51 ideas
| 6267 | A culture needs to admit that knowledge is more extensive than just 'science' [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The acknowledgement that the sphere of knowledge is wider than the sphere of 'science' seems to me to be a cultural necessity if we are to arrive at a sane and human view of ourselves or of science. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: A very nice remark, with which I intuitively agree, but then you are left with the problem of explaining how something can qualify as knowledge when it can't pass the stringent tests of science. How wide to we spread, and why? |
| 6272 | 'True' and 'refers' cannot be made scientically precise, but are fundamental to science [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Some non-scientific knowledge is presupposed by science; for example, I have been arguing that 'refers' and 'true' cannot be made scientifically precise; yet truth is a fundamental term in logic - a precise science. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: We might ask whether we 'know' what 'true' and 'refers' mean, as opposed to being able to use them. If their usage doesn't count as knowledge, then we could still end up with all actual knowledge being somehow 'scientific'. |
| 6276 | 'The rug is green' might be warrantedly assertible even though the rug is not green [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: 'The rug is green' might be warrantedly assertible even though the rug is not green. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: The word 'warranted' seems to be ambiguous in modern philosophy. See Idea 6150. There seem to be internalist and externalist versions. It seems clear to say that a belief could be well-justified and yet false. |
| 6266 | We need the correspondence theory of truth to understand language and science [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: A correspondence theory of truth is needed to understand how language works, and how science works. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Putnam retreated from this position to a more pragmatic one later on, but all my sympathies are with the present view, despite being repeatedly told by modern philosophers that I am wrong. See McGinn (Idea 6085) and Searle (Idea 3508). |
| 6277 | Correspondence between concepts and unconceptualised reality is impossible [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The great nineteenth century argument against the correspondence theory of truth was that one cannot think of truth as correspondence to facts (or 'reality') because one would need to compare concepts directly with unconceptualised reality. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: Presumably the criticism was offered by idealists, who preferred a coherence theory. The defence is to say that there is a confusion here between a concept and the contents of a concept. The contents of a concept are designed to be facts. |
| 6264 | In Tarski's definition, you understand 'true' if you accept the notions of the object language [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Anyone who accepts the notions of whatever object language is in question - and this can be chosen arbitrarily - can also understand 'true' as defined by Tarski for that object language. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: Thus if we say "'snow is white' is true iff snow is white", then if you 'accept the notion' that snow is white in English, you understand what 'true' means. This seems to leave you with the meaning of 'snow is white' being its truth conditions. |
| 6265 | Tarski has given a correct account of the formal logic of 'true', but there is more to the concept [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: What Tarski has done is to give us a perfectly correct account of the formal logic of the concept 'true', but the formal logic of the concept is not all there is to the notion of truth. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I find this refreshing. A lot of modern philosophers seem to think that truth is no longer an interesting philosophical topic, because deflationary accounts have sidelined it, but I take the concept to be at the heart of metaphysics. |
| 6269 | Only Tarski has found a way to define 'true' [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: There is only one way anyone knows how to define 'true' and that is Tarski's way. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec II.5) | |
| A reaction: However, Davidson wrote a paper called 'On the Folly of Trying to Define Truth', which seems to reject even Tarski. Also bear in mind Putnam's earlier remark (Idea 6265) that there is more to truth than Tarski's definition. Just take 'true' as primitive. |
| 6280 | Realism is a theory, which explains the convergence of science and the success of language [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Realism is an empirical theory; it explains the convergence of scientific theories, where earlier theories are often limiting cases of later theories (which is why theoretical terms preserve their reference); and it explains the success of language. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: I agree. Personally, I think of Plato's Theory of Forms and all religions as empirical theories. The response from anti-realists is generally to undermine confidence in the evidence which these 'empirical theories' are said to explain. |
| 20146 | 'Luck' is the unpredictable and inexplicable intersection of causal chains [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: 'Luck' is loose shorthand. It stands for various causal chains that intersect and whose intersection we can neither predict nor explain, because we lack the relevant knowledge. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 01.2) | |
| A reaction: Aristotle's example is a chance meeting in the market place. The point about 'intersection' seems good, since luck doesn't seem to arise for an event in isolation. |
| 6284 | If a tautology is immune from revision, why would that make it true? [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: If we held, say, 'All unmarried men are unmarried' as absolutely immune from revision, why would this make it true? | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: A very nice question. Like most American philosophers, Putnam accepts Quine's attack on the unrevisability of analytic truths. His point here is that defenders of analytic truths are probably desperate to preserve basic truths, but it won't work. |
| 6273 | Knowledge depends on believing others, which must be innate, as inferences are not strong enough [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Our ability to picture how people are likely to respond may well be innate; indeed, our disposition to believe what other people tell us (which is fundamental to knowledge) could hardly be an inference, as that isn’t good enough for knowledge. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: An interesting claim. There could be an intermediate situation, which is a hard-wired non-conscious inference. When dismantled, the 'innate' brain circuits for assessing testimony could turn out to work on logic and evidence. |
| 6274 | Empathy may not give knowledge, but it can give plausibility or right opinion [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Empathy with others may give less than 'Knowledge', but it gives more than mere logical or physical possibility; it gives plausibility, or (to revive Platonic terminology) it provides 'right opinion'. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec VI) | |
| A reaction: See Ideas 174 and 2140 for Plato. Putnam is exploring areas of knowledge outside the limits of strict science. Behind this claim seems to lie the Principle of Charity (3971), but a gang of systematic liars (e.g. evil students) would be a problem case. |
| 17084 | You can't decide which explanations are good if you don't attend to the interest-relative aspects [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Explanation is an interest-relative notion …explanation has to be partly a pragmatic concept. To regard the 'pragmatics' of explanation as no part of the concept is to abdicate the job of figuring out what makes an explanation good. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], p. 41-2), quoted by David-Hillel Ruben - Explaining Explanation Ch 1 | |
| A reaction: I suppose this is just obvious, depending on how far you want to take the 'interest-relative' bit. If a fool is fobbed off with a trivial explanation, there must be some non-relative criterion for assessing that. |
| 6282 | Theory of meaning presupposes theory of understanding and reference [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: Theory of meaning presupposes theory of understanding and reference. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: How can you have a theory of understanding without a meaning that requires to be understood? Personally I think about the minds of small animals when pondering this, and that seems to put reference and truth at the front of the queue. |
| 6281 | Truth conditions can't explain understanding a sentence, because that in turn needs explanation [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: You can't treat understanding a sentence as knowing its truth conditions, because it then becomes unintelligible what that knowledge in turn consists in. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: The implication, I take it, is circularity; how can you specify truth conditions if you don't understand sentences? Putnam here agrees with Dummett that verification must be involved. Something has to be taken as axiomatic in all this. |
| 6278 | We should reject the view that truth is prior to meaning [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: I am suggesting that we reject the view that truth (based on the semantic theory) is prior to meaning. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: It is a nice question which of truth or meaning has logical priority. One might start by speculating about how and why animals think. A moth attracted to flame is probably working on truth without much that could be called 'meaning'. |
| 6271 | How reference is specified is not what reference is [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: A theory of how reference is specified isn't a theory of what reference is. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec V) | |
| A reaction: A simple and important point. We may achieve reference by naming, describing, grunting or pointing, but the question is, what have we achieved when we get there? |
| 6268 | The claim that scientific terms are incommensurable can be blocked if scientific terms are not descriptions [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The line of reasoning of Kuhn and Feyerabend can be blocked by arguing (as I have in various places, and as Saul Kripke has) that scientific terms are not synonymous with descriptions. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec II.2) | |
| A reaction: A nice clear statement of the motivation for creating the causal theory of reference. See Idea 6162. We could still go back and ask whether we could block scientific relativism by rethinking how descriptions work, instead of abandoning them. |
| 6279 | A private language could work with reference and beliefs, and wouldn't need meaning [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: A language made up and used by a being who belonged to no community would have no need for such a concept as the 'meaning' of a term. To state the reference of each term and what the language speaker believes is to tell the whole story. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: A subtle response to Wittgenstein's claim (e.g. Ideas 4152,4158), but I am not sure what Putnam means. I would have thought that beliefs had to be embodied in propositions. They may not need 'meaning' quite as urgently as sentences, but still… |
| 6270 | The correct translation is the one that explains the speaker's behaviour [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: What it is to be a correct translation is to be the translation that best explains the behaviour of the speaker. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Lec III) | |
| A reaction: This seems fairly close to Quine, but rather puzzlingly uses the word 'correct'. If our criteria of translation are purely behavioural, there is no way we can be correct after one word ('gavagai'), so at what point does it become 'correct'? |
| 6283 | Language maps the world in many ways (because it maps onto other languages in many ways) [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: We could say that the language has more than one correct way of being mapped onto the world (it must, since it has more than one way of being correctly mapped onto a language which is itself correctly mapped onto the world). | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Four) | |
| A reaction: This spells out nicely the significance of Quine's 'indeterminacy of translation'. Others have pointed out that the fact that language maps onto world in many ways need not be anti-realist; the world is endless, and language is limited. |
| 6275 | You can't say 'most speaker's beliefs are true'; in some areas this is not so, and you can't count beliefs [Putnam] |
| Full Idea: The maxim that 'most of a speaker's beliefs are true' as an a priori principle governing radical translation seems to me to go too far; first, I don't know how to count beliefs; second, most people's beliefs on some topics (philosophy) are probably false. | |
| From: Hilary Putnam (Meaning and the Moral Sciences [1978], Pt Three) | |
| A reaction: Putnam prefers a pragmatic view, where charity is applicable if behaviour is involved. Philosophy is too purely theoretical. The extent to which Charity should apply in philosophy seminars is a nice question, which all students should test in practice. |
| 20169 | An action may be intended under one description, but not under another [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: People can usually be described as intending an action under one description, but not under another. ...Consequently the same action may reasonably be said to be both intentional and unintentional. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 07.2) | |
| A reaction: This is the terrorist/freedom fighter problem. The problem seems to arise with long-term intentions, rather than immediate ones. Maybe it is the significance of the intention, rather than the intention itself? |
| 20149 | To control our actions better, make them result from our attitudes, not from circumstances [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: We increase our control by making our actions more and more the effects of our attitudes, and less and less the effects of external forces acting on us independently of our attitudes. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 02.4) | |
| A reaction: He says that the attitudes should be focused on our well-being. Attitudes may also, however, serve some exernal ideal, such as altruism or patriotism. He has built a case for 'control' being a much more important value than 'free will'. |
| 19738 | Values are an attempt to achieve well-being by bringing contingencies under control [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: Our system of values should be understood, among other things, as our attempt to cope with contingencies by making the connection between our well-being and actions less contingent and more within our control. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], Intro) | |
| A reaction: He gives an account in which every aspect of morality focuses on human well-being. Of course, the values will dictate what constitutes that well-being, as well as good means of attaining it. |
| 20145 | Values help us to control life, by connecting it to what is stable and manageable [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: Values are ...an attempt to cope with contingencies by making the connection between our well-being and actions less contingent and more within our control. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This sounds more like principles than values, since the former tell you what to do, but a value in itself is just a picture of possibilities. |
| 20170 | Responsibility is unprovoked foreseeable harm, against society, arising from vicious character [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: Full responsibility is when evil-doers can fully foresee the harm that results, their victims have not provoked it, it violates the requirements of physical protection in a society, the action reflects character, and it is viciously motivated. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 07.4) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] The point of this is to omit any reference to an explicit intention to perform an evil act. The Nazi Franz Stangl claimed that he never intended evil, but Kekes says that if true he is innocent, but the above definition makes him guilty. |
| 20165 | Reason and morality do not coincide; immorality can be reasonable, with an ideology [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: A central assumption of Western moral thought is mistaken: the requirements of reason and morality do not coincide. Immorality need not be unreasonable. ...Malevolent motives in combination with ideologies supply reasons for doing evil. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 06.5) | |
| A reaction: I presume that Kant would say the malevolent motives are irrational. If I perform an evil act because someone gives me a stupid reason for doing it, I am not thereby rational because I am acting for a reason. Wrong. |
| 20171 | Practical reason is not universal and impersonal, because it depends on what success is [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: The assumption that the requirements of reason are universal and impersonal ...is false of practical reason that aims at successful action. Whether a belief is true depends on the facts. Whether an action is successful depends on what success consists in. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 08.5) | |
| A reaction: Kekes is trying to eliminate the Kantian idea that reason can lead us to the 'right' thing to do. He rightly points to the complex demands of human, cultural and personal values. |
| 20175 | If morality has to be rational, then moral conflicts need us to be irrational and immoral [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: The absurdity follows [from Kant's categorical imperative] that in the case of moral conflicts reason and morality require us to act irrationally and immorally. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 10.4) | |
| A reaction: We can't pick one from two equals if we must have a reason for the preference, but that does not make it 'irrational' to choose one of them, when it doesn't matter which one is chosen. Taking one of the cheese sandwiches is not irrational. |
| 20174 | Relativists say all values are relative; pluralists concede much of that, but not 'human' values [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: We must distinguish between pluralism and relativism about values. Pluralists accept that the validity of cultural and personal values is relative to societies and individuals. But they also hold that human values are objectively valid. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 09.4) | |
| A reaction: This is a very attractive response to global moral relativism. I see a problem in the neat division into three distinct forms of value. Each of the three sets of values ought to be sensitive to the other two areas. Humans are cultured individuals. |
| 20159 | Cultural values are interpretations of humanity, conduct, institutions, and evaluations [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: I distinguish four types of cultural values likely to be found in a particular society: interpretations of human values; forms of expression and conduct; institutions and practices within them; and modes of evaluation. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 05.2) | |
| A reaction: He proceeds to enlarge on these four. This sub-divides the second of his three main areas of value. I like philosophers who do that sort of thing. It gives you the reassuring feeling that you can break a problem down into elements we understand.... |
| 20161 | The big value problems are evil (humanity), disenchantment (cultures), and boredom (individuals) [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: The major problem for the human dimension of values is the prevalence of evil; for the cultural dimension it is widespread disenchantment; and for the personal dimension it is pervasive boredom. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 05.5) | |
| A reaction: Boldly simple claims, but quite persuasive. Presumably it is the evil in human beings, rather than natural evil (like earthquakes) that is the problem. Disenchantment must come through alienation from social values. Powerlessness, rather than boredom? |
| 20156 | We are bound to regret some values we never aspired to [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: We inevitably feel regret for the many values we could have, but did not, try to realize. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 04.5) | |
| A reaction: He's obviously talking about working harder at our projects. |
| 20150 | There are far more values than we can pursue, so they are optional possibilities [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: A significant feature of our system of values is that it provides many more values than we could pursue. ...We encounter values as possibilities, and we must accept or reject them. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 03.1) | |
| A reaction: This immediately invites the lovely question of what values you are going to invoke when you discriminate among the values available in your culture. Nietzsche says it comes down to 'taste'. |
| 20158 | Innumerable values arise for us, from our humanity, our culture, and our individuality [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: There is an irreducible plurality of values that follow from the universal requirements of human well-being, from a shared cultural identity, and from individual conceptions of well-being. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 05 Intro) | |
| A reaction: This strikes me as a very helpful division. It seems reasonably obvious, but I have not encountered it elsewhere. It is an obvious foundation for international negotiations. We can criticise another culture by appealing to human values. |
| 20151 | Our attitudes include what possibilities we value, and also what is allowable, and unthinkable [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: The beliefs, emotions, motives, and desires that form our attitudes ...include not only what possibilities we value, but also the limits we should not transgress. ...The strongest limit is what I call 'the unthinkable'. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 03.2) | |
| A reaction: Another chance to link to my favourite idea from Democritus! Ideally we want a theory which shows how a vision of the possibilities immediately points to the limits, and to what is unthinkable. |
| 20152 | Unconditional commitments are our most basic convictions, saying what must never be done [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: Unconditional commitments are the most basic convictions we have. They tell us what we must not do no matter what, what we regard as outrageous, horrible, beyond the pale, or, in religious language, as sacrilegious. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 03.3) | |
| A reaction: The Aztecs should have made rather different unconditional commitments from the ones they ended up with. How do you persuade someone to make such an unconditional commitment. Abortion seems to involve huge clashes here. |
| 20153 | Doing the unthinkable damages ourselves, so it is more basic than any value [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: Doing the unthinkable causes deep, often irreparable, damage to our sense of ourselves. ...That is why the unthinkable indicates a more basic commitment than what we have to any value. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 03.3) | |
| A reaction: Kekes makes the interesting claim that what is unthinkable is so basic that it doesn't even count as a value - it is more like a fact of your own nature, which is prior to your values. Not sure about that. |
| 20162 | Evil isn't explained by nature, by monsters, by uncharacteristic actions, or by society [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: Four inadequate explanations of human evil attribute it to natural causes, moral monsters, uncharacteristic actions, and corrupting social conditions. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 06.3) | |
| A reaction: He is addressing the 'secular problem of evil', which arises if you assume that human beings are essentially good, and then look around you. He says evil explains corrupting social conditions, so we can't be circular about it. |
| 20157 | Well-being needs correct attitudes and well-ordered commitments to local values [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: A reasonable conception of well-being requires mistake-free attitudes and well-ordered commitments to some values selected from our society's system of values. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 05 Intro) | |
| A reaction: This summarises where he has got to so far. |
| 20154 | Control is the key to well-being [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: Increasing control is the key to our well-being. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 04 Intro) | |
| A reaction: This slogan emerges from a sustained discussion. Hitler and Stalin increased control rather impressively, so we obviously need a bit more than this to get proper well-being. There's also something to be said for going with the flow. |
| 20172 | Boredom destroys our ability to evaluate [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: The threat of boredom is the dissolution of the evaluative dimension of our life. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 09.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems right. If nothing is interesting, then there is no scale of values left, except perhaps 'of possible interest to other people'. |
| 20173 | Boredom is apathy and restlessness, yearning for something interesting [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: Boredom combines apathy and restlessness. ...We crave stimulation, worthwhile activities, and objects that engage our interest. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 09.1) |
| 20155 | Society is alienating if it lacks our values, and its values repel us [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: We feel estranged from our society if the values we prize are not available, and if we do not want to live by the available values. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 04.4) | |
| A reaction: There are two pictures here, for a monolithic culture, and for pluralism. For example, the values of Islam are fairly available in the Christian/atheist UK - but not sharia law. Pluralism can embrace a huge array of moderate values, but not extremes? |
| 20164 | The ideal of an ideology is embodied in a text, a role model, a law of history, a dream of the past... [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: The ideal in an ideology may be set down in a sacred text, exemplified in an exceptional life, dictated by laws of history, sociology, or psychology, located in a past uncorrupted idyllic past, or in a future Utopia of perfected human nature, and so on. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 06.4) | |
| A reaction: A bit grumpy, but a fair observation about an awful lot of slightly mad social endeavours. |
| 20163 | Ideologies have beliefs about reality, ideals, a gap with actuality, and a program [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: Ideologies have a set of beliefs about the world, an ideal of life, an explanation of the gap between the ideal and actuality, and a program for closing the gap. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 06.4) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] Kekes emerges as a bit right of centre in his politics. He clearly despises such ideologies, yet his book is an optimistic program for correcting things. Maybe the enemy is dogmatic ideologies. Kekes gives an undogmatic account of values. |
| 20148 | Equal distribution is no good in a shortage, because there might be no one satisfied [Kekes] |
| Full Idea: It is useless to distribute insufficient resources equally, because the equal distribution of insufficient resources may result in the even worse outcome that no one's reasonable expectations are met. | |
| From: John Kekes (The Human Condition [2010], 01.5) | |
| A reaction: He gives a shortage of oxygen tanks as a persuasive example, but that is hardly typical of the sorts of things that we normally want to distribute. |
| 1748 | Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless [Archelaus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Diogenes Laertius - Lives of Eminent Philosophers 02.Ar.3 |
| 5989 | Archelaus said life began in a primeval slime [Archelaus, by Schofield] |
| Full Idea: Archelaus wrote that life on Earth began in a primeval slime. | |
| From: report of Archelaus (fragments/reports [c.450 BCE]) by Malcolm Schofield - Archelaus | |
| A reaction: This sounds like a fairly clearcut assertion of the production of life by evolution. Darwin's contribution was to propose the mechanism for achieving it. We should honour the name of Archelaus for this idea. |