Combining Philosophers

All the ideas for Stilpo, Richard Cartwright and Bas C. van Fraassen

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31 ideas

1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 1. Philosophy
9786 Philosophers working like teams of scientists is absurd, yet isolation is hard [Cartwright,R]
1. Philosophy / D. Nature of Philosophy / 7. Despair over Philosophy
12772 Philosophy is a value- and attitude-driven enterprise [Fraassen]
1. Philosophy / E. Nature of Metaphysics / 2. Possibility of Metaphysics
12771 Is it likely that a successful, coherent, explanatory ontological hypothesis is true? [Fraassen]
1. Philosophy / F. Analytic Philosophy / 1. Nature of Analysis
12773 Analytic philosophy has an exceptional arsenal of critical tools [Fraassen]
2. Reason / A. Nature of Reason / 6. Coherence
9784 A false proposition isn't truer because it is part of a coherent system [Cartwright,R]
12770 We may end up with a huge theory of carefully constructed falsehoods [Fraassen]
3. Truth / A. Truth Problems / 5. Truth Bearers
13941 Are the truth-bearers sentences, utterances, ideas, beliefs, judgements, propositions or statements? [Cartwright,R]
13942 Logicians take sentences to be truth-bearers for rigour, rather than for philosophical reasons [Cartwright,R]
8. Modes of Existence / B. Properties / 11. Properties as Sets
9783 While no two classes coincide in membership, there are distinct but coextensive attributes [Cartwright,R]
9. Objects / B. Unity of Objects / 3. Unity Problems / a. Scattered objects
14961 Clearly a pipe can survive being taken apart [Cartwright,R]
14962 Bodies don't becomes scattered by losing small or minor parts [Cartwright,R]
9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 7. Essence and Necessity / a. Essence as necessary properties
13952 Essentialism says some of a thing's properties are necessary, and could not be absent [Cartwright,R]
9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 14. Knowledge of Essences
13954 The difficulty in essentialism is deciding the grounds for rating an attribute as essential [Cartwright,R]
9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 15. Against Essentialism
13955 Essentialism is said to be unintelligible, because relative, if necessary truths are all analytic [Cartwright,R]
9. Objects / F. Identity among Objects / 3. Relative Identity
13953 An act of ostension doesn't seem to need a 'sort' of thing, even of a very broad kind [Cartwright,R]
9. Objects / F. Identity among Objects / 4. Type Identity
13945 A token isn't a unique occurrence, as the case of a word or a number shows [Cartwright,R]
10. Modality / A. Necessity / 11. Denial of Necessity
14919 Empiricists deny what is unobservable, and reject objective modality [Fraassen]
11. Knowledge Aims / A. Knowledge / 4. Belief / c. Aim of beliefs
6783 To 'accept' a theory is not to believe it, but to believe it empirically adequate [Fraassen, by Bird]
14. Science / B. Scientific Theories / 2. Aim of Science
14917 To accept a scientific theory, we only need to believe that it is empirically adequate [Fraassen]
14. Science / D. Explanation / 3. Best Explanation / c. Against best explanation
6784 Why should the true explanation be one of the few we have actually thought of? [Fraassen, by Bird]
12769 Inference to best explanation contains all sorts of hidden values [Fraassen]
14. Science / D. Explanation / 4. Explanation Doubts / a. Explanation as pragmatic
13066 An explanation is just descriptive information answering a particular question [Fraassen, by Salmon]
12768 We accept many scientific theories without endorsing them as true [Fraassen]
19. Language / A. Nature of Meaning / 1. Meaning
13948 For any statement, there is no one meaning which any sentence asserting it must have [Cartwright,R]
13950 People don't assert the meaning of the words they utter [Cartwright,R]
19. Language / D. Propositions / 1. Propositions
13944 We can pull apart assertion from utterance, and the action, the event and the subject-matter for each [Cartwright,R]
13947 'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same [Cartwright,R]
19. Language / D. Propositions / 4. Mental Propositions
13943 We can attribute 'true' and 'false' to whatever it was that was said [Cartwright,R]
13946 To assert that p, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to utter some particular words [Cartwright,R]
19. Language / F. Communication / 2. Assertion
13951 Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false.... [Cartwright,R]
28. God / C. Attitudes to God / 5. Atheism
3029 Stilpo said if Athena is a daughter of Zeus, then a statue is only the child of a sculptor, and so is not a god [Stilpo, by Diog. Laertius]