52 ideas
9307 | Modern Western culture suddenly appeared in Jena in the 1790s [Svendsen] |
9297 | You can't understand love in terms of 'if and only if...' [Svendsen] |
23000 | Vicious regresses force you to another level; non-vicious imply another level [Baron/Miller] |
23024 | A traveller takes a copy of a picture into the past, gives it the artist, who then creates the original! [Baron/Miller] |
23008 | Grounding is intended as a relation that fits dependences between things [Baron/Miller] |
9052 | Vague predicates lack application; there are no borderline cases; vague F is not F [Unger, by Keefe/Smith] |
16070 | There are no objects with proper parts; there are only mereological simples [Unger, by Wasserman] |
23018 | How does a changing object retain identity or have incompatible properties over time? [Baron/Miller] |
9308 | If subjective and objective begin to merge, then so do primary and secondary qualities [Svendsen] |
8724 | The meaning of 'know' does not change from courtroom to living room [Unger] |
8722 | No one knows anything, and no one is ever justified or reasonable [Unger] |
8723 | An evil scientist may give you a momentary life, with totally false memories [Unger] |
9309 | Emotions have intentional objects, while a mood is objectless [Svendsen] |
9304 | Death appears to be more frightening the less one has lived [Svendsen] |
9310 | The profoundest boredom is boredom with boredom [Svendsen] |
9302 | We are bored because everything comes to us fully encoded, and we want personal meaning [Svendsen] |
9301 | Boredom is so radical that suicide could not overcome it; only never having existed would do it [Svendsen] |
9298 | We can be unaware that we are bored [Svendsen] |
9311 | We have achieved a sort of utopia, and it is boring, so that is the end of utopias [Svendsen] |
9303 | The concept of 'alienation' seems no longer applicable [Svendsen] |
23011 | Modern accounts of causation involve either processes or counterfactuals [Baron/Miller] |
23013 | The main process theory of causation says it is transference of mass, energy, momentum or charge [Baron/Miller] |
23014 | If causes are processes, what is causation by omission? (Distinguish legal from scientific causes?) [Baron/Miller] |
23015 | The counterfactual theory of causation handles the problem no matter what causes actually are [Baron/Miller] |
23016 | Counterfactual theories struggle with pre-emption by a causal back-up system [Baron/Miller] |
23009 | There is no second 'law' of thermodynamics; it just reflects probabilities of certain microstates [Baron/Miller] |
23002 | In relativity space and time depend on one's motion, but spacetime gives an invariant metric [Baron/Miller] |
22988 | The block universe theory says entities of all times exist, and time is the B-series [Baron/Miller] |
22991 | How can we know this is the present moment, if other times are real? [Baron/Miller] |
22992 | If we are actually in the past then we shouldn't experience time passing [Baron/Miller] |
22994 | Erzatz Presentism allows the existence of other times, with only the present 'actualised' [Baron/Miller] |
22998 | How do presentists explain relations between things existing at different times? [Baron/Miller] |
23017 | Presentism needs endurantism, because other theories imply most of the object doesn't exist [Baron/Miller] |
23023 | How can presentists move to the next future moment, if that doesn't exist? [Baron/Miller] |
22995 | Most of the sciences depend on the concept of time [Baron/Miller] |
22993 | For abstractionists past times might still exist, althought their objects don't [Baron/Miller] |
23001 | The error theory of time's passage says it is either a misdescription or a false inference [Baron/Miller] |
22999 | It is meaningless to measure the rate of time using time itself, and without a rate there is no flow [Baron/Miller] |
22986 | The C-series rejects A and B, and just sees times as order by betweenness, without direction [Baron/Miller] |
22996 | The A-series has to treat being past, present or future as properties [Baron/Miller] |
23007 | The B-series can have a direction, as long as it does not arise from temporal flow [Baron/Miller] |
23003 | Static theories cannot account for time's obvious asymmetry, so time must be dynamic [Baron/Miller] |
23004 | The direction of time is either primitive, or reducible to something else [Baron/Miller] |
23005 | The kaon does not seem to be time-reversal invariant, unlike the rest of nature [Baron/Miller] |
23006 | Maybe the past is just the direction of decreasing entropy [Baron/Miller] |
23010 | We could explain time's direction by causation: past is the direction of causes, future of effects [Baron/Miller] |
22989 | Static time theory presents change as one property at t1, and a different property at t2 [Baron/Miller] |
23020 | If a time traveller kills his youthful grandfather, he both exists and fails to exist [Baron/Miller] |
23022 | Presentism means there no existing past for a time traveller to visit [Baron/Miller] |
22987 | The past (unlike the future) is fixed, along with truths about it, by the existence of past objects [Baron/Miller] |
22990 | The moving spotlight says entities can have properties of being present, past or future [Baron/Miller] |
22997 | The present moment is a matter of existence, not of acquiring a property [Baron/Miller] |