39 ideas
| 7623 | For ancient Greeks being wise was an ethical value [Putnam] |
| 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] |
| 4714 | Putnam's epistemic notion of truth replaces the realism of correspondence with ontological relativism [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
| 7617 | Before Kant, all philosophers had a correspondence theory of truth [Putnam] |
| 4716 | The correspondence theory is wrong, because there is no one correspondence between reality and fact [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
| 7616 | Truth is an idealisation of rational acceptability [Putnam] |
| 14203 | Intension is not meaning, as 'cube' and 'square-faced polyhedron' are intensionally the same [Putnam] |
| 14207 | If cats equal cherries, model theory allows reinterpretation of the whole language preserving truth [Putnam] |
| 1605 | Reality can be viewed neutrally, or as an object of desire [Roochnik] |
| 14214 | If we try to cure the abundance of theories with causal links, this is 'just more theory' [Putnam, by Lewis] |
| 14205 | The sentence 'A cat is on a mat' remains always true when 'cat' means cherry and 'mat' means tree [Putnam] |
| 7610 | A fact is simply what it is rational to accept [Putnam] |
| 7618 | Very nominalistic philosophers deny properties, though scientists accept them [Putnam] |
| 4718 | If necessity is always relative to a description in a language, then there is only 'de dicto' necessity [Putnam, by O'Grady] |
| 19440 | How do you know you have conceived a thing deeply enough to assess its possibility? [Vaidya] |
| 1577 | Relativism is a disease which destroys the possibility of rational debate [Roochnik] |
| 7620 | Some kind of objective 'rightness' is a presupposition of thought itself [Putnam] |
| 14204 | Naïve operationalism would have meanings change every time the tests change [Putnam] |
| 7611 | Rationality is one part of our conception of human flourishing [Putnam] |
| 14200 | 'Water' on Twin Earth doesn't refer to water, but no mental difference can account for this [Putnam] |
| 7612 | Reference is social not individual, because we defer to experts when referring to elm trees [Putnam] |
| 7613 | Concepts are (at least in part) abilities and not occurrences [Putnam] |
| 14202 | Neither individual nor community mental states fix reference [Putnam] |
| 14201 | Maybe the total mental state of a language community fixes the reference of a term [Putnam] |
| 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] |
| 14206 | There are infinitely many interpretations of a sentence which can all seem to be 'correct' [Putnam] |
| 7624 | The word 'inconsiderate' nicely shows the blurring of facts and values [Putnam] |