54 ideas
| 3358 | Metaphysics focuses on Platonism, essentialism, materialism and anti-realism [Benardete,JA] |
| 17713 | After 1903, Husserl avoids metaphysical commitments [Mares] |
| 3312 | There are the 'is' of predication (a function), the 'is' of identity (equals), and the 'is' of existence (quantifier) [Benardete,JA] |
| 3352 | Analytical philosophy analyses separate concepts successfully, but lacks a synoptic vision of the results [Benardete,JA] |
| 3329 | Presumably the statements of science are true, but should they be taken literally or not? [Benardete,JA] |
| 18781 | Inconsistency doesn't prevent us reasoning about some system [Mares] |
| 18789 | Intuitionist logic looks best as natural deduction [Mares] |
| 18790 | Intuitionism as natural deduction has no rule for negation [Mares] |
| 18787 | Three-valued logic is useful for a theory of presupposition [Mares] |
| 3326 | Set theory attempts to reduce the 'is' of predication to mathematics [Benardete,JA] |
| 3327 | The set of Greeks is included in the set of men, but isn't a member of it [Benardete,JA] |
| 3335 | The standard Z-F Intuition version of set theory has about ten agreed axioms [Benardete,JA, by PG] |
| 18793 | Material implication (and classical logic) considers nothing but truth values for implications [Mares] |
| 18784 | In classical logic the connectives can be related elegantly, as in De Morgan's laws [Mares] |
| 18786 | Excluded middle standardly implies bivalence; attacks use non-contradiction, De M 3, or double negation [Mares] |
| 18780 | Standard disjunction and negation force us to accept the principle of bivalence [Mares] |
| 18782 | The connectives are studied either through model theory or through proof theory [Mares] |
| 18783 | Many-valued logics lack a natural deduction system [Mares] |
| 18792 | Situation semantics for logics: not possible worlds, but information in situations [Mares] |
| 18785 | Consistency is semantic, but non-contradiction is syntactic [Mares] |
| 3332 | Greeks saw the science of proportion as the link between geometry and arithmetic [Benardete,JA] |
| 3330 | Negatives, rationals, irrationals and imaginaries are all postulated to solve baffling equations [Benardete,JA] |
| 3337 | Natural numbers are seen in terms of either their ordinality (Peano), or cardinality (set theory) [Benardete,JA] |
| 17715 | The truth of the axioms doesn't matter for pure mathematics, but it does for applied [Mares] |
| 17716 | Mathematics is relations between properties we abstract from experience [Mares] |
| 18788 | For intuitionists there are not numbers and sets, but processes of counting and collecting [Mares] |
| 3310 | If slowness is a property of walking rather than the walker, we must allow that events exist [Benardete,JA] |
| 12793 | Early pre-Socratics had a mass-noun ontology, which was replaced by count-nouns [Benardete,JA] |
| 3353 | If there is no causal interaction with transcendent Platonic objects, how can you learn about them? [Benardete,JA] |
| 3304 | Why should packed-together particles be a thing (Mt Everest), but not scattered ones? [Benardete,JA] |
| 12887 | A whole must have one characteristic, an internal relation, and a structure [Rescher/Oppenheim] |
| 3350 | Could a horse lose the essential property of being a horse, and yet continue to exist? [Benardete,JA] |
| 3309 | If a soldier continues to exist after serving as a soldier, does the wind cease to exist after it ceases to blow? [Benardete,JA] |
| 3351 | One can step into the same river twice, but not into the same water [Benardete,JA] |
| 3314 | Absolutists might accept that to exist is relative, but relative to what? How about relative to itself? [Benardete,JA] |
| 3323 | Maybe self-identity isn't existence, if Pegasus can be self-identical but non-existent [Benardete,JA] |
| 17703 | Light in straight lines is contingent a priori; stipulated as straight, because they happen to be so [Mares] |
| 3306 | The clearest a priori knowledge is proving non-existence through contradiction [Benardete,JA] |
| 3345 | Appeals to intuition seem to imply synthetic a priori knowledge [Benardete,JA] |
| 3349 | If we know truths about prime numbers, we seem to have synthetic a priori knowledge of Platonic objects [Benardete,JA] |
| 3341 | Logical positivism amounts to no more than 'there is no synthetic a priori' [Benardete,JA] |
| 3344 | Assertions about existence beyond experience can only be a priori synthetic [Benardete,JA] |
| 17714 | Aristotelians dislike the idea of a priori judgements from pure reason [Mares] |
| 17705 | Empiricists say rationalists mistake imaginative powers for modal insights [Mares] |
| 17700 | The most popular view is that coherent beliefs explain one another [Mares] |
| 17704 | Operationalism defines concepts by our ways of measuring them [Mares] |
| 17710 | Aristotelian justification uses concepts abstracted from experience [Mares] |
| 17706 | The essence of a concept is either its definition or its conceptual relations? [Mares] |
| 18791 | In 'situation semantics' our main concepts are abstracted from situations [Mares] |
| 17701 | Possible worlds semantics has a nice compositional account of modal statements [Mares] |
| 17702 | Unstructured propositions are sets of possible worlds; structured ones have components [Mares] |
| 17708 | Maybe space has points, but processes always need regions with a size [Mares] |
| 3334 | Rationalists see points as fundamental, but empiricists prefer regions [Benardete,JA] |
| 3308 | In the ontological argument a full understanding of the concept of God implies a contradiction in 'There is no God' [Benardete,JA] |