52 ideas
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] |
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] |
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] |
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] |
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] |
15037 | Why does knowledge appear in sudden bursts, and not in a smooth continuous development? [Foucault] |
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] |
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] |
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] |
21941 | Unlike Marxists, Foucault explains thought internally, without deference to conscious ideas [Foucault, by Gutting] |
7422 | A subject is a form which can change, in (say) political or sexual situations [Foucault] |
22235 | Feelings are not unchanging, but have a history (especially if they are noble) [Foucault] |
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] |
21939 | The author function of any text is a plurality of selves [Foucault, by Gutting] |
7419 | Ethics is the conscious practice of freedom [Foucault] |
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] |
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] |
20723 | Only when working people are poor do they remain obedient to God [Calvin, by Weber] |
15039 | History lacks 'meaning', but it can be analysed in terms of its struggles [Foucault] |