display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
1 idea
| 10004 | Our minds are at their best when reasoning about objects [Hofweber] |
| Full Idea: Our minds mainly reason about objects. Most cognitive problems we are faced with deal with particular objects, whether they are people or material things. Reasoning about them is what our minds are good at. | |
| From: Thomas Hofweber (Number Determiners, Numbers, Arithmetic [2005], §4.3) | |
| A reaction: Hofweber is suggesting this as an explanation of why we continually reify various concepts, especially numbers. Very plausible. It works for qualities of character, and explains our tendency to talk about universals as objects ('redness'). |