73 ideas
| 5333 | Philosophy needs wisdom about who we are, as well as how we ought to be [Flanagan] |
| 7500 | Early Greeks cared about city and companions; later Greeks concentrated on the self [Foucault] |
| 15045 | The big issue since the eighteenth century has been: what is Reason? Its effect, limits and dangers? [Foucault] |
| 7426 | Critical philosophy is what questions domination at every level [Foucault] |
| 23269 | Philosophy must start from clearly observed facts [Galen] |
| 5334 | We resist science partly because it can't provide ethical wisdom [Flanagan] |
| 7423 | Philosophy and politics are fundamentally linked [Foucault] |
| 15038 | Structuralism systematically abstracted the event from sciences, and even from history [Foucault] |
| 7420 | When logos controls our desires, we have actually become the logos [Foucault] |
| 23248 | Early empiricists said reason was just a useless concept introduced by philosophers [Galen, by Frede,M] |
| 21945 | Foucault originally felt that liberating reason had become an instrument of domination [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 15044 | 'Truth' is the procedures for controlling which statements are acceptable [Foucault] |
| 15042 | Truth doesn't arise from solitary freedom, but from societies with constraints [Foucault] |
| 15037 | Why does knowledge appear in sudden bursts, and not in a smooth continuous development? [Foucault] |
| 21942 | Foucault challenges knowledge in psychology and sociology, not in the basic sciences [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7424 | Saying games of truth were merely power relations would be a horrible exaggeration [Foucault] |
| 5340 | Explanation does not entail prediction [Flanagan] |
| 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] |
| 21941 | Unlike Marxists, Foucault explains thought internally, without deference to conscious ideas [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 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] |
| 7422 | A subject is a form which can change, in (say) political or sexual situations [Foucault] |
| 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] |
| 22235 | Feelings are not unchanging, but have a history (especially if they are noble) [Foucault] |
| 5335 | Emotions are usually very apt, rather than being non-rational and fickle [Flanagan] |
| 23265 | The rational part of the soul is the desire for truth, understanding and recollection [Galen] |
| 5348 | Intellectualism admires the 'principled actor', non-intellectualism admires the 'good character' [Flanagan] |
| 21939 | The author function of any text is a plurality of selves [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7419 | Ethics is the conscious practice of freedom [Foucault] |
| 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] |
| 7501 | Why couldn't a person's life become a work of art? [Foucault] |
| 21835 | We need Eudaimonics - the empirical study of how we should flourish [Flanagan] |
| 7498 | Greeks and early Christians were much more concerned about food than about sex [Foucault] |
| 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] |
| 21940 | Nature is not the basis of rights, but the willingness to risk death in asserting them [Foucault] |
| 15043 | Every society has a politics of truth, concerning its values, functions, prestige and mechanisms [Foucault] |
| 15040 | Marxists denounced power as class domination, but never analysed its mechanics [Foucault] |
| 15041 | Power doesn't just repress, but entices us with pleasure, artefacts, knowledge and discourse [Foucault] |
| 8991 | Foucault can't accept that power is sometimes decent and benign [Foucault, by Scruton] |
| 7425 | The aim is not to eliminate power relations, but to reduce domination [Foucault] |
| 22236 | The big question of the Renaissance was how to govern everything, from the state to children [Foucault] |
| 21947 | Power is localised, so we either have totalitarian centralisation, or local politics [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 21831 | Alienation is not finding what one wants, or being unable to achieve it [Flanagan] |
| 21946 | Prisons gradually became our models for schools, hospitals and factories [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7418 | The idea of liberation suggests there is a human nature which has been repressed [Foucault] |
| 23268 | We execute irredeemable people, to protect ourselves, as a deterrent, and ending a bad life [Galen] |
| 21116 | Power is used to create identities and ways of life for other people [Foucault, by Shorten] |
| 15039 | History lacks 'meaning', but it can be analysed in terms of its struggles [Foucault] |
| 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] |