32 ideas
| 15169 | Metaphysics is clarifying how we speak and think (and possibly improving it) [Sidelle] |
| 9978 | Analytic philosophy focuses too much on forms of expression, instead of what is actually said [Tait] |
| 15164 | We seem to base necessities on thought experiments and imagination [Sidelle] |
| 9986 | The null set was doubted, because numbering seemed to require 'units' [Tait] |
| 9984 | We can have a series with identical members [Tait] |
| 13416 | Mathematics must be based on axioms, which are true because they are axioms, not vice versa [Tait, by Parsons,C] |
| 15180 | There doesn't seem to be anything in the actual world that can determine modal facts [Sidelle] |
| 15184 | Causal reference presupposes essentialism if it refers to modally extended entities [Sidelle] |
| 15172 | Clearly, essential predications express necessary properties [Sidelle] |
| 15181 | Being a deepest explanatory feature is an actual, not a modal property [Sidelle] |
| 15173 | That the essence of water is its microstructure is a convention, not a discovery [Sidelle] |
| 15185 | We aren't clear about 'same stuff as this', so a principle of individuation is needed to identify it [Sidelle] |
| 15175 | Evaluation of de dicto modalities does not depend on the identity of its objects [Sidelle] |
| 15032 | Necessary a posteriori is conventional for necessity and nonmodal for a posteriority [Sidelle, by Sider] |
| 15179 | To know empirical necessities, we need empirical facts, plus conventions about which are necessary [Sidelle] |
| 15171 | The necessary a posteriori is statements either of identity or of essence [Sidelle] |
| 15167 | Empiricism explores necessities and concept-limits by imagining negations of truths [Sidelle] |
| 15177 | Contradictoriness limits what is possible and what is imaginable [Sidelle] |
| 15176 | The individuals and kinds involved in modality are also a matter of convention [Sidelle] |
| 15174 | A thing doesn't need transworld identity prior to rigid reference - that could be a convention of the reference [Sidelle] |
| 15183 | 'Dthat' operates to make a singular term into a rigid term [Sidelle] |
| 15165 | A priori knowledge is entirely of analytic truths [Sidelle] |
| 15168 | That water is essentially H2O in some way concerns how we use 'water' [Sidelle] |
| 9981 | Abstraction is 'logical' if the sense and truth of the abstraction depend on the concrete [Tait] |
| 9982 | Cantor and Dedekind use abstraction to fix grammar and objects, not to carry out proofs [Tait] |
| 9985 | Abstraction may concern the individuation of the set itself, not its elements [Tait] |
| 9972 | Why should abstraction from two equipollent sets lead to the same set of 'pure units'? [Tait] |
| 9980 | If abstraction produces power sets, their identity should imply identity of the originals [Tait] |
| 15166 | Causal reference seems to get directly at the object, thus leaving its nature open [Sidelle] |
| 15182 | Because some entities overlap, reference must have analytic individuation principles [Sidelle] |
| 6040 | There is no universal goal to human life [Aenesidemus, by Photius] |
| 15178 | Can anything in science reveal the necessity of what it discovers? [Sidelle] |