29 ideas
| 22659 | It is wisdom to believe what you desire, because belief is needed to achieve it [James] |
| 22657 | All good philosophers start from a dumb conviction about which truths can be revealed [James] |
| 22647 | A complete system is just a classification of the whole world's ingredients [James] |
| 22648 | A single explanation must have a single point of view [James] |
| 22644 | Our greatest pleasure is the economy of reducing chaotic facts to one single fact [James] |
| 22649 | Classification can only ever be for a particular purpose [James] |
| 22655 | Scientific genius extracts more than other people from the same evidence [James] |
| 22658 | Experimenters assume the theory is true, and stick to it as long as result don't disappoint [James] |
| 22654 | We can't know if the laws of nature are stable, but we must postulate it or assume it [James] |
| 22656 | Trying to assess probabilities by mere calculation is absurd and impossible [James] |
| 22646 | We have a passion for knowing the parts of something, rather than the whole [James] |
| 22652 | The mind has evolved entirely for practical interests, seen in our reflex actions [James] |
| 22651 | Dogs' curiosity only concerns what will happen next [James] |
| 22650 | How can the ground of rationality be itself rational? [James] |
| 22643 | It seems that we feel rational when we detect no irrationality [James] |
| 22660 | Evolution suggests prevailing or survival as a new criterion of right and wrong [James] |
| 1748 | Archelaus was the first person to say that the universe is boundless [Archelaus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 8388 | Causation is either direct realism, Humean reduction, non-Humean reduction or theoretical realism [Tooley] |
| 8389 | Causation distinctions: reductionism/realism; Humean/non-Humean states; observable/non-observable [Tooley] |
| 8393 | We can only reduce the direction of causation to the direction of time if we are realist about the latter [Tooley] |
| 8390 | Causation is directly observable in pressure on one's body, and in willed action [Tooley] |
| 22645 | Understanding by means of causes is useless if they are not reduced to a minimum number [James] |
| 8392 | Probabilist laws are compatible with effects always or never happening [Tooley] |
| 8399 | The actual cause may not be the most efficacious one [Tooley] |
| 8391 | In counterfactual worlds there are laws with no instances, so laws aren't supervenient on actuality [Tooley] |
| 8394 | Explaining causation in terms of laws can't explain the direction of causation [Tooley] |
| 8398 | Causation is a concept of a relation the same in all worlds, so it can't be a physical process [Tooley] |
| 5989 | Archelaus said life began in a primeval slime [Archelaus, by Schofield] |
| 22653 | Early Christianity says God recognises the neglected weak and tender impulses [James] |