4 ideas
| 16789 | Only supernatural means could annihilate anything once it had being [Hobbes] |
| Full Idea: A being cannot naturally go out of existence. For even if a ship or a plank ceases to be a ship or a plank, it never naturally ceases to be a being. For a being, unless it is annihilated, does not cease to be a being. To annihilate is a supernatural task. | |
| From: Thomas Hobbes (De Mundo (On the World) [1642], 12.5) | |
| A reaction: This idea was becoming an orthodoxy in Hobbes's time, and leads to the various conservation laws in physics. |
| 16695 | Successive entities are in flux, flowing in existence, with different parts at different times [Oresme] |
| Full Idea: For any time, some of a successive entity exists in one of its parts, and a totally different such exists in another part. …It is in continuous flux and transition, ..and flows in existence if it does not have the same existence over a whole time. | |
| From: Nicole Oresme (On 'Physics' [1346], III.6, dist.1), quoted by Robert Pasnau - Metaphysical Themes 1274-1671 18.1 | |
| A reaction: Pasnau says the successive entity is the whole made up of these changing parts, so it sounds very like the temporal stages view of Sider and Hawley. |
| 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. |