TE's, Analogies and Examples
This thought experiment includes a former US President to highlight the importance of the body to Personal identity.
What is the Dr.Nefarious thought experiment?
"It feels as if I have fallen unexpectedly into a deep whirlpool which tumbles me around so that I can neither stand on the bottom nor swim up to the top..." describes this philosopher's feelings in their pursuit of foundational principles.
Who is Descartes?
Nagel's fundamental criteria for an organism having conscious mental states.
What is something it is like to be that organism, something it is like for that organism?
According to Socrates, this is the worst of all conditions.
What is immorality?
These are the defect and excess of the virtue of Courage.
Visting our brother in hospital, helping a friend move and making our daughter a last minute costume are all examples Wolf uses for this concept.
What are personal reasons of love?
"Everything that raises the individual above the herd and makes his neighbour quail is henceforth called evil; the fair, modest, obedient, self-effacing disposition, the mean and average in desires, acquires moral names and honours..." describe this type of morality posited by Nietzsche
What is slave morality/ herd morality?
Hume's requirements for identity.
What is an object being uninterrupted and invariable?
Callicles argument the only authentic way of life is to do nothing to hinder or restrain the expansion of one's desires and satisfy every passing whim aligns with this theory.
What is Hedonism?
Those most pleased when the enemy forces are falling back.
Who are fools?
This is the issue Smart's discussion of the fossil analogy is designed to show.
What is the issue between the brain-process theory (identity theory) and epiphenomenalism?
--> Evidence of one also constitutes evidence for the other but epiphenomenalism requires the mental to be considered separate even if it cannot causally interact or influence the physical
"With your head spinning and mouth gaping open, you wouldn't know what to say.." is but one of this thinker's insults.
Who is Socrates?
Locke's example of personal identity in change of substance and when that substance is no longer part of that which is itself.
What is the cut off hand example?
What are external goods, goods of the body and goods of the soul?
The explanation of Ockham's razor.
What is the principle that all things equal (certainty, evidence etc.) explanations that have fewer assumptions or leaps in logic required, are to be preferred to explanations that posit more?
This analogy is offered to challenge Callicles' claims that people who need nothing aren't happy, otherwise there would be nothing happier than a stone or corpse.
What is the Leaky Jar analogy?
"...nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement..." encompasses this view of personal identity.
What is the bundle theory of the self, the illusion of identity in the ever changing bundles of perceptions making up each moment?
Michaels explanation of why an appeal to the fact that the same brain is involved in two events does not provide us with a way out of the Lockean circle.
What is that brains alone do not learn things (to ride a bike)and brains alone do not remember things (having rode a bike) - people do, more than just the brain?
Gandhi, Mother Theresa, Einstein and Cezanne are examples given of this.
What are paradigms of meaningful lives?
The meaning of 'Moral tartuffery'.
These are 2 of the named reductionist analogies Nagel says ignore the unique element of the mind-body problem.
What are the.. (any 2):
Water-H20 problem;
Turing Machine-IBM machine problem;
Lightning-electrical discharge problem;
Gene-DNA problem;
Oak tree-hydrocarbon problem?
"This conception of meaning specifies that the relationship between the subject and the object of her attraction must be an active one". This Wolf quote highlights this point of comparison with another unit 4 philosopher.
What is the requirement for active engagement to constitute meaning for Wolf and virtue for Aristotle?
Descartes compares the visions of sleep to paintings on this basis.
What is that for everything created must be made up of pre-existing elements, made of a likeness of things which are real?
Nietzsche's four noble virtues
Who is Richard Taylor?