rationality. |
| 11911 | Some philosophers always want more from morality; for others, nature is enough [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: The history of moral theory is largely a history of battles between people who want more (truth, absolutes...) - Plato, Locke, Cudworth, Kant, Nagel - and people content with what we have (nature) - Aristotle, Epicurus, Hobbes, Hume, Stevenson. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Précis of 'Ruling Passions' [2002], p.133) | |
| A reaction: [Thanks to Neil Sinclair for this one] As a devotee of Aristotle, I like this. I'm always impressed, though, by people who go the extra mile in morality, because they are in the grips of purer and loftier ideals than I am. They also turn into monsters! |
| 2864 | The main objection to intuitionism in ethics is that intuition is a disguise for prejudice or emotion [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: Critics say that intuitionism in ethics explains nothing, but may merely function as a disguise for prejudice or passion. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy [1994], p.198) | |
| A reaction: If someone claims to have an important moral intuition about something, you should carefully assess the person who has the intuition. I would trust some people a lot. |
| 2865 | Critics of prescriptivism observe that it is consistent to accept an ethical verdict but refuse to be bound by it [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: Critics of prescriptivism have noted the problem that whilst accepting a command seems tantamount to setting oneself to obey it, accepting an ethical verdict is, unfortunately, consistent with refusing to be bound by it. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy [1994], p.300) | |
| A reaction: We nearly all of us accept that our behaviour should be better than it actually is, so we accept the oughts but fail to act. Actually 'refusing', though, sounds a bit contradictory. |
| 23223 | The word 'respect' ranges from mere non-interference to the highest levels of reverence [Blackburn] |
| Full Idea: The word 'respect' seems to span a spectrum from simply not interfering, passing by on the other side, through admiration, right up to reverence and deference. This makes it uniquely well placed for ideological purposes. | |
| From: Simon Blackburn (Religion and Respect [2005], p.2) | |
| A reaction: Most people understand the world perfectly well, but only when they fully understand the context. I've taken to distinguishing conditional from unconditional forms of respect. Everyone is entitled to the unconditional form, which has limits. |
| 3059 | There is no real motion, only the appearance of it [Melissus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: There is no such thing as real motion, but there only appears to be such. | |
| From: report of Melissus (fragments/reports [c.443 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 09.4.3 |
| 5100 | The void is not required for change, because a plenum can alter in quality [Aristotle on Melissus] |
| Full Idea: There is no need for void to be the cause of all change, because it is perfectly possible for a plenum to alter qualitatively (which is something Melissus overlooked). | |
| From: comment on Melissus (fragments/reports [c.443 BCE]) by Aristotle - Physics 214a27 | |
| A reaction: In modern physics this presumably gives us fluctuations in a force field. Motion is like a cat being digested by a python. The atomist claim that emptiness is needed if anything is to move still has intuitive appeal. |
| 456 | Nothing could come out of nothing [Melissus] |
| Full Idea: If Nothing existed, in no way could anything come into being out of nothing. | |
| From: Melissus (fragments/reports [c.443 BCE], B1), quoted by (who?) - where? |