51 ideas
5333 | Philosophy needs wisdom about who we are, as well as how we ought to be [Flanagan] |
13939 | No possible evidence could decide the reality of numbers, so it is a pseudo-question [Carnap] |
16252 | Metaphysics uses empty words, or just produces pseudo-statements [Carnap] |
5334 | We resist science partly because it can't provide ethical wisdom [Flanagan] |
13342 | Carnap defined consequence by contradiction, but this is unintuitive and changes with substitution [Tarski on Carnap] |
13251 | Each person is free to build their own logic, just by specifying a syntax [Carnap] |
13936 | Questions about numbers are answered by analysis, and are analytic, and hence logically true [Carnap] |
8748 | Logical positivists incorporated geometry into logicism, saying axioms are just definitions [Carnap, by Shapiro] |
8960 | Internal questions about abstractions are trivial, and external ones deeply problematic [Carnap, by Szabó] |
13933 | Existence questions are 'internal' (within a framework) or 'external' (concerning the whole framework) [Carnap] |
13934 | To be 'real' is to be an element of a system, so we cannot ask reality questions about the system itself [Carnap] |
13938 | A linguistic framework involves commitment to entities, so only commitment to the framework is in question [Carnap] |
13935 | We only accept 'things' within a language with formation, testing and acceptance rules [Carnap] |
14305 | In the truth-functional account a burnt-up match was soluble because it never entered water [Carnap] |
13932 | Empiricists tend to reject abstract entities, and to feel sympathy with nominalism [Carnap] |
13937 | New linguistic claims about entities are not true or false, but just expedient, fruitful or successful [Carnap] |
5340 | Explanation does not entail prediction [Flanagan] |
18699 | Carnap tried to define all scientific predicates in terms of primitive relations, using type theory [Carnap, by Button] |
13940 | All linguistic forms in science are merely judged by their efficiency as instruments [Carnap] |
13048 | Good explications are exact, fruitful, simple and similar to the explicandum [Carnap, by Salmon] |
5346 | In the 17th century a collisionlike view of causation made mental causation implausible [Flanagan] |
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] |
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] |
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] |
12131 | All concepts can be derived from a few basics, making possible one science of everything [Carnap, by Brody] |
11968 | The intension of a sentence is the set of all possible worlds in which it is true [Carnap, by Kaplan] |
18285 | All translation loses some content (but language does not create reality) [Carnap] |
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] |
21831 | Alienation is not finding what one wants, or being unable to achieve it [Flanagan] |
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] |
1513 | The Egyptians were the first to say the soul is immortal and reincarnated [Herodotus] |
5352 | The idea of the soul gets some support from the scientific belief in essential 'natural kinds' [Flanagan] |