Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'works', 'On Multiplying Entities' and 'Survival and Identity, with postscript'

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6 ideas

2. Reason / B. Laws of Thought / 6. Ockham's Razor
In arithmetic, ratios, negatives, irrationals and imaginaries were created in order to generalise [Quine]
The quest for simplicity drove scientists to posit new entities, such as molecules in gases [Quine]
6. Mathematics / B. Foundations for Mathematics / 3. Axioms for Geometry
Archimedes defined a straight line as the shortest distance between two points [Archimedes, by Leibniz]
7. Existence / B. Change in Existence / 4. Events / c. Reduction of events
Explaining events just by bodies can't explain two events identical in space-time [Quine]
10. Modality / A. Necessity / 4. De re / De dicto modality
De re modal predicates are ambiguous [Lewis, by Rudder Baker]
10. Modality / A. Necessity / 11. Denial of Necessity
Necessity could be just generalisation over classes, or (maybe) quantifying over possibilia [Quine]