[lit-ideas] Re: Is 'All men are mortal' unscientific?
- From: "Phil Enns" <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 08:55:58 +0700
Donal McEvoy quotes Popper:
"Quine also discusses 'All men are mortal', but he takes 'x is mortal'
to mean 'there is a time t such that x dies at t'."
This doesn't seem quite right to me. When I think of the word
'mortal', I take it mean that all men would die if ... and here one
could provide a list of events that one would expect should lead to
death. Or, to be mortal is to be subject to all the weaknesses and
vulnerabilities one normally ascribes to human life. On this account,
it would be rather simple to certify a person as being immortal. Do
they suffer? Do they die if ... ?
This use of the word 'mortal' by Quine and Popper is peculiar since it
presupposes that all mortal people have, as some sort of quality or
predicative attribute, their time of death.
Evidently,
Phil Enns
Yogyakarta, Indonesia
------------------------------------------------------------------
To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,
digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
Other related posts:
