18 ideas
| 1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
| 5435 | An interpreter of a text, because of wider knowledge, can understand it better than its author [Schleiermacher, by Mautner] |
| 22028 | Unity emerges from understanding particulars, so understanding is prior to seeing unity [Schleiermacher] |
| 3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 20959 | Concepts are only analytic once the predicate is absorbed into the subject [Schleiermacher] |
| 20086 | Nowadays sovereignty (once the basis of a state) has become relative [Reybrouck] |
| 20090 | Today it seems almost impossible to learn the will of the people [Reybrouck] |
| 20087 | There are no united monolothic 'peoples', and no 'national gut feelings' [Reybrouck] |
| 20089 | Technocrats may be efficient, but they lose legitimacy as soon as they do unpopular things [Reybrouck] |
| 20088 | Technocrats are expert managers, who replace politicians, and can be long-term and unpopular [Reybrouck] |
| 20085 | Democracy is the best compromise between legitimacy and efficiency [Reybrouck] |
| 20095 | A referendum result arises largely from ignorance [Reybrouck] |
| 20094 | You don't really govern people if you don't involve them [Reybrouck] |
| 20093 | In the 18th century democratic lots lost out to elections, that gave us a non-hereditary aristocracy [Reybrouck] |
| 20091 | Representative elections were developed in order to avoid democracy [Reybrouck] |
| 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] |