94 ideas
| 7490 | Because of Darwin, wisdom as a definite attainable state has faded [Watson] |
| 7461 | The three key ideas are the soul, Europe, and the experiment [Watson] |
| 7464 | The big idea: imitation, the soul, experiments, God, heliocentric universe, evolution? [Watson] |
| 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] |
| 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] |
| 21945 | Foucault originally felt that liberating reason had become an instrument of domination [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7465 | Babylonian thinking used analogy, rather than deduction or induction [Watson] |
| 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] |
| 18877 | Moral realism doesn't seem to entail the existence of any things [Cameron] |
| 18868 | Surely if some propositions are grounded in existence, they all are? [Cameron] |
| 18928 | If maximalism is necessary, then that nothing exists has a truthmaker, which it can't have [Cameron] |
| 18867 | Orthodox Truthmaker applies to all propositions, and necessitates their truth [Cameron] |
| 18873 | God fixes all the truths of the world by fixing what exists [Cameron] |
| 15395 | Give up objects necessitating truths, and say their natures cause the truths? [Cameron] |
| 18931 | Determinate truths don't need extra truthmakers, just truthmakers that are themselves determinate [Cameron] |
| 18879 | What the proposition says may not be its truthmaker [Cameron] |
| 18880 | Rather than what exists, some claim that the truthmakers are ways of existence, dispositions, modalities etc [Cameron] |
| 18874 | Truthmaking doesn't require realism, because we can be anti-realist about truthmakers [Cameron] |
| 18932 | The facts about the existence of truthmakers can't have a further explanation [Cameron] |
| 15394 | Truthmaker requires a commitment to tropes or states of affairs, for contingent truths [Cameron] |
| 18869 | Without truthmakers, negative truths must be ungrounded [Cameron] |
| 18923 | The present property 'having been F' says nothing about a thing's intrinsic nature [Cameron] |
| 18926 | One temporal distibution property grounds our present and past truths [Cameron] |
| 18929 | We don't want present truthmakers for the past, if they are about to cease to exist! [Cameron] |
| 18871 | I support the correspondence theory because I believe in truthmakers [Cameron] |
| 18870 | Maybe truthmaking and correspondence stand together, and are interdefinable [Cameron] |
| 15102 | S4 says there must be some necessary truths (the actual ones, of which there is at least one) [Cameron] |
| 7466 | Mesopotamian numbers applied to specific things, and then became abstract [Watson] |
| 18881 | For realists it is analytic that truths are grounded in the world [Cameron] |
| 18875 | Realism says a discourse is true or false, and some of it is true [Cameron] |
| 18878 | Realism says truths rest on mind-independent reality; truthmaking theories are about which features [Cameron] |
| 18924 | Being polka-dotted is a 'spatial distribution' property [Cameron] |
| 15401 | Essentialists say intrinsic properties arise from what the thing is, irrespective of surroundings [Cameron] |
| 15393 | An object's intrinsic properties are had in virtue of how it is, independently [Cameron] |
| 15396 | Most criteria for identity over time seem to leave two later objects identical to the earlier one [Cameron] |
| 18930 | Change is instantiation of a non-uniform distributional property, like 'being red-then-orange' [Cameron] |
| 15103 | Blackburn fails to show that the necessary cannot be grounded in the contingent [Cameron] |
| 18872 | We should reject distinct but indiscernible worlds [Cameron] |
| 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] |
| 21941 | Unlike Marxists, Foucault explains thought internally, without deference to conscious ideas [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 20657 | There are 23 core brain functions, with known circuit, transmitters, genes and behaviour [Watson] |
| 7422 | A subject is a form which can change, in (say) political or sexual situations [Foucault] |
| 20656 | Traditional ideas of the mind were weakened in the 1950s by mind-influencing drugs [Watson] |
| 22235 | Feelings are not unchanging, but have a history (especially if they are noble) [Foucault] |
| 21939 | The author function of any text is a plurality of selves [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7419 | Ethics is the conscious practice of freedom [Foucault] |
| 20655 | Humans have been hunter-gatherers for 99.5% of their existence [Watson] |
| 7501 | Why couldn't a person's life become a work of art? [Foucault] |
| 7498 | Greeks and early Christians were much more concerned about food than about sex [Foucault] |
| 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] |
| 7477 | Modern democracy is actually elective oligarchy [Watson] |
| 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] |
| 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] |
| 7478 | Greek philosophers invented the concept of 'nature' as their special subject [Watson] |
| 20650 | The Uncertainty Principle implies that cause and effect can't be measured [Watson] |
| 20649 | The interference of light through two slits confirmed that it is waves [Watson] |
| 20661 | Electrons rotate in hyrogen atoms 10^13 times per second [Watson] |
| 20647 | Quantum theory explains why nature is made up of units, such as elements [Watson] |
| 20654 | Only four particles are needed for matter: up and down quark, electron, electron-neutrino [Watson] |
| 15104 | The 'moving spotlight' theory makes one time privileged, while all times are on a par ontologically [Cameron] |
| 18927 | Surely if things extend over time, then time itself must be extended? [Cameron] |
| 20651 | The shape of molecules is important, as well as the atoms and their bonds [Watson] |
| 20652 | In 1828 the animal substance urea was manufactured from inorganic ingredients [Watson] |
| 20658 | Information is physical, and living can be seen as replicating and preserving information [Watson] |
| 7462 | DNA mutation suggests humans and chimpanzees diverged 6.6 million years ago [Watson] |
| 7470 | During the rise of civilizations, the main gods changed from female to male [Watson] |
| 7474 | Hinduism has no founder, or prophet, or creed, or ecclesiastical structure [Watson] |
| 7479 | Modern Judaism became stabilised in 200 CE [Watson] |
| 7481 | The Israelites may have asserted the uniqueness of Yahweh to justify land claims [Watson] |
| 7480 | Monotheism was a uniquely Israelite creation within the Middle East [Watson] |
| 7471 | The Gathas (hymns) of Zoroastrianism date from about 1000 BCE [Watson] |
| 7473 | Zoroaster conceived the afterlife, judgement, heaven and hell, and the devil [Watson] |
| 7484 | Jesus never intended to start a new religion [Watson] |
| 7483 | Paul's early writings mention few striking episodes from Jesus' life [Watson] |
| 7475 | Confucius revered the spiritual world, but not the supernatural, or a personal god, or the afterlife [Watson] |
| 7476 | Taoism aims at freedom from the world, the body, the mind, and nature [Watson] |
| 7463 | The three basic ingredients of religion are: the soul, seers or priests, and ritual [Watson] |
| 7468 | In ancient Athens the souls of the dead are received by the 'upper air' [Watson] |