60 ideas
5333 | Philosophy needs wisdom about who we are, as well as how we ought to be [Flanagan] |
23269 | Philosophy must start from clearly observed facts [Galen] |
3123 | Science is in the business of carving nature at the joints [Segal] |
5334 | We resist science partly because it can't provide ethical wisdom [Flanagan] |
23248 | Early empiricists said reason was just a useless concept introduced by philosophers [Galen, by Frede,M] |
3125 | Psychology studies the way rationality links desires and beliefs to causality [Segal] |
3105 | Is 'Hesperus = Phosphorus' metaphysically necessary, but not logically or epistemologically necessary? [Segal] |
3106 | If claims of metaphysical necessity are based on conceivability, we should be cautious [Segal] |
5340 | Explanation does not entail prediction [Flanagan] |
3113 | The success and virtue of an explanation do not guarantee its truth [Segal] |
23266 | The spirit in the soul wants freedom, power and honour [Galen] |
6003 | Galen showed by experiment that the brain controls the body [Galen, by Hankinson] |
5346 | In the 17th century a collisionlike view of causation made mental causation implausible [Flanagan] |
23219 | Stopping the heart doesn't terminate activity; pressing the brain does that [Galen, by Cobb] |
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] |
21799 | We just use the word 'faculty' when we don't know the psychological cause [Galen] |
23264 | Philosophers think faculties are in substances, and invent a faculty for every activity [Galen] |
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] |
23220 | The brain contains memory and reason, and is the source of sensation and decision [Galen] |
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] |
3112 | Folk psychology is ridiculously dualist in its assumptions [Segal] |
23265 | The rational part of the soul is the desire for truth, understanding and recollection [Galen] |
3108 | If 'water' has narrow content, it refers to both H2O and XYZ [Segal] |
3110 | Humans are made of H2O, so 'twins' aren't actually feasible [Segal] |
3124 | Externalists can't assume old words refer to modern natural kinds [Segal] |
3109 | If content is external, so are beliefs and desires [Segal] |
3116 | Maybe experts fix content, not ordinary users [Segal] |
3117 | Concepts can survive a big change in extension [Segal] |
3104 | Must we relate to some diamonds to understand them? [Segal] |
3111 | Externalism can't explain concepts that have no reference [Segal] |
3103 | Maybe content involves relations to a language community [Segal] |
3121 | If content is narrow, my perfect twin shares my concepts [Segal] |
3118 | If thoughts ARE causal, we can't explain how they cause things [Segal] |
3119 | Even 'mass' cannot be defined in causal terms [Segal] |
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] |
7453 | Galen's medicine followed the mean; each illness was balanced by opposite treatment [Galen, by Hacking] |
6030 | Each part of the soul has its virtue - pleasure for appetite, success for competition, and rectitude for reason [Galen] |
21831 | Alienation is not finding what one wants, or being unable to achieve it [Flanagan] |
23268 | We execute irredeemable people, to protect ourselves, as a deterrent, and ending a bad life [Galen] |
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] |