28 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] |
| 18928 | If maximalism is necessary, then that nothing exists has a truthmaker, which it can't have [Cameron] |
| 18931 | Determinate truths don't need extra truthmakers, just truthmakers that are themselves determinate [Cameron] |
| 18932 | The facts about the existence of truthmakers can't have a further explanation [Cameron] |
| 18923 | The present property 'having been F' says nothing about a thing's intrinsic nature [Cameron] |
| 18926 | One temporal distibution property grounds our present and past truths [Cameron] |
| 18929 | We don't want present truthmakers for the past, if they are about to cease to exist! [Cameron] |
| 17743 | De Morgan introduced a 'universe of discourse', to replace Boole's universe of 'all things' [De Morgan, by Walicki] |
| 22649 | Classification can only ever be for a particular purpose [James] |
| 18924 | Being polka-dotted is a 'spatial distribution' property [Cameron] |
| 18930 | Change is instantiation of a non-uniform distributional property, like 'being red-then-orange' [Cameron] |
| 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] |
| 22645 | Understanding by means of causes is useless if they are not reduced to a minimum number [James] |
| 18927 | Surely if things extend over time, then time itself must be extended? [Cameron] |
| 22653 | Early Christianity says God recognises the neglected weak and tender impulses [James] |