32 ideas
| 9271 | Human knowledge may not produce well-being; the examined life may not be worth living [Gray] |
| 14611 | Metaphysics should avoid talk of past, present or future [Smart] |
| 17070 | Coherence is consilience, simplicity, analogy, and fitting into a web of belief [Smart] |
| 17072 | We need comprehensiveness, as well as self-coherence [Smart] |
| 17073 | I simply reject evidence, if it is totally contrary to my web of belief [Smart] |
| 9275 | Knowledge does not need minds or nervous systems; it is found in all living things [Gray] |
| 17077 | The height of a flagpole could be fixed by its angle of shadow, but that would be very unusual [Smart] |
| 17078 | Universe expansion explains the red shift, but not vice versa [Smart] |
| 17074 | Explanations are bad by fitting badly with a web of beliefs, or fitting well into a bad web [Smart] |
| 17076 | Deducing from laws is one possible way to achieve a coherent explanation [Smart] |
| 17061 | Explanation of a fact is fitting it into a system of beliefs [Smart] |
| 17071 | An explanation is better if it also explains phenomena from a different field [Smart] |
| 17062 | If scientific explanation is causal, that rules out mathematical explanation [Smart] |
| 17075 | Scientific explanation tends to reduce things to the unfamiliar (not the familiar) [Smart] |
| 9276 | The will hardly ever does anything; most of our life just happens to us [Gray] |
| 22405 | Negative utilitarianism implies that the world should be destroyed, to avoid future misery [Smart] |
| 22404 | Any group interested in ethics must surely have a sentiment of generalised benevolence [Smart] |
| 9278 | Nowadays we identify the free life with the good life [Gray] |
| 1868 | The world was made as much for animals as for man [Celsus] |
| 14613 | Special relativity won't determine a preferred frame, but we can pick one externally [Smart] |
| 17063 | Unlike Newton, Einstein's general theory explains the perihelion of Mercury [Smart] |
| 14615 | If time flows, then 'how fast does it flow?' is a tricky question [Smart] |
| 14614 | The past, present, future and tenses of A-theory are too weird, and should be analysed indexically [Smart] |
| 9280 | Over forty percent of the Earth's living tissue is human [Gray] |
| 23061 | Free atheism should start by questioning its faith in humanity [Gray] |
| 23057 | Gnosticism has a supreme creator God, giving way to a possibly hostile Demiurge [Gray] |
| 23056 | Judaism only became monotheistic around 550 BCE [Gray] |
| 23055 | Christians introduced the idea that a religion needs a creed [Gray] |
| 9272 | Without Christianity we lose the idea that human history has a meaning [Gray] |
| 9279 | What was our original sin, and how could Christ's suffering redeem it? [Gray] |
| 1867 | Christians presented Jesus as a new kind of logos to oppose that of the philosophers [Celsus] |
| 23058 | Buddhism has no divinity or souls, and the aim is to lose the illusion of a self [Gray] |