45 ideas
9593 | Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson] |
6961 | An analogy begins to break down as soon as the two cases differ [Hume] |
9594 | Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson] |
9601 | The realist/anti-realist debate is notoriously obscure and fruitless [Williamson] |
9599 | There cannot be vague objects, so there may be no such thing as a mountain [Williamson] |
9602 | Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson] |
11976 | Aristotelian essentialism says essences are not relative to specification [Lewis] |
11978 | Causal necessities hold in all worlds compatible with the laws of nature [Lewis] |
9598 | Modal thinking isn't a special intuition; it is part of ordinary counterfactual thinking [Williamson] |
16536 | Williamson can't base metaphysical necessity on the psychology of causal counterfactuals [Lowe on Williamson] |
9596 | We scorn imagination as a test of possibility, forgetting its role in counterfactuals [Williamson] |
11979 | It doesn't take the whole of a possible Humphrey to win the election [Lewis] |
16994 | Counterpart theory is bizarre, as no one cares what happens to a mere counterpart [Kripke on Lewis] |
11974 | Counterparts are not the original thing, but resemble it more than other things do [Lewis] |
11975 | If the closest resembler to you is in fact quite unlike you, then you have no counterpart [Lewis] |
11977 | Essential attributes are those shared with all the counterparts [Lewis] |
9597 | There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson] |
21285 | Events are baffling before experience, and obvious after experience [Hume] |
9592 | Intuition is neither powerful nor vacuous, but reveals linguistic or conceptual competence [Williamson] |
20181 | When analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they present intuitions as their evidence [Williamson] |
9595 | You might know that the word 'gob' meant 'mouth', but not be competent to use it [Williamson] |
9600 | If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson] |
6959 | We can't assume God's perfections are like our ideas or like human attributes [Hume] |
6957 | The objects of theological reasoning are too big for our minds [Hume] |
21255 | No being's non-existence can imply a contradiction, so its existence cannot be proved a priori [Hume] |
21254 | A chain of events requires a cause for the whole as well as the parts, yet the chain is just a sum of parts [Hume] |
1435 | If something must be necessary so that something exists rather than nothing, why can't the universe be necessary? [Hume] |
6962 | The thing which contains order must be God, so see God where you see order [Hume] |
6958 | How can we pronounce on a whole after a brief look at a very small part? [Hume] |
21282 | Design cannot prove a unified Deity. Many men make a city, so why not many gods for a world? [Hume] |
21280 | From a ship you would judge its creator a genius, not a mere humble workman [Hume] |
21281 | This excellent world may be the result of a huge sequence of trial-and-error [Hume] |
21283 | Humans renew their species sexually. If there are many gods, would they not do the same? [Hume] |
6966 | Creation is more like vegetation than human art, so it won't come from reason [Hume] |
21284 | This Creator god might be an infant or incompetent or senile [Hume] |
21286 | Motion often begins in matter, with no sign of a controlling agent [Hume] |
21287 | The universe could settle into superficial order, without a designer [Hume] |
21288 | Ideas arise from objects, not vice versa; ideas only influence matter if they are linked [Hume] |
21256 | A surprise feature of all products of 9 looks like design, but is actually a necessity [Hume] |
6960 | Analogy suggests that God has a very great human mind [Hume] |
6965 | The universe may be the result of trial-and-error [Hume] |
6967 | Order may come from an irrational source as well as a rational one [Hume] |
6964 | From our limited view, we cannot tell if the universe is faulty [Hume] |
21279 | If the divine cause is proportional to its effects, the effects are finite, so the Deity cannot be infinite [Hume] |
6963 | Why would we infer an infinite creator from a finite creation? [Hume] |