145 ideas
| 21405 | Cicero sees wisdom in terms of knowledge, but earlier Stoics saw it as moral [Cicero, by Long] |
| 20871 | Unfortunately we choose a way of life before we are old enough to think clearly [Cicero] |
| 5893 | A wise man has integrity, firmness of will, nobility, consistency, sobriety, patience [Cicero] |
| 5891 | Philosophy is the collection of rational arguments [Cicero] |
| 2661 | Dialectic is speech cast in the form of logical argument [Cicero] |
| 23000 | Vicious regresses force you to another level; non-vicious imply another level [Baron/Miller] |
| 2653 | If the parts of the universe are subject to the law of nature, the whole universe must also be subject to it [Cicero] |
| 2673 | There cannot be more than one truth [Cicero] |
| 21677 | How can the not-true fail to be false, or the not-false fail to be true? [Cicero] |
| 2669 | Dialectic assumes that all statements are either true or false, but self-referential paradoxes are a big problem [Cicero] |
| 23024 | A traveller takes a copy of a picture into the past, gives it the artist, who then creates the original! [Baron/Miller] |
| 23008 | Grounding is intended as a relation that fits dependences between things [Baron/Miller] |
| 22355 | In the realist view, the real external world explains how it (and perceptions of it) are possible [Williams,B] |
| 23018 | How does a changing object retain identity or have incompatible properties over time? [Baron/Miller] |
| 23283 | Necessity implies possibility, but in experience it matters which comes first [Williams,B] |
| 2664 | If we have complete healthy senses, what more could the gods give us? [Cicero] |
| 2665 | How can there be a memory of what is false? [Cicero] |
| 20800 | Every true presentation can have a false one of the same quality [Cicero] |
| 4244 | It is very confused to deduce a nonrelativist morality of universal toleration from relativism [Williams,B] |
| 4243 | Our ability to react to an alien culture shows that ethical thought extends beyond cultural boundaries [Williams,B] |
| 5879 | The soul is the heart, or blood in the heart, or part of the brain, of something living in heart or brain, or breath [Cicero] |
| 5884 | How can one mind perceive so many dissimilar sensations? [Cicero] |
| 5887 | The soul has a single nature, so it cannot be divided, and hence it cannot perish [Cicero] |
| 3238 | 'Dead person' isn't a contradiction, so 'person' is somewhat vague [Williams,B] |
| 3239 | You can only really love a person as a token, not as a type [Williams,B] |
| 5886 | Like the eye, the soul has no power to see itself, but sees other things [Cicero] |
| 7946 | The memory criterion has a problem when one thing branches into two things [Williams,B, by Macdonald,C] |
| 2181 | It is an absurd Kantian idea that at the limit rationality and freedom coincide [Williams,B] |
| 2176 | There is only a problem of free will if you think the notion of 'voluntary' can be metaphysically deepened [Williams,B] |
| 6029 | Whoever knows future causes knows everything that will be [Cicero] |
| 2628 | Why would mind mix with matter if it didn't need it? [Cicero] |
| 5885 | Souls contain no properties of elements, and elements contain no properties of souls [Cicero] |
| 24008 | Reference to a person's emotions is often essential to understanding their actions [Williams,B] |
| 24009 | Moral education must involve learning about various types of feeling towards things [Williams,B] |
| 21667 | Oratory and philosophy are closely allied; orators borrow from philosophy, and ornament it [Cicero] |
| 20814 | Eloquence educates, exhorts, comforts, distracts and unites us, and raises us from savagery [Cicero] |
| 4317 | We judge weakness of will by an assessment after the event is concluded [Williams,B, by Cottingham] |
| 9284 | Reasons are 'internal' if they give a person a motive to act, but 'external' otherwise [Williams,B] |
| 2174 | Responsibility involves cause, intention, state of mind, and response after the event [Williams,B] |
| 22455 | Many ethical theories neglect the power of regretting the ought not acted upon [Williams,B] |
| 4114 | Philosophers try to produce ethical theories because they falsely assume that ethics can be simple [Williams,B] |
| 22453 | Moral conflicts have a different feeling and structure from belief conflicts [Williams,B, by Foot] |
| 22454 | We tolerate inconsistency in ethics but not in other beliefs (which reflect an independent order) [Williams,B, by Foot] |
| 22450 | If moral systems can't judge other moral systems, then moral relativism is true [Williams,B, by Foot] |
| 21678 | If desire is not in our power then neither are choices, so we should not be praised or punished [Cicero] |
| 2178 | In bad actions, guilt points towards victims, and shame to the agent [Williams,B] |
| 20168 | Blame usually has no effect if the recipient thinks it unjustified [Williams,B] |
| 20167 | Blame partly rests on the fiction that blamed agents always know their obligations [Williams,B] |
| 4128 | Intuitionism has been demolished by critics, and no longer looks interesting [Williams,B] |
| 4366 | We can't accept Aristotle's naturalism about persons, because it is normative and unscientific [Williams,B, by Hursthouse] |
| 4132 | The category of person is a weak basis for ethics, because it is not fixed but comes in degrees [Williams,B] |
| 24007 | Emotivism saw morality as expressing emotions, and influencing others' emotions [Williams,B] |
| 4134 | The weakness of prescriptivism is shown by "I simply don't like staying at good hotels" [Williams,B] |
| 4135 | Some ethical ideas, such as 'treachery' and 'promise', seem to express a union of facts and values [Williams,B] |
| 22410 | Maybe the unthinkable is a moral category, and considering some options is dishonourable or absurd [Williams,B] |
| 22408 | Consequentialism assumes that situations can be compared [Williams,B] |
| 22411 | For a consequentialist massacring 7 million must be better than massacring 7 million and one [Williams,B] |
| 4120 | It is an error of consequentialism to think we just aim at certain states of affairs; we also want to act [Williams,B] |
| 23282 | If all that matters in morality is motive and intention, that makes moral luck irrelevant [Williams,B] |
| 4252 | Promise keeping increases reliability, by making deliberation focus on something which would be overlooked [Williams,B] |
| 4116 | A weakness of contractual theories is the position of a person of superior ability and power [Williams,B] |
| 2169 | Greek moral progress came when 'virtue' was freed from social status [Williams,B] |
| 2672 | Virtues must be very detached, to avoid being motivated by pleasure [Cicero] |
| 4112 | A crucial feature of moral thought is second-order desire - the desire to have certain desires [Williams,B] |
| 24010 | An admirable human being should have certain kinds of emotional responses [Williams,B] |
| 23279 | It is important that a person can change their character, and not just be successive 'selves' [Williams,B] |
| 23280 | Kantians have an poor account of individuals, and insist on impartiality, because they ignore character [Williams,B] |
| 5890 | We should not share the distress of others, but simply try to relieve it [Cicero] |
| 3236 | Equality of opportunity without equality of respect would create a very inhuman society [Williams,B] |
| 5894 | All men except philosophers fear poverty [Cicero] |
| 4113 | 'Deon' in Greek means what one must do; there was no word meaning 'duty' [Williams,B] |
| 4250 | The concept of a 'duty to myself' is fraudulent [Williams,B] |
| 4110 | Obligation and duty look backwards (because of a promise or job), although the acts are in the future [Williams,B] |
| 4248 | Not all moral deliberations lead to obligations; some merely reveal what 'may' be done [Williams,B] |
| 4249 | "Ought implies can" is a famous formula in connection with moral obligation [Williams,B] |
| 2172 | The modern idea of duty is unknown in archaic Greece [Williams,B] |
| 6031 | The essence of propriety is consistency [Cicero] |
| 4121 | Why should I think of myself as both the legislator and the citizen who follows the laws? [Williams,B] |
| 22409 | We don't have a duty to ensure that others do their duty [Williams,B] |
| 4122 | If the self becomes completely impartial, it no longer has enough identity to worry about its interests [Williams,B] |
| 2180 | If reason cannot lead people to good, we must hope they have an internal voice [Williams,B] |
| 24012 | Kant's love of consistency is too rigid, and it even overrides normal fairness [Williams,B] |
| 2179 | If the moral self is seen as characterless, then other people have a very limited role in our moral lives [Williams,B] |
| 22407 | Utilitarianism cannot make any serious sense of integrity [Williams,B] |
| 23278 | For utilitarians states of affairs are what have value, not matter who produced them [Williams,B] |
| 4124 | Utilitarian benevolence involves no particular attachments, and is immune to the inverse square law [Williams,B] |
| 4245 | Ethical conviction must be to some extent passive, and can't just depend on the will and decisions [Williams,B] |
| 4246 | Taking responsibility won't cure ethical uncertainty by; we are uncertain what to decide [Williams,B] |
| 5895 | If one despises illiterate mechanics individually, they are not worth more collectively [Cicero] |
| 3233 | Equality implies that people are alike in potential as well as in needs [Williams,B] |
| 3234 | Equality seems to require that each person be acknowledged as having a significant point of view [Williams,B] |
| 3235 | It is a mark of extreme exploitation that the sufferers do not realise their plight [Williams,B] |
| 2640 | We have the death penalty, but still have thousands of robbers [Cicero] |
| 4247 | It is a mark of our having ethical values that we aim to reproduce them in our children [Williams,B] |
| 4131 | Most women see an early miscarriage and a late stillbirth as being very different in character [Williams,B] |
| 4133 | Speciesism isn't like racism, because the former implies a viewpoint which belongs to no one [Williams,B] |
| 2652 | Some regard nature simply as an irrational force that imparts movement [Cicero] |
| 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] |
| 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] |
| 2645 | Why shouldn't the gods fear their own destruction? [Cicero] |
| 2627 | I wonder whether loss of reverence for the gods would mean the end of all virtue [Cicero] |
| 2651 | God doesn't obey the laws of nature; they are subject to the law of God [Cicero] |
| 2634 | It seems clear to me that we have an innate idea of the divine [Cicero] |
| 2636 | Many primitive people know nothing of the gods [Cicero] |
| 2650 | If a person cannot feel the power of God when looking at the stars, they are probably incapable of feeling [Cicero] |
| 2647 | It is obvious from order that someone is in charge, as when we visit a gymnasium [Cicero] |
| 2655 | If the barbarians of Britain saw a complex machine, they would be baffled, but would know it was designed [Cicero] |
| 2656 | Chance is no more likely to create the world than spilling lots of letters is likely to create a famous poem [Cicero] |
| 2657 | If everything with regular movement and order is divine, then recurrent illnesses must be divine [Cicero] |
| 2638 | Either the gods are identical, or one is more beautiful than another [Cicero] |
| 2635 | The gods are happy, so virtuous, so rational, so must have human shape [Cicero] |
| 2641 | Why believe in gods if you have never seen them? [Cicero] |
| 2659 | The lists of good men who have suffered and bad men who have prospered are endless [Cicero] |
| 2175 | There is a problem of evil only if you expect the world to be good [Williams,B] |
| 2658 | The gods blame men for having vices, but they could have given us enough reason to avoid them [Cicero] |