Combining Texts

All the ideas for 'works', 'The Method of Truth in Metaphysics' and 'On Multiplying Entities'

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7 ideas

2. Reason / B. Laws of Thought / 6. Ockham's Razor
The quest for simplicity drove scientists to posit new entities, such as molecules in gases [Quine]
In arithmetic, ratios, negatives, irrationals and imaginaries were created in order to generalise [Quine]
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 / 11. Denial of Necessity
Necessity could be just generalisation over classes, or (maybe) quantifying over possibilia [Quine]
16. Persons / A. Concept of a Person / 1. Existence of Persons
Metaphysics requires the idea of people (speakers) located in space and time [Davidson]
19. Language / A. Nature of Meaning / 4. Meaning as Truth-Conditions
Sentences held true determine the meanings of the words they contain [Davidson]
22. Metaethics / A. Ethics Foundations / 2. Source of Ethics / e. Human nature
We can't accept Aristotle's naturalism about persons, because it is normative and unscientific [Williams,B, by Hursthouse]