jack@cs.glasgow.ac.UK (Jack Campin) (07/29/87)
[This is posted from brahms, since Jack's machine can't post at the nonce.] >From: gould!proxftl!bill@seismo.CSS.GOV (T. William Wells) >... to say that the same thing acting on the same thing under the >same conditions may yet produce a different effect, is to say that a >thing need not be what it is... >[This is from "An Introduction to Logic" by H.W.B. Joseph, as quoted >in "Atheism: the Case Against God" by George H. Smith. I can see no earthly reason to believe this. Maybe I could if I were Aristotle and thought that *everything* an object does comes from some sort of essence, though I suspect this is a bad parody even of Aristotle's views; at any rate this is just a restatement of Laplacian determinism in essentialist language and it is certainly NOT presupposed by quantum mechanics. Does Joseph's book have an index entry for "petitio principii"? - jack ARPANet: jack%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@{ucl-cs.arpa,cs.ucl.ac.uk} JANET: jack@uk.ac.glasgow.cs USENET: mcvax!ukc!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!jack Mail: Jack Campin, Computer Science Dept., University of Glasgow, 17 Lilybank Gardens, GLASGOW G12 8QQ British Telecon: 041 339 8855 x 6045