126 ideas
| 6123 | Empirical investigation can't discover if holes exist, or if two things share a colour [Merricks] |
| 19023 | Slippery slope arguments are challenges to show where a non-arbitrary boundary lies [Vetter] |
| 19215 | Arguers often turn the opponent's modus ponens into their own modus tollens [Merricks] |
| 4748 | Anselm of Canterbury identified truth with God [Anselm, by Engel] |
| 14415 | A ground must be about its truth, and not just necessitate it [Merricks] |
| 14408 | Truthmaker needs truths to be 'about' something, and that is often unclear [Merricks] |
| 14395 | If a ball changes from red to white, Truthmaker says some thing must make the change true [Merricks] |
| 14398 | Truthmaker says if an entity is removed, some nonexistence truthmaker must replace it [Merricks] |
| 14403 | If Truthmaker says each truth is made by the existence of something, the theory had de re modality at is core [Merricks] |
| 14397 | Truthmaker demands not just a predication, but an existing state of affairs with essential ingredients [Merricks] |
| 14396 | If 'truth supervenes on being', worlds with the same entities, properties and relations have the same truths [Merricks] |
| 14400 | If truth supervenes on being, that won't explain why truth depends on being [Merricks] |
| 14394 | It is implausible that claims about non-existence are about existing things [Merricks] |
| 14390 | Truthmaker isn't the correspondence theory, because it offers no analysis of truth [Merricks] |
| 14412 | Speculations about non-existent things are not about existent things, so Truthmaker is false [Merricks] |
| 14414 | I am a truthmaker for 'that a human exists', but is it about me? [Merricks] |
| 14418 | Being true is not a relation, it is a primitive monadic property [Merricks] |
| 14391 | If the correspondence theory is right, then necessary truths must correspond to something [Merricks] |
| 19205 | 'Snow is white' only contingently expresses the proposition that snow is white [Merricks] |
| 14419 | Deflationism just says there is no property of being truth [Merricks] |
| 19209 | Simple Quantified Modal Logc doesn't work, because the Converse Barcan is a theorem [Merricks] |
| 19033 | Deontic modalities are 'ought-to-be', for sentences, and 'ought-to-do' for predicates [Vetter] |
| 19032 | S5 is undesirable, as it prevents necessities from having contingent grounds [Vetter] |
| 19208 | The Converse Barcan implies 'everything exists necessarily' is a consequence of 'necessarily, everything exists' [Merricks] |
| 19036 | The Barcan formula endorses either merely possible things, or makes the unactualised impossible [Vetter] |
| 19207 | Sentence logic maps truth values; predicate logic maps objects and sets [Merricks] |
| 19034 | The world is either a whole made of its parts, or a container which contains its parts [Vetter] |
| 14393 | The totality state is the most plausible truthmaker for negative existential truths [Merricks] |
| 6143 | Prolonged events don't seem to endure or exist at any particular time [Merricks] |
| 19015 | Grounding can be between objects ('relational'), or between sentences ('operational') [Vetter] |
| 19012 | The Humean supervenience base entirely excludes modality [Vetter] |
| 6135 | A crumbling statue can't become vague, because vagueness is incoherent [Merricks] |
| 19024 | A determinate property must be a unique instance of the determinable class [Vetter] |
| 14413 | Some properties seem to be primitive, but others can be analysed [Merricks] |
| 6145 | Intrinsic properties are those an object still has even if only that object exists [Merricks] |
| 17954 | Essence is a thing's necessities, but what about its possibilities (which may not be realised)? [Vetter] |
| 19021 | I have an 'iterated ability' to learn the violin - that is, the ability to acquire that ability [Vetter] |
| 14416 | An object can have a disposition when the revelant conditional is false [Merricks] |
| 19016 | We should think of dispositions as 'to do' something, not as 'to do something, if ....' [Vetter] |
| 19017 | Nomological dispositions (unlike ordinary ones) have to be continually realised [Vetter] |
| 19014 | How can spatiotemporal relations be understood in dispositional terms? [Vetter] |
| 6124 | I say that most of the objects of folk ontology do not exist [Merricks] |
| 6134 | Is swimming pool water an object, composed of its mass or parts? [Merricks] |
| 14392 | Fregeans say 'hobbits do not exist' is just 'being a hobbit' is not exemplified [Merricks] |
| 6125 | We can eliminate objects without a commitment to simples [Merricks] |
| 14229 | Merricks agrees that there are no composite objects, but offers a different semantics [Merricks, by Liggins] |
| 6142 | The 'folk' way of carving up the world is not intrinsically better than quite arbitrary ways [Merricks] |
| 14472 | If atoms 'arranged baseballwise' break a window, that analytically entails that a baseball did it [Merricks, by Thomasson] |
| 14469 | Overdetermination: the atoms do all the causing, so the baseball causes no breakage [Merricks] |
| 6137 | Clay does not 'constitute' a statue, as they have different persistence conditions (flaking, squashing) [Merricks] |
| 6127 | 'Unrestricted composition' says any two things can make up a third thing [Merricks] |
| 6131 | Composition as identity is false, as identity is never between a single thing and many things [Merricks] |
| 6132 | Composition as identity is false, as it implies that things never change their parts [Merricks] |
| 6141 | There is no visible difference between statues, and atoms arranged statuewise [Merricks] |
| 6130 | 'Composition' says things are their parts; 'constitution' says a whole substance is an object [Merricks] |
| 6138 | It seems wrong that constitution entails that two objects are wholly co-located [Merricks] |
| 6128 | Objects decompose (it seems) into non-overlapping parts that fill its whole region [Merricks] |
| 17953 | Real definition fits abstracta, but not individual concrete objects like Socrates [Vetter] |
| 17952 | Modal accounts make essence less mysterious, by basing them on the clearer necessity [Vetter] |
| 14410 | You believe you existed last year, but your segment doesn't, so they have different beliefs [Merricks] |
| 19214 | In twinning, one person has the same origin as another person [Merricks] |
| 19030 | Why does origin matter more than development; why are some features of origin more important? [Vetter] |
| 19040 | We take origin to be necessary because we see possibilities as branches from actuality [Vetter] |
| 6136 | Eliminativism about objects gives the best understanding of the Sorites paradox [Merricks] |
| 19008 | The modern revival of necessity and possibility treated them as special cases of quantification [Vetter] |
| 19029 | It is necessary that p means that nothing has the potentiality for not-p [Vetter] |
| 17959 | Metaphysical necessity is even more deeply empirical than Kripke has argued [Vetter] |
| 17955 | Possible worlds allow us to talk about degrees of possibility [Vetter] |
| 19028 | Possibilities are potentialities of actual things, but abstracted from their location [Vetter] |
| 19010 | All possibility is anchored in the potentiality of individual objects [Vetter] |
| 19013 | Possibility is a generalised abstraction from the potentiality of its bearer [Vetter] |
| 17957 | Maybe possibility is constituted by potentiality [Vetter] |
| 19025 | Potentialities may be too weak to count as 'dispositions' [Vetter] |
| 19019 | Potentiality is the common genus of dispositions, abilities, and similar properties [Vetter] |
| 19022 | Water has a potentiality to acquire a potentiality to break (by freezing) [Vetter] |
| 23705 | A potentiality may not be a disposition, but dispositions are strong potentialities [Vetter, by Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 19009 | Potentiality does the explaining in metaphysics; we don't explain it away or reduce it [Vetter] |
| 19027 | Potentiality logic is modal system T. Stronger systems collapse iterations, and necessitate potentials [Vetter] |
| 19031 | There are potentialities 'to ...', but possibilities are 'that ....'. [Vetter] |
| 14417 | Counterfactuals aren't about actuality, so they lack truthmakers or a supervenience base [Merricks] |
| 17958 | The apparently metaphysically possible may only be epistemically possible [Vetter] |
| 17956 | Closeness of worlds should be determined by the intrinsic nature of relevant objects [Vetter] |
| 19011 | If worlds are sets of propositions, how do we know which propositions are genuinely possible? [Vetter] |
| 6133 | If my counterpart is happy, that is irrelevant to whether I 'could' have been happy [Merricks] |
| 14402 | If 'Fido is possibly black' depends on Fido's counterparts, then it has no actual truthmaker [Merricks] |
| 19037 | Are there possible objects which nothing has ever had the potentiality to produce? [Vetter] |
| 6150 | The 'warrant' for a belief is what turns a true belief into knowledge [Merricks] |
| 19018 | Explanations by disposition are more stable and reliable than those be external circumstances [Vetter] |
| 19020 | Grounding is a kind of explanation, suited to metaphysics [Vetter] |
| 6144 | You hold a child in your arms, so it is not mental substance, or mental state, or software [Merricks] |
| 6140 | Maybe the word 'I' can only refer to persons [Merricks] |
| 6149 | Free will and determinism are incompatible, since determinism destroys human choice [Merricks] |
| 6148 | Human organisms can exercise downward causation [Merricks] |
| 6147 | The hypothesis of solipsism doesn't seem to be made incoherent by the nature of mental properties [Merricks] |
| 6146 | Before Creation it is assumed that God still had many many mental properties [Merricks] |
| 19217 | I don't accept that if a proposition is directly about an entity, it has a relation to the entity [Merricks] |
| 19203 | A sentence's truth conditions depend on context [Merricks] |
| 19200 | Propositions are standardly treated as possible worlds, or as structured [Merricks] |
| 19206 | 'Cicero is an orator' represents the same situation as 'Tully is an orator', so they are one proposition [Merricks] |
| 19202 | Propositions are necessary existents which essentially (but inexplicably) represent things [Merricks] |
| 19204 | True propositions existed prior to their being thought, and might never be thought [Merricks] |
| 19210 | The standard view of propositions says they never change their truth-value [Merricks] |
| 19201 | Propositions can be 'about' an entity, but that doesn't make the entity a constituent of it [Merricks] |
| 19211 | Early Russell says a proposition is identical with its truthmaking state of affairs [Merricks] |
| 19212 | Unity of the proposition questions: what unites them? can the same constituents make different ones? [Merricks] |
| 19213 | We want to explain not just what unites the constituents, but what unites them into a proposition [Merricks] |
| 19039 | The view that laws are grounded in substance plus external necessity doesn't suit dispositionalism [Vetter] |
| 19038 | Dispositional essentialism allows laws to be different, but only if the supporting properties differ [Vetter] |
| 17993 | Laws are relations of kinds, quantities and qualities, supervening on the essences of a domain [Vetter] |
| 17960 | Eternalism says all times are equally real, and future and past objects and properties are real [Merricks] |
| 19026 | If time is symmetrical between past and future, why do they look so different? [Vetter] |
| 17961 | Growing block has a subjective present and a growing edge - but these could come apart [Merricks, by PG] |
| 14411 | Maybe only presentism allows change, by now having a property, and then lacking it [Merricks] |
| 19041 | Presentists explain cross-temporal relations using surrogate descriptions [Vetter] |
| 14406 | Presentists say that things have existed and will exist, not that they are instantaneous [Merricks] |
| 14407 | Presentist should deny there is a present time, and just say that things 'exist' [Merricks] |
| 14405 | How can a presentist explain an object's having existed? [Merricks] |
| 21244 | Conceiving a greater being than God leads to absurdity [Anselm] |
| 21241 | Even the fool can hold 'a being than which none greater exists' in his understanding [Anselm] |
| 21242 | If that than which a greater cannot be thought actually exists, that is greater than the mere idea [Anselm] |
| 1421 | A perfection must be independent and unlimited, and the necessary existence of Anselm's second proof gives this [Malcolm on Anselm] |
| 21245 | The word 'God' can be denied, but understanding shows God must exist [Anselm] |
| 21246 | Guanilo says a supremely fertile island must exist, just because we can conceive it [Anselm] |
| 21247 | Nonexistence is impossible for the greatest thinkable thing, which has no beginning or end [Anselm] |
| 21243 | An existing thing is even greater if its non-existence is inconceivable [Anselm] |
| 1420 | Anselm's first proof fails because existence isn't a real predicate, so it can't be a perfection [Malcolm on Anselm] |