23 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] |
20768 | Like spiderswebs, dialectical arguments are clever but useless [Ariston, by Diog. Laertius] |
22649 | Classification can only ever be for a particular purpose [James] |
3291 | Emergent properties appear at high levels of complexity, but aren't explainable by the lower levels [Nagel] |
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] |
3049 | The chief good is indifference to what lies midway between virtue and vice [Ariston, by Diog. Laertius] |
3549 | Ariston says rules are useless for the virtuous and the non-virtuous [Ariston, by Annas] |
22645 | Understanding by means of causes is useless if they are not reduced to a minimum number [James] |
3290 | Given the nature of heat and of water, it is literally impossible for water not to boil at the right heat [Nagel] |
22653 | Early Christianity says God recognises the neglected weak and tender impulses [James] |