display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers
3 ideas
| 13883 | The best way to understand a philosophical idea is to defend it [Wright,C] |
| Full Idea: The most productive way in which to attempt an understanding of any philosophical idea is to work on its defence. | |
| From: Crispin Wright (Frege's Concept of Numbers as Objects [1983], 1.vii) | |
| A reaction: Very nice. The key point is that this brings greater understanding than working on attacking an idea, which presumably has the dangers of caricature, straw men etc. It is the Socratic insight that dialectic is the route to wisdom. |
| 10142 | The attempt to define numbers by contextual definition has been revived [Wright,C, by Fine,K] |
| Full Idea: Frege gave up on the attempt to introduce natural numbers by contextual definition, but the project has been revived by neo-logicists. | |
| From: report of Crispin Wright (Frege's Concept of Numbers as Objects [1983]) by Kit Fine - The Limits of Abstraction II |
| 15164 | We seem to base necessities on thought experiments and imagination [Sidelle] |
| Full Idea: Judgments of necessity seem always to be based on thought experiments and appeals to what we can imagine. | |
| From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: That is, the denial of this thing seems inconceivable. I would say that they are also based on coherence. The idea that we can think without imagination is nonsense. |