22 ideas
| 17867 | If a concept is not compact, it will not be presentable to finite minds [Almog] |
| Full Idea: If the notion of 'logically following' in your language is not compact, it will not be locally presentable to finite minds. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 02) |
| 17877 | The number series is primitive, not the result of some set theoretic axioms [Almog] |
| Full Idea: On Skolem's account, to 'get' the natural numbers - that primal structure - do not 'look for it' as the satisfier of some abstract (set-theoretic) axiomatic essence; start with that primitive structure. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 12) | |
| A reaction: [Skolem 1922 and 1923] Almog says the numbers are just 0,1,2,3,4..., and not some underlying axioms. That makes it sound as if they have nothing in common, and that the successor relation is a coincidence. |
| 12756 | Substance is a force for acting and being acted upon [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: The very substance in things consists of a force for acting and being acted upon. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Nature Itself (De Ipsa Natura) [1698], §08) | |
| A reaction: Garber places this text just before the spiritual notion of monads took a grip on Leibniz. He seems to have thought that only some non-physical entity, with appetite and perception, could generate force. Wrong. |
| 17871 | Fregean meanings are analogous to conceptual essence, defining a kind [Almog] |
| Full Idea: Ever since Frege, semantic definitionalists have posited a meaning ('sinn') for a name; the meaning/sinn is their semantic analog to the conceptual essence, as ontologically defining of the kind. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 07) |
| 17866 | Essential definition aims at existence conditions and structural truths [Almog] |
| Full Idea: The essentialist encapsulating formula is meant to be existence-exhaustive (an attribute the satisfaction of which is logically necessary and sufficient to be the thing) and truth-exhaustive (promising all the structural truths). | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 01) | |
| A reaction: [compressed] If he thinks essentialism means that one short phrase can achieve all this, then it is not surprising that Almog renounces his former essentialism in this essay. He may, however, have misunderstood. He should reread Aristotle. |
| 17868 | Surface accounts aren't exhaustive as they always allow unintended twin cases [Almog] |
| Full Idea: A surface-functional characterisation is not exhaustive. It allows unintended twins, alien intruders with different structures - water lookalikes that are not H2O and lookalike infinite structures that are not the natural numbers. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 03) | |
| A reaction: He rests this on the claim in mathematical logic that fully expressive systems are always non-categorical (having unintended twins). Set theory is not fully categorical, but Peano Arithmetic is. Almog's main anti-essentialist argument. |
| 17872 | Definitionalists rely on snapshot-concepts, instead of on the real processes [Almog] |
| Full Idea: The definitionalist errs by abstracting away from differences cosmic processes, freezing real, dynamic processes in snapshot-concepts. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 08) | |
| A reaction: You could hardly do science at all if you didn't 'abstract away from the differences in cosmic processes'. We can't write about sea-waves, because they all differ slightly? 'Electron' is a snapshot concept. |
| 17870 | Alien 'tigers' can't be tigers if they are not related to our tigers [Almog] |
| Full Idea: Animals roaming jungles on some planet at the other end of the galaxy with the tiger-look and the tiger genetic make-up but with a disjoint evolutionary history are not the same species as the earthly tigers. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 10) | |
| A reaction: I disagree. If two independent cultures build boats, they are both boats. If we manufacture a tiger which can breed with other tigers, we've made a tiger. His 'tigers' would scream for explanation, precisely because they are tigers. If not, no puzzle. |
| 17869 | Kripke and Putnam offer an intermediary between real and nominal essences [Almog] |
| Full Idea: Kripke and Putnam offer us enhanced essences, still formulable in one short sentence and locally graspable. They offer between Locke's mind-boggling definitive real essence and his mind-friendly but not definitive nominal essence. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 04) | |
| A reaction: The solution is to add a 'deep structure' which serves both ends. |
| 17876 | Individual essences are just cobbled together classificatory predicates [Almog] |
| Full Idea: The key for the essentialist is classificatory predication. It is only a subsequent extension of this prime idea that leads us to cobble together enough such essential predications to make an individuative essential property. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 11) | |
| A reaction: So the essence is just a cross-reference of all the ways we can think of to classify it? I don't think so. Which are the essential classifications? |
| 12755 | Final causes can help with explanations in physics [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Final causes not only advance virtue and piety in ethics and natural theology, but also help us to find and lay bare hidden truths in physics itself. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Nature Itself (De Ipsa Natura) [1698], §04) | |
| A reaction: This rearguard action against the attack on teleology is certainly aimed at Spinoza. The notion of purpose still seems to have a role to play in evolutionary biology, but probably not in physics. |
| 12760 | Something rather like souls (though not intelligent) could be found everywhere [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Nor is there any reason why souls or things analogous to souls should not be everywhere, even if dominant and consequently intelligent souls, like human souls, cannot be everywhere. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Nature Itself (De Ipsa Natura) [1698], §12) | |
| A reaction: He is always flirting with panpsychism, though he doesn't seem to offer any account of how these little baby souls can be built up to create one intelligent soul, the latter being indivisible. 'Souls' are very different from things 'analous to souls'! |
| 17873 | Water must be related to water, just as tigers must be related to tigers [Almog] |
| Full Idea: It is a blindspot to say that to be a tiger one must come from tigers, but to be water one needn't come from water. ...The error lies in not appreciating that to be water one still must come from somewhere in the cosmos, indeed, from hydrogen and oxygen. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 09) | |
| A reaction: A unified picture is indeed desirable, but a better solution is to say that the essence of a tiger is in its structure, not in its origins. There are many ways to produce an artefact. There could be many ways to produce a tiger. |
| 13304 | Learned men gain more in one day than others do in a lifetime [Posidonius] |
| Full Idea: In a single day there lies open to men of learning more than there ever does to the unenlightened in the longest of lifetimes. | |
| From: Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]), quoted by Seneca the Younger - Letters from a Stoic 078 | |
| A reaction: These remarks endorsing the infinite superiority of the educated to the uneducated seem to have been popular in late antiquity. It tends to be the religions which discourage great learning, especially in their emphasis on a single book. |
| 12759 | There are atoms of substance, but no atoms of bulk or extension [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: Although there are atoms of substance, namely monads, which lack parts, there are no atoms of bulk [moles], that is, atoms of the least possible extension, nor are there any ultimate elements, since a continuum cannot be composed out of points. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Nature Itself (De Ipsa Natura) [1698], §11) | |
| A reaction: Leibniz has a constant battle for the rest of his career to explain what these 'atoms of substance' are, since they have location but no extension, they are self-sufficient yet generate force, and are non-physical but interact with matter. |
| 12718 | Secondary matter is active and complete; primary matter is passive and incomplete [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: I understand matter as either secondary or primary. Secondary matter is, indeed, a complete substance, but it is not merely passive; primary matter is merely passive, but it is not a complete substance. So we must add a soul or form... | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Nature Itself (De Ipsa Natura) [1698], §12), quoted by Daniel Garber - Leibniz:Body,Substance,Monad 4 | |
| A reaction: It sounds as if primary matter is redundant, but Garber suggests that secondary matter is just the combination of primary matter with form. |
| 11854 | If there is some trace of God in things, that would explain their natural force [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If the law of God does indeed leave some vestige of him expressed in things...then it must be granted that there is a certain efficacy residing in things, a form or force such as we usually designate by the name of nature, from which the phenomena follow. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Nature Itself (De Ipsa Natura) [1698], §06) | |
| A reaction: I wouldn't rate this as a very promising theory of powers, but it seems to me important that Leibniz recognises the innate power in things as needing explanation. If you remove divine power, you are left with unexplained intrinsic powers. |
| 17864 | Defining an essence comes no where near giving a thing's nature [Almog] |
| Full Idea: The natures of things are neither exhausted nor even partially given by 'defining essences'. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], Intro) | |
| A reaction: A better criticism of essentialism. 'Natures' is a much vaguer word than 'essences', however, because the latter refers to what is stable and important, whereas natures could include any aspect. Being ticklish is in my nature, but not in my essence. |
| 17863 | Essences promise to reveal reality, but actually drive us away from it [Almog] |
| Full Idea: The essentialist line (one I trace to Aristotle, Descartes and Kripke) is driving us away from, not closer to, the real nature of things. It promised a sort of Hubble telescope - essences - able to reveal the deep structure of reality. | |
| From: Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], Intro) | |
| A reaction: I suspect this is tilting at a straw man. No one thinks we should hunt for essences instead of doing normal science. 'Essence' just labels what you've got when you succeed. |
| 12758 | It is plausible to think substances contain the same immanent force seen in our free will [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: If we attribute an inherent force to our mind, a force acting immanently, then nothing forbids us to suppose that the same force would be found in other souls or forms, or, if you prefer, in the nature of substances. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Nature Itself (De Ipsa Natura) [1698], §10) | |
| A reaction: This is the kind of bizarre idea that you are driven to, once you start thinking that God must have a will outside nature, and then that we have the same thing. Why shouldn't such a thing pop up all over the place? Only Leibniz spots the slippery slope. |
| 20820 | Time is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed [Posidonius, by Stobaeus] |
| Full Idea: Posidonius defined time thus: it is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed and slowness. | |
| From: report of Posidonius (fragments/reports [c.95 BCE]) by John Stobaeus - Anthology 1.08.42 | |
| A reaction: Hm. Can we define motion or speed without alluding to time? Looks like we have to define them as a conjoined pair, which means we cannot fully understand either of them. |
| 19408 | To say that nature or the one universal substance is God is a pernicious doctrine [Leibniz] |
| Full Idea: To say that nature itself or the substance of all things is God is a pernicious doctrine, recently introduced into the world or renewed by a subtle or profane author. | |
| From: Gottfried Leibniz (On Nature Itself (De Ipsa Natura) [1698], 8) | |
| A reaction: The dastardly profane author is, of course, Spinoza, whom Leibniz had met in 1676. The doctrine may be pernicious to religious orthodoxy, but to me it is rather baffling, since in my understanding nature and God have almost nothing in common. |