56 ideas
| 6319 | Wise people choose inaction and silence [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: The sage keeps to the deed that consists in taking no action and practises the teaching that uses no words. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], I.II.6) | |
| A reaction: Notice that this is an active 'deed', and a positive 'practice'. He is not just recommending indifference and lethargy. Personally I don't find the advice very appealing, but it might be good if you live in 'interesting times'. |
| 6325 | One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: One who knows does not speak; one who speaks does not know. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], II.LVI.128) | |
| A reaction: A famous remark, which my western mind finds simply perplexing. It strikes me as wicked selfishness to keep your wisdom to yourself, and not try to persuade others to follow it. We are all in this together, I say. |
| 6321 | Vulgar people are alert; I alone am muddled [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: Vulgar people are alert; I alone am muddled. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], I.XX.47) | |
| A reaction: Personally I think all human beings are deeply perplexed when they actually address their situation, but most people never spend more than a few minutes a year worrying about it. |
| 16227 | Philosophers are good at denying the obvious [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Philosophers are skilled at resisting even the most inviting thoughts. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5) | |
| A reaction: Not exactly 'despair', but it does show how far philosophers are able to stray from common sense. Monads, real possible worlds, real sets… Thomas Reid, the philosopher of common sense, might be the antidote. |
| 16216 | Part of the sense of a proper name is a criterion of the thing's identity [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A Fregean dictum is that part of the sense of proper name is a criterion of identity for the thing in question. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.8) | |
| A reaction: [She quotes Dummett 1981:545] We are asked to choose between this and the Kripke rigid/dubbing/causal account, with effectively no content. |
| 16211 | A homogeneous rotating disc should be undetectable according to Humean supervenience [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Imagine a perfectly homogeneous non-atomistic disc. A record of all the non-relational information about the world at that moment will not reveal whether the disc is rotating about a vertical axis through. This tells against Humean supervenience. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.2) | |
| A reaction: [Armstrong 1980 originated this, and it is famously discussed by Kripke in lectures] There will, of course, be dispositions present because of the rotation, but Lewis excludes any such modal truths. |
| 16219 | Non-linguistic things cannot be indeterminate, because they don't have truth-values at all [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Non-linguistic objects, properties, and states of affairs cannot be indeterminate because they cannot have determinate truth-values either. No cloud is indeterminate, just as no cloud is either determinately true or determinately false. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: If vagueness must be linguistic, this means animals can never experience it, which I doubt. Presumably 'this is a cloud' is only made vague by the vagueness of the object, rather than by the vagueness of the sentence? |
| 16223 | Maybe for the world to be vague, it must be vague in its foundations? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There is a question of whether there must be 'vagueness all the way down' for the world to be vague. One view is that if there is a base level of precisely describably facts, upon which all the others supervene, then the world is not really vague. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.5) | |
| A reaction: My understanding of the physics is that it is non-vague all the way down, and then you get to the base level which is hopelessly vague! |
| 16226 | Epistemic vagueness seems right in the case of persons [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The epistemic account of vagueness is particularly attractive where persons are concerned. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.14) | |
| A reaction: You'll have to see her text for details. Interesting that there might be different views of what vagueness is for different cases. Or putting it another way, absolutely everything (said, thought, existing or done) might be vague in some way! |
| 16208 | Supervaluation refers to one vaguely specified thing, through satisfaction by everything in some range [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Supervaluationists take a present-tense predication as concerning a single, but vaguely specified, moment. …It is indeterminate which of a range of moments enters into the truth conditions, but it is true if satisfied by every member of the range. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.7) | |
| A reaction: She is discussing stage theory, but this is a helpful clarification of the idea of supervaluation. Something can be satisfied by a whole bunch of values, even though you are not sure which one. |
| 16221 | Supervaluationism takes what the truth-value would have been if indecision was resolved [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A supervaluationist approach involves consideration of what the truth value of the utterance would have been if semantic indecision had been resolved in this way or that. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: At last, a lovely account of supervaluation in plain English that anyone can understand! Why don't they all do that? Well, done Katherine Hawley! ['semantic indecision' is uncertainty about what your words mean!] |
| 16230 | Maybe the only properties are basic ones like charge, mass and spin [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Some philosophers suspect that properties are few and far between, that there are only properties like charge, mass, spin, and so on. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: I think properties are very sparse, and mainly consist of physical powers, but I am not sure what I think of this. It may be 'mere semantics'. Complex properties still seem to be properties. Powers combine to make properties, I suggest. |
| 16232 | An object is 'natural' if its stages are linked by certain non-supervenient relations [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: I suggest that our distinction between natural and unnatural (gerrymandered) objects corresponds to a distinction between series of stages which are and are not linked by certain non-supervenient relations. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.5) | |
| A reaction: See Idea 16213 for the nature of these 'relations'. I don't understand how an abstraction (as I take it) like a relation can unify a physical object. A trout-turkey is unified by a relation of some sort. Hawley defends Stage Theory. |
| 16200 | Are sortals spatially maximal - so no cat part is allowed to be a cat? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Many philosophers believe that sortal predicates are spatially maximal - for example, that no cat can be a proper spatial part of a cat. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This sounds reasonable until you cut the tail off a cat. Presumably what remains is a cat? So presumably that smaller part was always a cat? Only essentialism can make sense of this! You can't just invent rules for sortals. |
| 16237 | The modal features of statue and lump are disputed; when does it stop being that statue? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: It is difficult to establish a consensus about the modal features of the statue and the lump. Could that statue be made of a different lump? Could that statue of Goliath have been spherical? Not a realistic statue of Goliath, but still the same statue? | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6) | |
| A reaction: The problem is with a wild wacky sculptor, who might say it is a statue of Goliath no matter what shape the lump takes. 'Goliath had a spherical character'. Sometimes we will say (pace Evans) it is 'roughly identical' to the original statue. |
| 16238 | Perdurantists can adopt counterpart theory, to explain modal differences of identical part-sums [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Perdurance theory claims that lumps and statues differ modally whilst always being made of the same parts. A natural way to make this less mysterious is for perdurantists to adopt counterpart theory, where objects in different worlds are never identical. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: This, of course, is exactly the system created by David Lewis. Personally I rather like counterparts, but perdurance seems a tad crazy. |
| 16220 | Vagueness is either in our knowledge, in our talk, or in reality [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There are three main views of vagueness: the Epistemic view says we talk precisely, but don't know what we talk precisely about; the Semantic view is that it is loose talk, or semantic indecision; the Ontic view says it is part of how the world is. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.1) | |
| A reaction: [My summary of two paragraphs] She associates Williamson with the first view, Lewis with the second, and Van Inwagen with the third. |
| 16222 | Indeterminacy in objects and in properties are not distinct cases [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There is no important distinction to be drawn between cases where indeterminacy is due to the object involved and cases where indeterminacy is due to the property involved. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.2) | |
| A reaction: You could always paraphrase the object's situation propertywise, or the property's situation objectwise. 'His baldness is indeterminate'; 'where does the mountainous terrain end?' |
| 16228 | The constitution theory is endurantism plus more than one object in a place [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Constitution theorists are endurance theorists who believe that there can be more than one object exactly occupying a spatial region at a certain moment. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: I increasingly think that this is a ridiculous view. The constitution of an object isn't a further object. A constitution is a necessary requirement for a physical object. Hylomorphism! Constitutions can't be separate - they must constitute something! |
| 16229 | Constitution theory needs sortal properties like 'being a sweater' to distinguish it from its thread [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Constitution theorists need to posit sortal properties of 'being a thread' or 'being a sweater', as grounds for the differences betwween the sweater and the thread that constitutes it. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.1) | |
| A reaction: This is further grounds for thinking the constitution view ridiculous, because there are no such properties. 'Being a sweater' is a category, which something belongs in if it has all the properties of a sweater. The final property triggers sweaterhood. |
| 14492 | If the constitution view says thread and sweater are two things, why do we talk of one thing? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The constitution theorists, who claim that the sweater and the thread are different things, should offer some explanation of why we tend to say that there is just one thing there. They must simply claim that we 'do not count by identity'. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 5.8) | |
| A reaction: Her example is a sweater knitted from a single piece of thread. Presumably we could count by sortal identity, so there is one thread here, and there is one sweater here. We just can't add the two together. No ontological arithmetic. |
| 16193 | 'Adverbialism' explains change by saying an object has-at-some-time a given property [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Another strategy for the problem of change says that instantiation - the having of properties - is time-indexed, or relative to times, although properties themselves are not. This 'adverbialism' says that object has-at-t some property. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.5) | |
| A reaction: [She cites Johnson, Lowe and Haslanger for this] Promising. The question is whether the time index is attached to the object, to the property, or to the instantiation. The middle one is wrong. There aren't two properties - green-at-t1 and green-at-t2. |
| 16195 | Presentism solves the change problem: the green banana ceases, so can't 'relate' to the yellow one [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Adopting presentism solves the problem of change, since it means that, once the banana is yellow, there just is no green banana, and the question of the relationship between yesterday's green banana and today's yellow one therefore does not arise. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.7) | |
| A reaction: Change remains kind of odd, but it is no longer the puzzlement of two things being the same when they are admitted to be different. There is only ever one thing. This is my preferred account, I think. I certainly hope past bananas don't exist. |
| 16202 | The problem of change arises if there must be 'identity' of a thing over time [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: It is the insistence on identity between objects wholly present at different times which gives rise to the problem of change. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: My solution is to say things are the 'same', in a slightly loose non-transitive way, rather than formally identical, which is a concept from maths, not from reality. |
| 16192 | Endurance theory can relate properties to times, or timed instantiations to properties [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Endurance theory might claim a banana stands (atemporally) in different relations to different times (being-green-at to Monday), ..or has different instantiation relations to different properties (instantiates-on-Monday to being green). | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.3) | |
| A reaction: She suggests that the first approach is more plausible for endurantists. I think she is right (assuming these are the only two options). Monday awaits a banana, but yellow doesn't. |
| 16196 | Endurance is a sophisticated theory, covering properties, instantiation and time [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Endurance theory is not just a default 'no-theory' theory, for it must incorporate a sophisticated account of properties and instantiation, and requires a certain view of time if it is even to be formulable. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: A bit odd to claim it is a sophisticated theory when it is held (at least in our culture) by absolutely everyone apart from a few philosophers and physicists. The sophistication may come with trying to describe it using current metaphysical vocabulary. |
| 16197 | How does perdurance theory explain our concern for our own future selves? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A question for perdurance theory is whether it can account for the special concern we feel for our own future selves. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.8) | |
| A reaction: That is one of those questions that begins to look very mysterious whatever your theory. I favour endurantism, but me next year looks a very remote person for me to be concerned about, in comparison with the people around me now. |
| 16191 | Perdurance needs an atemporal perspective, to say that the object 'has' different temporal parts [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Perdurance relies on our having an 'atemporal' perspective from which we can truly say a banana has both yellow and green parts, where this 'has' is not in the present tense. ..Perdurance theory cannot be expressed straightforwardly in the present tense. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 1.2) | |
| A reaction: This seems to require the tenseless B-series view of time. It seems to need a tenseless view of the past, but what does it have to say about the future? |
| 16199 | If an object is the sum of all of its temporal parts, its mass is staggeringly large! [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The mass of an object is the sum of its nonoverlapping parts. Analogy would suggest that a persisting banana has, atemporally speaking, a mass that is the sum of all the masses of the 100g temporal parts, a worryingly large figure. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.1) | |
| A reaction: This is an objection to the Perdurance view that an object is the sum of all of its temporal parts. Their duration tends towards instantaneous, so the aggregate mass tends towards infinity. She says they should deny atemporal mass. |
| 16201 | Perdurance says things are sums of stages; Stage Theory says each stage is the thing [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: According to Perdurance Theory, it is long-lived sums of stages which are tennis balls, whereas according to Stage Theory, it is the stages themselves which are tennis balls. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: These seem to be the two options if you are a four-dimensionalist, though Fine says you could be a weird three-dimensionalist and choose stage theory. |
| 16240 | If a life is essentially the sum of its temporal parts, it couldn't be shorter or longer than it was? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: It seems that perdurance theory should identify Descartes with the sum of his temporal parts, but that means Descartes essentially lived for 54 years, which seems absurd, as he could have lived longer or less long than he in fact did. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6.10) | |
| A reaction: [She credits Van Inwagen with this] I'm not clear why a counterpart of Descartes could not have a shorter or longer sum of parts, and still be Descartes. If the sum is rigidly designated, that is a problem for endurance too. |
| 16203 | Stage Theory seems to miss out the link between stages of the same object [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The first worry for Stage Theory is that many present stages are bananas, and many stages tomorrow are bananas, but this seems to omit the important fact that some of those stages are intimately linked, that certain stages are the same banana. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: Hawley has a theory to do with external relations, which I didn't find very persuasive. Just to say stages have a 'relation' seems too abstract. Stages of disparate things can also have 'relations', but presumably the wrong sort. |
| 16204 | Stage Theory says every stage is a distinct object, which gives too many objects [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: The second worry for Stage Theory is that there are far too many bananas in the world on this account. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: The point is that each (instantaneous) stage is considered to be a whole banana (as opposed to one sum of all the stages of the banana, in the Perdurance view). A pretty serious problem, which she tries to deal with. |
| 16212 | An isolated stage can't be a banana (which involves suitable relations to other stages) [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A single isolated stage could not be a banana, because in order to be a banana a stage must be suitably related to other stages with appropriate properties. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.4.1) | |
| A reaction: This seems at odds with the claim that each stage is the whole thing (rather than the long temporal 'worm' of perdurance theory). Isolated stages are instantaneous, so can't be anything, really. Her 'relations' seem hand-wavy to me. Connections? |
| 16213 | Stages of one thing are related by extrinsic counterfactual and causal relations [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: I claim that there are relations between the distinct stages of a persisting object which are not determined by the intrinsic properties of those stages. …The later stages depend, counterfactually and causally, upon the earlier stages. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: This is the heart of her theory. How can there be a causal link between two stages which is not the result of intrinsic properties of the stages? This begins to sound like Malebranche's Occasionalism. |
| 16205 | The stages of Stage Theory seem too thin to populate the world, or to be referred to [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: A third worry for Stage Theory is that the momentary stages themselves are just too thin to populate the world, and too thin to be the objects of reference. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.3) | |
| A reaction: Her three objections to her own theory add up to sufficient to refute it, in my view, though a large chunk of her book is spent trying to refute the objections. |
| 16206 | Stages must be as fine-grained in length as change itself, so any change is a new stage [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: To account for change, stages and temporal parts must be as fine-grained as change: a material thing must have as many stages or parts as it is in incompatible states during its lifetime. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.4) | |
| A reaction: There seems to be a dilemma for stages here, of being so fat that they are divisible and change, or so thin that they barely exist. Lose-lose, I'd say. |
| 16225 | If two things might be identical, there can't be something true of one and false of the other [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: We can call the 'transference principle' the claim that if it is indeterminate whether two objects are identical, then nothing determinately true of one can be determinately false of the other. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 4.9) | |
| A reaction: The point is that Leibniz's Law could immediately be invoked to show there is no possibility of their identity. |
| 16239 | To decide whether something is a counterpart, we need to specify a relevant sortal concept [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: When asked whether a possible object is a counterpart of something, we need to specify which sortal we are interested in. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 6.2) | |
| A reaction: The compares this to the 'respect' in which two things are similar. For example, what would count as a counterpart of the current British Prime Minister? De re or de dicto reference? |
| 6328 | To know yet to think that one does not know is best [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: To know yet to think that one does not know is best. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], II.LXXI.173) | |
| A reaction: Tricky. Self-deception doesn't sound like a virtue to me. There are epistemic virtues, and caution about one's own knowledge has to be one of them, but a totally false assessment sounds counter-productive. |
| 6323 | Pursuit of learning increases activity; the Way decreases it [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: In the pursuit of learning one knows more every day; in the pursuit of the Way one does less every day. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], II.XLVII.108) | |
| A reaction: Everything in my culture has raised the status of the pursuit of learning, so that I can hardly comprehend what is proposed by the Way. I don't believe that the Way can be achieved without great learning, but one might move beyond learning. |
| 16218 | On any theory of self, it is hard to explain why we should care about our future selves [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: It is rather difficult to say why one should care about one's future self, even on an endurance theory account of the self. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.9) | |
| A reaction: A nice passing remark, that strikes me forcibly as one of those basic mysteries of experience that philosophers can only gawp at, and have no theory to offer. |
| 6331 | Truth is not beautiful; beautiful speech is not truthful [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], II.LXXXI.194) | |
| A reaction: A sharp disagreement with Keats ('Ode to a Grecian Urn'). A deep and important question, especially in relation to Plato's discussion of rhetoric (where he is very ambivalent). Great mathematics is beautiful. Truth can harsh. On the whole, I disagree. |
| 6330 | One with no use for life is wiser than one who values it [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: It is just because one has no use for life that one is wiser than the man who values life. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], II.LXXV.181a) | |
| A reaction: To have no use for life certainly seems to put a person into a position of superiority, especially when the 'Titanic' is sinking. However, if our lives have no value, I don't know what does. A balance must clearly be struck. |
| 6327 | Do good to him who has done you an injury [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: Do good to him who has done you an injury. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], II.LXIII.148) | |
| A reaction: Compare Idea 6288 (Jesus). People like this really mess up the social contract theory of morality. If they are going to return good for your evil, there doesn't seem much point in helping them, given how much effort is involved. Most peculiar… |
| 23402 | The highest virtue is achieved without effort [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: Those of highest virtue do not strive for virtue, and so they have it. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], 38), quoted by Bryan van Norden - Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy 8.II.2 | |
| A reaction: Every moralist's dream is the person to whom virtue comes so naturally that no thought is required. This says they don't even notice it; Aristotle says they simply enjoying behaving virtuously. |
| 6324 | To gain in goodness, treat as good those who are good, and those who are not [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: Those who are good I treat as good; those who are not good I also treat as good; in doing so I gain in goodness. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], II.XLIX.111) | |
| A reaction: Socrates (idea 346) and Jesus (Idea 6288) had similar ideas. Who, though, is going to administer justice, and where is the idea that people 'deserve' good or ill treatment? Schoolteachers should treat all children as if they were good. |
| 6322 | There is no crime greater than having too many desires [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: There is no crime greater than having too many desires. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], II.XLVI.104) | |
| A reaction: It seems harsh to call this a 'crime', given that no one is likely to choose to have 'too many' desires. The crime is in deciding to stimulate desire to excess, or deciding to show no sensible restraint. |
| 6320 | The best rulers are invisible, the next admired, the next feared, and the worst are exploited [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: The best of all rulers is but a shadowy presence to his subjects; next comes the ruler they love and praise; next comes one they fear; next comes one with whom they take liberties. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], I.XVII.39) | |
| A reaction: This fits our understanding of football referees to perfection. It might apply to anyone doing a vital adminstrative job, such as compiling a school timetable. It is hard, though, to accept anonymity as a mark of success. |
| 6329 | People are hard to govern because authorities love to do things [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: It is because those in authority are too fond of action that the people are difficult to govern. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], II.LXXV.181) | |
| A reaction: I love this. It should be on the wall of every human institution in our civilization. How the heart sinks at the prospect of a 'new initiative'. Not that I am against action; it is just important to recognise that inaction is sometimes the best option. |
| 6326 | The better known the law, the more criminals there are [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: The better known the laws and edicts, the more thieves and robbers there are. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], II.LVII.132) | |
| A reaction: Nice. I link this with my favourite moral maxim from Democritus (Idea 519). The idea is that continual emphasis on what you should not do fills the mind with evil possibilities. Moral perfection must start by taking goodness for granted. |
| 23401 | A military victory is not a thing of beauty [Laozi (Lao Tzu)] |
| Full Idea: A military victory is not a thing of beauty. | |
| From: Laozi (Lao Tzu) (Daodejing (Tao Te Ching) [c.530 BCE], 31), quoted by Bryan van Norden - Intro to Classical Chinese Philosophy 8.II.1 | |
| A reaction: Should be written on the wall of every military academy and barracks. |
| 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 |
| 16215 | Causation is nothing more than the counterfactuals it grounds? [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: Counterfactual accounts of causation say that a causal connection is exhausted by the counterfactuals it appears to ground. | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 3.5) | |
| A reaction: I am bewildered as to how this became a respectable view in philosophy. I quite understand that this might exhaust the 'logic' of causal relations. Presumably you can have counterfactuals in mathematics which are not causal? |
| 16207 | Time could be discrete (like integers) or dense (rationals) or continuous (reals) [Hawley] |
| Full Idea: There seem to be three possible ways for time to be fine-grained. The ordering of instants could be discrete (like the integers), dense (like the rational numbers) or continuous (like the real numbers). | |
| From: Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.5) | |
| A reaction: She seems to assume that time must be 'grained', but I would take the continuous view to imply that there is no grain at all (which is bad news for her version of stage theory). |
| 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. |