37 ideas
| 4037 | Ockham's Razor is the principle that we need reasons to believe in entities [Mellor/Oliver] |
| 12463 | Unlike correspondence, truthmaking can be one truth to many truthmakers, or vice versa [Jacobs] |
| 14375 | If structures result from intrinsic natures of properties, the 'relations' between them can drop out [Jacobs] |
| 4027 | Properties are respects in which particular objects may be alike or differ [Mellor/Oliver] |
| 4029 | Nominalists ask why we should postulate properties at all [Mellor/Oliver] |
| 14378 | Science aims at identifying the structure and nature of the powers that exist [Jacobs] |
| 12467 | Powers come from concrete particulars, not from the laws of nature [Jacobs] |
| 22744 | Parts are not parts if their whole is nothing more than the parts [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 14377 | Possibilities are manifestations of some power, and impossibilies rest on no powers [Jacobs] |
| 14376 | States of affairs are only possible if some substance could initiate a causal chain to get there [Jacobs] |
| 14379 | Counterfactuals invite us to consider the powers picked out by the antecedent [Jacobs] |
| 14372 | Possible worlds are just not suitable truthmakers for modality [Jacobs] |
| 12466 | All modality is in the properties and relations of the actual world [Jacobs] |
| 14371 | We can base counterfactuals on powers, not possible worlds, and hence define necessity [Jacobs] |
| 12465 | Concrete worlds, unlike fictions, at least offer evidence of how the actual world could be [Jacobs] |
| 12464 | If some book described a possibe life for you, that isn't what makes such a life possible [Jacobs] |
| 12469 | Possible worlds semantics gives little insight into modality [Jacobs] |
| 22748 | Some say motion is perceived by sense, but others say it is by intellect [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22746 | If we try to conceive of a line with no breadth, it ceases to exist, and so has no length [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22741 | The incorporeal is not in the nature of body, and so could not emerge from it [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 4039 | Abstractions lack causes, effects and spatio-temporal locations [Mellor/Oliver] |
| 22747 | A man walking backwards on a forwards-moving ship is moving in a fixed place [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22749 | Time doesn't end with the Universe, because tensed statements about destruction remain true [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22750 | Time is divisible, into past, present and future [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22742 | Socrates either dies when he exists (before his death) or when he doesn't (after his death) [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22751 | If the present is just the limit of the past or the future, it can't exist because they don't exist [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22730 | All men agree that God is blessed, imperishable, happy and good [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22739 | God must suffer to understand suffering [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22738 | The Divine must lack the virtues of continence and fortitude, because they are not needed [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22734 | God is defended by agreement, order, absurdity of denying God, and refutations [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22736 | God's sensations imply change, and hence perishing, which is absurd, so there is no such God [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22740 | God without virtue is absurd, but God's virtues will be better than God [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22735 | The original substance lacked motion or shape, and was given these by a cause [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22732 | The perfections of God were extrapolations from mankind [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22728 | Gods were invented as watchers of people's secret actions [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22737 | An incorporeal God could do nothing, and a bodily god would perish, so there is no God [Sext.Empiricus] |
| 22731 | It is mad to think that what is useful to us, like lakes and rivers, are gods [Sext.Empiricus] |