Philosophy Concordance - online philosophical quotations

The basic difference between such a man-made space and the nature-made 'real' space is in that the former, in contrast to the latter, is not a matter of making some courses of action impossible, but rather of making them merely improper.

As Sellars (1949, 298) puts it12: When God created Adam, he whispered in this ear "In all contexts of action you will recognize rules, if only the rule to grope for rules to recognize. When you cease to recognize rules, you will walk on four feet."

The principle of least action was to be our guide in constructing a world from experience.

If I ask "How does one know an action has this quality?", you might tell me to examine it and I would find out.

Now am I to investigate the movements making up the action, or are they only symptoms of goodness?

Now there is an important question which arises about goodness: Can one know an action in all its details and yet not know whether it is good?

How can one know whether an action or event has the quality of goodness?

And can one know the action in all of its details and not know whether it is good?

Or I can test the rod empirically, e.g., see how far it can be pulled out. The question in ethics, about the goodness of an action, and in aesthetics, about the beauty of a face, is whether the characteristics of the action, the lines and colours of the face, are like the arrangement of particles: a symptom of goodness, or of beauty.

To see how the ideal comes in, say in making the bass quieter, look at what is being done and at one's being dissatisfied with the music as it is. Can one call this "action" of making the bass quieter an investigation?