[lit-ideas] Re: Is 'All men are mortal' unscientific?
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2008 18:26:34 +0000 (GMT)
--- On Thu, 13/3/08, Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> From: Phil Enns <phil.enns@xxxxxxxxxxx>
> Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Is 'All men are mortal' unscientific?
> To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Date: Thursday, 13 March, 2008, 1:55 AM
> 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
Why think this? The fact of death means their was a time that X was alive and a
later time when x was dead. This fact is enough to show mortality whether or
not we know the cause of death, or still less "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.
I am subject to these but am not therefore dead.
Both these approaches to death seem to confuse the concept with the concept of
'causes of death' and of 'nornal human frailty' and this seems odd to me. The
following is also a peculiar reading of Quine's definition
> 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.
Why? This puts it in tendentious way that is not involved in saying that death
has occurred when, after a time t, a previously living thing is no longer
alive: taken not too seriously, we may say a dead person has the quality or
attribute of 'being dead' - but this is not to suggest that 'being dead' is
some sort of intrinsic quality or attribute of the person (how can it when that
person was previously alive?).
Donal
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