51 ideas
5333 | Philosophy needs wisdom about who we are, as well as how we ought to be [Flanagan] |
8092 | Logic was merely a branch of rhetoric until the scientific 17th century [Devlin] |
5988 | Anaximander produced the first philosophy book (and maybe the first book) [Anaximander, by Bodnár] |
5334 | We resist science partly because it can't provide ethical wisdom [Flanagan] |
1496 | The earth is stationary, because it is in the centre, and has no more reason to move one way than another [Anaximander, by Aristotle] |
8081 | 'No councillors are bankers' and 'All bankers are athletes' implies 'Some athletes are not councillors' [Devlin] |
8085 | Modern propositional inference replaces Aristotle's 19 syllogisms with modus ponens [Devlin] |
8086 | Predicate logic retains the axioms of propositional logic [Devlin] |
8091 | Situation theory is logic that takes account of context [Devlin] |
8087 | Golden ages: 1900-1960 for pure logic, and 1950-1985 for applied logic [Devlin] |
8089 | Montague's intensional logic incorporated the notion of meaning [Devlin] |
8082 | Where a conditional is purely formal, an implication implies a link between premise and conclusion [Devlin] |
8072 | Sentences of apparent identical form can have different contextual meanings [Devlin] |
8075 | Space and time are atomic in the arrow, and divisible in the tortoise [Devlin] |
14874 | Anaximander saw the contradiction in the world - that its own qualities destroy it [Anaximander, by Nietzsche] |
8088 | People still say the Hopi have no time concepts, despite Whorf's later denial [Devlin] |
5340 | Explanation does not entail prediction [Flanagan] |
5346 | In the 17th century a collisionlike view of causation made mental causation implausible [Flanagan] |
21833 | Research suggest that we overrate conscious experience [Flanagan] |
5341 | Only you can have your subjective experiences because only you are hooked up to your nervous system [Flanagan] |
5351 | We only have a sense of our self as continuous, not as exactly the same [Flanagan] |
5353 | The self is an abstraction which magnifies important aspects of autobiography [Flanagan] |
5354 | We are not born with a self; we develop a self through living [Flanagan] |
5349 | For Buddhists a fixed self is a morally dangerous illusion [Flanagan] |
5338 | Normal free will claims control of what I do, but a stronger view claims control of thought and feeling [Flanagan] |
5344 | Free will is held to give us a whole list of desirable capacities for living [Flanagan] |
5332 | People believe they have free will that circumvents natural law, but only an incorporeal mind could do this [Flanagan] |
5345 | We only think of ourselves as having free will because we first thought of God that way [Flanagan] |
5343 | People largely came to believe in dualism because it made human agents free [Flanagan] |
5347 | Behaviourism notoriously has nothing to say about mental causation [Flanagan] |
5339 | Cars and bodies obey principles of causation, without us knowing any 'strict laws' about them [Flanagan] |
21834 | Sensations may be identical to brain events, but complex mental events don't seem to be [Flanagan] |
5342 | Physicalism doesn't deny that the essence of an experience is more than its neural realiser [Flanagan] |
5335 | Emotions are usually very apt, rather than being non-rational and fickle [Flanagan] |
8073 | How do we parse 'time flies like an arrow' and 'fruit flies like an apple'? [Devlin] |
8076 | The distinction between sentences and abstract propositions is crucial in logic [Devlin] |
5348 | Intellectualism admires the 'principled actor', non-intellectualism admires the 'good character' [Flanagan] |
5355 | Cognitivists think morals are discovered by reason [Flanagan] |
21837 | Morality is normative because it identifies best practices among the normal practices [Flanagan] |
5336 | Ethics is the science of the conditions that lead to human flourishing [Flanagan] |
21830 | For Darwinians, altruism is either contracts or genetics [Flanagan] |
21835 | We need Eudaimonics - the empirical study of how we should flourish [Flanagan] |
21831 | Alienation is not finding what one wants, or being unable to achieve it [Flanagan] |
1495 | Anaximander introduced the idea that the first principle and element of things was the Boundless [Anaximander, by Simplicius] |
405 | The essential nature, whatever it is, of the non-limited is everlasting and ageless [Anaximander] |
13222 | The Boundless cannot exist on its own, and must have something contrary to it [Aristotle on Anaximander] |
404 | Things begin and end in the Unlimited, and are balanced over time according to justice [Anaximander] |
1746 | The parts of all things are susceptible to change, but the whole is unchangeable [Anaximander, by Diog. Laertius] |
5350 | The Hindu doctrine of reincarnation only appeared in the eighth century CE [Flanagan] |
21832 | Buddhists reject God and the self, and accept suffering as key, and liberation through wisdom [Flanagan] |
5352 | The idea of the soul gets some support from the scientific belief in essential 'natural kinds' [Flanagan] |