42 ideas
1606 | You have to be a Platonist to debate about reality, so every philosopher is a Platonist [Roochnik] |
1595 | Philosophy aims to satisfy the chief human desire - the articulation of beauty itself [Roochnik] |
1749 | If all laws were abolished, philosophers would still live as they do now [Aristippus elder] |
9136 | The paradox of analysis says that any conceptual analysis must be either trivial or false [Sorensen] |
1571 | 'Logos' ranges from thought/reasoning, to words, to rational structures outside thought [Roochnik] |
1572 | In the seventeenth century the only acceptable form of logos was technical knowledge [Roochnik] |
1573 | The hallmark of a person with logos is that they give reasons why one opinion is superior to another [Roochnik] |
1592 | Logos cannot refute the relativist, and so must admit that it too is a matter of desire (for truth and agreement) [Roochnik] |
1593 | Human desire has an ordered structure, with logos at the pinnacle [Roochnik] |
1603 | Logos is not unconditionally good, but good if there is another person willing to engage with it [Roochnik] |
1598 | We prefer reason or poetry according to whether basics are intelligible or not [Roochnik] |
1584 | Modern science, by aiming for clarity about the external world, has abandoned rationality in the human world [Roochnik] |
1591 | Unfortunately for reason, argument can't be used to establish the value of argument [Roochnik] |
1599 | Attempts to suspend all presuppositions are hopeless, because a common ground must be agreed for the process [Roochnik] |
9131 | Two long understandable sentences can have an unintelligible conjunction [Sorensen] |
9139 | If nothing exists, no truthmakers could make 'Nothing exists' true [Sorensen] |
9140 | Which toothbrush is the truthmaker for 'buy one, get one free'? [Sorensen] |
9119 | No attempt to deny bivalence has ever been accepted [Sorensen] |
9135 | We now see that generalizations use variables rather than abstract entities [Sorensen] |
9125 | Denying problems, or being romantically defeated by them, won't make them go away [Sorensen] |
9137 | Banning self-reference would outlaw 'This very sentence is in English' [Sorensen] |
1605 | Reality can be viewed neutrally, or as an object of desire [Roochnik] |
9116 | Vague words have hidden boundaries [Sorensen] |
9132 | An offer of 'free coffee or juice' could slowly shift from exclusive 'or' to inclusive 'or' [Sorensen] |
9128 | It is propositional attitudes which can be a priori, not the propositions themselves [Sorensen] |
9130 | Attributing apriority to a proposition is attributing a cognitive ability to someone [Sorensen] |
9118 | The colour bands of the spectrum arise from our biology; they do not exist in the physics [Sorensen] |
9124 | We are unable to perceive a nose (on the back of a mask) as concave [Sorensen] |
9126 | Bayesians build near-certainty from lots of reasonably probable beliefs [Sorensen] |
9121 | Illusions are not a reason for skepticism, but a source of interesting scientific information [Sorensen] |
1577 | Relativism is a disease which destroys the possibility of rational debate [Roochnik] |
9134 | The negation of a meaningful sentence must itself be meaningful [Sorensen] |
9133 | Propositions are what settle problems of ambiguity in sentences [Sorensen] |
1578 | If relativism is the correct account of human values, then rhetoric is more important than reasoning [Roochnik] |
1596 | Reasoning aims not at the understanding of objects, but at the desire to give beautiful speeches [Roochnik] |
3558 | Only the Cyrenaics reject the idea of a final moral end [Aristippus elder, by Annas] |
5835 | The road of freedom is the surest route to happiness [Aristippus elder, by Xenophon] |
3018 | People who object to extravagant pleasures just love money [Aristippus elder, by Diog. Laertius] |
1751 | Pleasure is the good, because we always seek it, it satisfies us, and its opposite is the most avoidable thing [Aristippus elder, by Diog. Laertius] |
9129 | I can buy any litre of water, but not every litre of water [Sorensen] |
1755 | Errors result from external influence, and should be corrected, not hated [Aristippus elder, by Diog. Laertius] |
9122 | God cannot experience unwanted pain, so God cannot understand human beings [Sorensen] |