28 ideas
| 1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
| 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] |
| 15842 | An ad hominem refutation is reasonable, if it uses the opponent's assumptions [Harte,V] |
| 15841 | Mereology began as a nominalist revolt against the commitments of set theory [Harte,V] |
| 15858 | Traditionally, the four elements are just what persists through change [Harte,V] |
| 1605 | Reality can be viewed neutrally, or as an object of desire [Roochnik] |
| 15848 | Mereology treats constitution as a criterion of identity, as shown in the axiom of extensionality [Harte,V] |
| 15837 | What exactly is a 'sum', and what exactly is 'composition'? [Harte,V] |
| 15839 | If something is 'more than' the sum of its parts, is the extra thing another part, or not? [Harte,V] |
| 15838 | The problem with the term 'sum' is that it is singular [Harte,V] |
| 3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 1577 | Relativism is a disease which destroys the possibility of rational debate [Roochnik] |
| 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] |
| 1494 | Thales said water is the first principle, perhaps from observing that food is moist [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 1713 | Thales must have thought soul causes movement, since he thought magnets have soul [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |