42 ideas
9307 | Modern Western culture suddenly appeared in Jena in the 1790s [Svendsen] |
1642 | We must fight fiercely for knowledge, understanding and intelligence [Plato] |
1645 | The desire to split everything into its parts is unpleasant and unphilosophical [Plato] |
9297 | You can't understand love in terms of 'if and only if...' [Svendsen] |
287 | Good analysis involves dividing things into appropriate forms without confusion [Plato] |
1644 | Dialectic should only be taught to those who already philosophise well [Plato] |
20478 | In discussion a person's opinions are shown to be in conflict, leading to calm self-criticism [Plato] |
11278 | What does 'that which is not' refer to? [Plato] |
1643 | If statements about non-existence are logically puzzling, so are statements about existence [Plato] |
7022 | To be is to have a capacity, to act on other things, or to receive actions [Plato] |
1641 | Some alarming thinkers think that only things which you can touch exist [Plato] |
10784 | Whenever there's speech it has to be about something [Plato] |
9476 | If dispositions are more fundamental than causes, then they won't conceptually reduce to them [Bird on Lewis] |
16122 | Good thinkers spot forms spread through things, or included within some larger form [Plato] |
10422 | The not-beautiful is part of the beautiful, though opposed to it, and is just as real [Plato] |
15855 | If we see everything as separate, we can then give no account of it [Plato] |
8425 | For true counterfactuals, both antecedent and consequent true is closest to actuality [Lewis] |
9308 | If subjective and objective begin to merge, then so do primary and secondary qualities [Svendsen] |
1637 | A soul without understanding is ugly [Plato] |
8424 | Determinism says there can't be two identical worlds up to a time, with identical laws, which then differ [Lewis] |
9309 | Emotions have intentional objects, while a mood is objectless [Svendsen] |
8420 | A proposition is a set of possible worlds where it is true [Lewis] |
9304 | Death appears to be more frightening the less one has lived [Svendsen] |
1636 | Wickedness is an illness of the soul [Plato] |
9298 | We can be unaware that we are bored [Svendsen] |
9301 | Boredom is so radical that suicide could not overcome it; only never having existed would do it [Svendsen] |
9302 | We are bored because everything comes to us fully encoded, and we want personal meaning [Svendsen] |
9310 | The profoundest boredom is boredom with boredom [Svendsen] |
9311 | We have achieved a sort of utopia, and it is boring, so that is the end of utopias [Svendsen] |
9303 | The concept of 'alienation' seems no longer applicable [Svendsen] |
1638 | Didactic education is hard work and achieves little [Plato] |
8405 | A theory of causation should explain why cause precedes effect, not take it for granted [Lewis, by Field,H] |
8427 | I reject making the direction of causation axiomatic, since that takes too much for granted [Lewis] |
10392 | It is just individious discrimination to pick out one cause and label it as 'the' cause [Lewis] |
8419 | The modern regularity view says a cause is a member of a minimal set of sufficient conditions [Lewis] |
8421 | Regularity analyses could make c an effect of e, or an epiphenomenon, or inefficacious, or pre-empted [Lewis] |
17525 | The counterfactual view says causes are necessary (rather than sufficient) for their effects [Lewis, by Bird] |
17524 | Lewis has basic causation, counterfactuals, and a general ancestral (thus handling pre-emption) [Lewis, by Bird] |
8397 | Counterfactual causation implies all laws are causal, which they aren't [Tooley on Lewis] |
8423 | My counterfactual analysis applies to particular cases, not generalisations [Lewis] |
8426 | One event causes another iff there is a causal chain from first to second [Lewis] |
4795 | Lewis's account of counterfactuals is fine if we know what a law of nature is, but it won't explain the latter [Cohen,LJ on Lewis] |