85 ideas
| 16227 | Philosophers are good at denying the obvious [Hawley] |
| 9108 | From an impossibility anything follows [William of Ockham] |
| 16676 | Why use more things when fewer will do? [William of Ockham] |
| 6806 | Do not multiply entities beyond necessity [William of Ockham] |
| 9107 | A proposition is true if its subject and predicate stand for the same thing [William of Ockham] |
| 16300 | Ockham had an early axiomatic account of truth [William of Ockham, by Halbach] |
| 16216 | Part of the sense of a proper name is a criterion of the thing's identity [Hawley] |
| 9106 | The word 'every' only signifies when added to a term such as 'man', referring to all men [William of Ockham] |
| 9113 | Just as unity is not a property of a single thing, so numbers are not properties of many things [William of Ockham] |
| 9110 | The words 'thing' and 'to be' assert the same idea, as a noun and as a verb [William of Ockham] |
| 7508 | Good reductionism connects fields of knowledge, but doesn't replace one with another [Pinker] |
| 16211 | A homogeneous rotating disc should be undetectable according to Humean supervenience [Hawley] |
| 16219 | Non-linguistic things cannot be indeterminate, because they don't have truth-values at all [Hawley] |
| 16223 | Maybe for the world to be vague, it must be vague in its foundations? [Hawley] |
| 16226 | Epistemic vagueness seems right in the case of persons [Hawley] |
| 16208 | Supervaluation refers to one vaguely specified thing, through satisfaction by everything in some range [Hawley] |
| 16221 | Supervaluationism takes what the truth-value would have been if indecision was resolved [Hawley] |
| 16608 | Ockham was an anti-realist about the categories [William of Ockham, by Pasnau] |
| 16654 | Our words and concepts don't always correspond to what is out there [William of Ockham] |
| 18529 | Relations are expressed either as absolute facts, or by a relational concept [William of Ockham] |
| 16230 | Maybe the only properties are basic ones like charge, mass and spin [Hawley] |
| 22132 | Species and genera are individual concepts which naturally signify many individuals [William of Ockham] |
| 9103 | A universal is not a real feature of objects, but only a thought-object in the mind [William of Ockham] |
| 15388 | Universals are single things, and only universal in what they signify [William of Ockham] |
| 16232 | An object is 'natural' if its stages are linked by certain non-supervenient relations [Hawley] |
| 16779 | Cut wood doesn't make a new substance, but seems to make separate subjects [William of Ockham] |
| 16200 | Are sortals spatially maximal - so no cat part is allowed to be a cat? [Hawley] |
| 16237 | The modal features of statue and lump are disputed; when does it stop being that statue? [Hawley] |
| 16238 | Perdurantists can adopt counterpart theory, to explain modal differences of identical part-sums [Hawley] |
| 16220 | Vagueness is either in our knowledge, in our talk, or in reality [Hawley] |
| 16222 | Indeterminacy in objects and in properties are not distinct cases [Hawley] |
| 16757 | Hot water naturally cools down, which is due to the substantial form of the water [William of Ockham] |
| 16599 | Ockham says matter must be extended, so we don't need Quantity [William of Ockham, by Pasnau] |
| 16681 | Matter gets its quantity from condensation and rarefaction, which is just local motion [William of Ockham] |
| 16228 | The constitution theory is endurantism plus more than one object in a place [Hawley] |
| 16229 | Constitution theory needs sortal properties like 'being a sweater' to distinguish it from its thread [Hawley] |
| 14492 | If the constitution view says thread and sweater are two things, why do we talk of one thing? [Hawley] |
| 9109 | If essence and existence were two things, one could exist without the other, which is impossible [William of Ockham] |
| 16792 | If parts change, the whole changes [William of Ockham] |
| 16193 | 'Adverbialism' explains change by saying an object has-at-some-time a given property [Hawley] |
| 16195 | Presentism solves the change problem: the green banana ceases, so can't 'relate' to the yellow one [Hawley] |
| 16202 | The problem of change arises if there must be 'identity' of a thing over time [Hawley] |
| 16192 | Endurance theory can relate properties to times, or timed instantiations to properties [Hawley] |
| 16196 | Endurance is a sophisticated theory, covering properties, instantiation and time [Hawley] |
| 16197 | How does perdurance theory explain our concern for our own future selves? [Hawley] |
| 16191 | Perdurance needs an atemporal perspective, to say that the object 'has' different temporal parts [Hawley] |
| 16199 | If an object is the sum of all of its temporal parts, its mass is staggeringly large! [Hawley] |
| 16201 | Perdurance says things are sums of stages; Stage Theory says each stage is the thing [Hawley] |
| 16240 | If a life is essentially the sum of its temporal parts, it couldn't be shorter or longer than it was? [Hawley] |
| 16205 | The stages of Stage Theory seem too thin to populate the world, or to be referred to [Hawley] |
| 16203 | Stage Theory seems to miss out the link between stages of the same object [Hawley] |
| 16204 | Stage Theory says every stage is a distinct object, which gives too many objects [Hawley] |
| 16212 | An isolated stage can't be a banana (which involves suitable relations to other stages) [Hawley] |
| 16213 | Stages of one thing are related by extrinsic counterfactual and causal relations [Hawley] |
| 16206 | Stages must be as fine-grained in length as change itself, so any change is a new stage [Hawley] |
| 16225 | If two things might be identical, there can't be something true of one and false of the other [Hawley] |
| 16239 | To decide whether something is a counterpart, we need to specify a relevant sortal concept [Hawley] |
| 9089 | Knowledge is a quality existing subjectively in the soul [William of Ockham] |
| 9091 | Sometimes 'knowledge' just concerns the conclusion, sometimes the whole demonstration [William of Ockham] |
| 9100 | Our intellect only assents to what we believe to be true [William of Ockham] |
| 9090 | Knowledge is certain cognition of something that is true [William of Ockham] |
| 7510 | Connectionists say the mind is a general purpose learning device [Pinker] |
| 7513 | Is memory stored in protein sequences, neurons, synapses, or synapse-strengths? [Pinker] |
| 9101 | Abstractive cognition knows universals abstracted from many singulars [William of Ockham] |
| 9102 | If an animal approached from a distance, we might abstract 'animal' from one instance [William of Ockham] |
| 16218 | On any theory of self, it is hard to explain why we should care about our future selves [Hawley] |
| 7509 | Roundworms live successfully with 302 neurons, so human freedom comes from our trillions [Pinker] |
| 9114 | There are no secure foundations to prove the separate existence of mind, in reason or experience [William of Ockham] |
| 7511 | Neural networks can generalise their training, e.g. truths about tigers apply mostly to lions [Pinker] |
| 7512 | There are five types of reasoning that seem beyond connectionist systems [Pinker, by PG] |
| 9104 | A universal is the result of abstraction, which is only a kind of mental picturing [William of Ockham] |
| 9105 | Some concepts for propositions exist only in the mind, and in no language [William of Ockham] |
| 7505 | Many think that accepting human nature is to accept innumerable evils [Pinker] |
| 16675 | Every extended material substance is composed of parts distant from one another [William of Ockham] |
| 16215 | Causation is nothing more than the counterfactuals it grounds? [Hawley] |
| 19381 | The past has ceased to exist, and the future does not yet exist, so time does not exist [William of Ockham] |
| 16207 | Time could be discrete (like integers) or dense (rationals) or continuous (reals) [Hawley] |
| 7516 | In 1828, the stuff of life was shown to be ordinary chemistry, not a magic gel [Pinker] |
| 7515 | All the evidence says evolution is cruel and wasteful, not intelligent [Pinker] |
| 7514 | Intelligent Design says that every unexplained phenomenon must be design, by default [Pinker] |
| 9111 | God is not wise, but more-than-wise; God is not good, but more-than-good [William of Ockham] |
| 8010 | William of Ockham is the main spokesman for God's commands being the source of morality [William of Ockham] |
| 9112 | We could never form a concept of God's wisdom if we couldn't abstract it from creatures [William of Ockham] |
| 9115 | To love God means to love whatever God wills to be loved [William of Ockham] |
| 16679 | Even an angel must have some location [William of Ockham, by Pasnau] |