44 ideas
| 1606 | You have to be a Platonist to debate about reality, so every philosopher is a Platonist [Roochnik] |
| 1595 | Philosophy aims to satisfy the chief human desire - the articulation of beauty itself [Roochnik] |
| 1571 | 'Logos' ranges from thought/reasoning, to words, to rational structures outside thought [Roochnik] |
| 1572 | In the seventeenth century the only acceptable form of logos was technical knowledge [Roochnik] |
| 1573 | The hallmark of a person with logos is that they give reasons why one opinion is superior to another [Roochnik] |
| 1592 | Logos cannot refute the relativist, and so must admit that it too is a matter of desire (for truth and agreement) [Roochnik] |
| 1593 | Human desire has an ordered structure, with logos at the pinnacle [Roochnik] |
| 1603 | Logos is not unconditionally good, but good if there is another person willing to engage with it [Roochnik] |
| 1598 | We prefer reason or poetry according to whether basics are intelligible or not [Roochnik] |
| 1584 | Modern science, by aiming for clarity about the external world, has abandoned rationality in the human world [Roochnik] |
| 1591 | Unfortunately for reason, argument can't be used to establish the value of argument [Roochnik] |
| 1599 | Attempts to suspend all presuppositions are hopeless, because a common ground must be agreed for the process [Roochnik] |
| 12154 | Are 'word token' and 'word type' different sorts of countable objects, or two ways of counting? [Geach, by Perry] |
| 10735 | Abstraction from objects won't reveal an operation's being performed 'so many times' [Geach] |
| 1605 | Reality can be viewed neutrally, or as an object of desire [Roochnik] |
| 8780 | Attributes are functions, not objects; this distinguishes 'square of 2' from 'double of 2' [Geach] |
| 8969 | We should abandon absolute identity, confining it to within some category [Geach, by Hawthorne] |
| 16075 | Denial of absolute identity has drastic implications for logic, semantics and set theory [Wasserman on Geach] |
| 12152 | Identity is relative. One must not say things are 'the same', but 'the same A as' [Geach] |
| 16073 | Leibniz's Law is incomplete, since it includes a non-relativized identity predicate [Geach, by Wasserman] |
| 11910 | Being 'the same' is meaningless, unless we specify 'the same X' [Geach] |
| 1577 | Relativism is a disease which destroys the possibility of rational debate [Roochnik] |
| 8775 | A big flea is a small animal, so 'big' and 'small' cannot be acquired by abstraction [Geach] |
| 8776 | We cannot learn relations by abstraction, because their converse must be learned too [Geach] |
| 10732 | If concepts are just recognitional, then general judgements would be impossible [Geach] |
| 2567 | You can't define real mental states in terms of behaviour that never happens [Geach] |
| 2568 | Beliefs aren't tied to particular behaviours [Geach] |
| 8781 | The mind does not lift concepts from experience; it creates them, and then applies them [Geach] |
| 10731 | For abstractionists, concepts are capacities to recognise recurrent features of the world [Geach] |
| 8769 | If someone has aphasia but can still play chess, they clearly have concepts [Geach] |
| 8770 | 'Abstractionism' is acquiring a concept by picking out one experience amongst a group [Geach] |
| 8771 | 'Or' and 'not' are not to be found in the sensible world, or even in the world of inner experience [Geach] |
| 8772 | We can't acquire number-concepts by extracting the number from the things being counted [Geach] |
| 8773 | Abstractionists can't explain counting, because it must precede experience of objects [Geach] |
| 8774 | The numbers don't exist in nature, so they cannot have been abstracted from there into our languages [Geach] |
| 8778 | Blind people can use colour words like 'red' perfectly intelligently [Geach] |
| 8777 | If 'black' and 'cat' can be used in the absence of such objects, how can such usage be abstracted? [Geach] |
| 8779 | We can form two different abstract concepts that apply to a single unified experience [Geach] |
| 10733 | The abstractionist cannot explain 'some' and 'not' [Geach] |
| 10734 | Only a judgement can distinguish 'striking' from 'being struck' [Geach] |
| 1578 | If relativism is the correct account of human values, then rhetoric is more important than reasoning [Roochnik] |
| 1596 | Reasoning aims not at the understanding of objects, but at the desire to give beautiful speeches [Roochnik] |
| 22489 | 'Good' is an attributive adjective like 'large', not predicative like 'red' [Geach, by Foot] |
| 20723 | Only when working people are poor do they remain obedient to God [Calvin, by Weber] |