74 ideas
| 9108 | From an impossibility anything follows [William of Ockham] |
| 16676 | Why use more things when fewer will do? [William of Ockham] |
| 6806 | Do not multiply entities beyond necessity [William of Ockham] |
| 23000 | Vicious regresses force you to another level; non-vicious imply another level [Baron/Miller] |
| 9107 | A proposition is true if its subject and predicate stand for the same thing [William of Ockham] |
| 16300 | Ockham had an early axiomatic account of truth [William of Ockham, by Halbach] |
| 9106 | The word 'every' only signifies when added to a term such as 'man', referring to all men [William of Ockham] |
| 23024 | A traveller takes a copy of a picture into the past, gives it the artist, who then creates the original! [Baron/Miller] |
| 18085 | Values that approach zero, becoming less than any quantity, are 'infinitesimals' [Cauchy] |
| 18084 | When successive variable values approach a fixed value, that is its 'limit' [Cauchy] |
| 9113 | Just as unity is not a property of a single thing, so numbers are not properties of many things [William of Ockham] |
| 9110 | The words 'thing' and 'to be' assert the same idea, as a noun and as a verb [William of Ockham] |
| 23008 | Grounding is intended as a relation that fits dependences between things [Baron/Miller] |
| 16608 | Ockham was an anti-realist about the categories [William of Ockham, by Pasnau] |
| 16654 | Our words and concepts don't always correspond to what is out there [William of Ockham] |
| 18529 | Relations are expressed either as absolute facts, or by a relational concept [William of Ockham] |
| 22132 | Species and genera are individual concepts which naturally signify many individuals [William of Ockham] |
| 9103 | A universal is not a real feature of objects, but only a thought-object in the mind [William of Ockham] |
| 15388 | Universals are single things, and only universal in what they signify [William of Ockham] |
| 16779 | Cut wood doesn't make a new substance, but seems to make separate subjects [William of Ockham] |
| 16757 | Hot water naturally cools down, which is due to the substantial form of the water [William of Ockham] |
| 16599 | Ockham says matter must be extended, so we don't need Quantity [William of Ockham, by Pasnau] |
| 16681 | Matter gets its quantity from condensation and rarefaction, which is just local motion [William of Ockham] |
| 9109 | If essence and existence were two things, one could exist without the other, which is impossible [William of Ockham] |
| 16792 | If parts change, the whole changes [William of Ockham] |
| 23018 | How does a changing object retain identity or have incompatible properties over time? [Baron/Miller] |
| 9089 | Knowledge is a quality existing subjectively in the soul [William of Ockham] |
| 9091 | Sometimes 'knowledge' just concerns the conclusion, sometimes the whole demonstration [William of Ockham] |
| 9100 | Our intellect only assents to what we believe to be true [William of Ockham] |
| 9090 | Knowledge is certain cognition of something that is true [William of Ockham] |
| 9101 | Abstractive cognition knows universals abstracted from many singulars [William of Ockham] |
| 9102 | If an animal approached from a distance, we might abstract 'animal' from one instance [William of Ockham] |
| 9114 | There are no secure foundations to prove the separate existence of mind, in reason or experience [William of Ockham] |
| 9104 | A universal is the result of abstraction, which is only a kind of mental picturing [William of Ockham] |
| 9105 | Some concepts for propositions exist only in the mind, and in no language [William of Ockham] |
| 16675 | Every extended material substance is composed of parts distant from one another [William of Ockham] |
| 23011 | Modern accounts of causation involve either processes or counterfactuals [Baron/Miller] |
| 23013 | The main process theory of causation says it is transference of mass, energy, momentum or charge [Baron/Miller] |
| 23014 | If causes are processes, what is causation by omission? (Distinguish legal from scientific causes?) [Baron/Miller] |
| 23015 | The counterfactual theory of causation handles the problem no matter what causes actually are [Baron/Miller] |
| 23016 | Counterfactual theories struggle with pre-emption by a causal back-up system [Baron/Miller] |
| 23009 | There is no second 'law' of thermodynamics; it just reflects probabilities of certain microstates [Baron/Miller] |
| 23002 | In relativity space and time depend on one's motion, but spacetime gives an invariant metric [Baron/Miller] |
| 22988 | The block universe theory says entities of all times exist, and time is the B-series [Baron/Miller] |
| 22991 | How can we know this is the present moment, if other times are real? [Baron/Miller] |
| 22992 | If we are actually in the past then we shouldn't experience time passing [Baron/Miller] |
| 22994 | Erzatz Presentism allows the existence of other times, with only the present 'actualised' [Baron/Miller] |
| 22998 | How do presentists explain relations between things existing at different times? [Baron/Miller] |
| 23017 | Presentism needs endurantism, because other theories imply most of the object doesn't exist [Baron/Miller] |
| 23023 | How can presentists move to the next future moment, if that doesn't exist? [Baron/Miller] |
| 19381 | The past has ceased to exist, and the future does not yet exist, so time does not exist [William of Ockham] |
| 22995 | Most of the sciences depend on the concept of time [Baron/Miller] |
| 22993 | For abstractionists past times might still exist, althought their objects don't [Baron/Miller] |
| 23001 | The error theory of time's passage says it is either a misdescription or a false inference [Baron/Miller] |
| 22999 | It is meaningless to measure the rate of time using time itself, and without a rate there is no flow [Baron/Miller] |
| 22986 | The C-series rejects A and B, and just sees times as order by betweenness, without direction [Baron/Miller] |
| 22996 | The A-series has to treat being past, present or future as properties [Baron/Miller] |
| 23007 | The B-series can have a direction, as long as it does not arise from temporal flow [Baron/Miller] |
| 23003 | Static theories cannot account for time's obvious asymmetry, so time must be dynamic [Baron/Miller] |
| 23004 | The direction of time is either primitive, or reducible to something else [Baron/Miller] |
| 23005 | The kaon does not seem to be time-reversal invariant, unlike the rest of nature [Baron/Miller] |
| 23006 | Maybe the past is just the direction of decreasing entropy [Baron/Miller] |
| 23010 | We could explain time's direction by causation: past is the direction of causes, future of effects [Baron/Miller] |
| 22989 | Static time theory presents change as one property at t1, and a different property at t2 [Baron/Miller] |
| 23020 | If a time traveller kills his youthful grandfather, he both exists and fails to exist [Baron/Miller] |
| 23022 | Presentism means there no existing past for a time traveller to visit [Baron/Miller] |
| 22987 | The past (unlike the future) is fixed, along with truths about it, by the existence of past objects [Baron/Miller] |
| 22990 | The moving spotlight says entities can have properties of being present, past or future [Baron/Miller] |
| 22997 | The present moment is a matter of existence, not of acquiring a property [Baron/Miller] |
| 9111 | God is not wise, but more-than-wise; God is not good, but more-than-good [William of Ockham] |
| 8010 | William of Ockham is the main spokesman for God's commands being the source of morality [William of Ockham] |
| 9112 | We could never form a concept of God's wisdom if we couldn't abstract it from creatures [William of Ockham] |
| 9115 | To love God means to love whatever God wills to be loved [William of Ockham] |
| 16679 | Even an angel must have some location [William of Ockham, by Pasnau] |