45 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] |
6123 | Empirical investigation can't discover if holes exist, or if two things share a colour [Merricks] |
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] |
6143 | Prolonged events don't seem to endure or exist at any particular time [Merricks] |
1605 | Reality can be viewed neutrally, or as an object of desire [Roochnik] |
6135 | A crumbling statue can't become vague, because vagueness is incoherent [Merricks] |
6145 | Intrinsic properties are those an object still has even if only that object exists [Merricks] |
6124 | I say that most of the objects of folk ontology do not exist [Merricks] |
6134 | Is swimming pool water an object, composed of its mass or parts? [Merricks] |
6125 | We can eliminate objects without a commitment to simples [Merricks] |
14229 | Merricks agrees that there are no composite objects, but offers a different semantics [Merricks, by Liggins] |
6142 | The 'folk' way of carving up the world is not intrinsically better than quite arbitrary ways [Merricks] |
14472 | If atoms 'arranged baseballwise' break a window, that analytically entails that a baseball did it [Merricks, by Thomasson] |
14469 | Overdetermination: the atoms do all the causing, so the baseball causes no breakage [Merricks] |
6137 | Clay does not 'constitute' a statue, as they have different persistence conditions (flaking, squashing) [Merricks] |
6127 | 'Unrestricted composition' says any two things can make up a third thing [Merricks] |
6131 | Composition as identity is false, as identity is never between a single thing and many things [Merricks] |
6132 | Composition as identity is false, as it implies that things never change their parts [Merricks] |
6141 | There is no visible difference between statues, and atoms arranged statuewise [Merricks] |
6130 | 'Composition' says things are their parts; 'constitution' says a whole substance is an object [Merricks] |
6138 | It seems wrong that constitution entails that two objects are wholly co-located [Merricks] |
6128 | Objects decompose (it seems) into non-overlapping parts that fill its whole region [Merricks] |
6136 | Eliminativism about objects gives the best understanding of the Sorites paradox [Merricks] |
6133 | If my counterpart is happy, that is irrelevant to whether I 'could' have been happy [Merricks] |
6150 | The 'warrant' for a belief is what turns a true belief into knowledge [Merricks] |
1577 | Relativism is a disease which destroys the possibility of rational debate [Roochnik] |
6144 | You hold a child in your arms, so it is not mental substance, or mental state, or software [Merricks] |
6140 | Maybe the word 'I' can only refer to persons [Merricks] |
6149 | Free will and determinism are incompatible, since determinism destroys human choice [Merricks] |
6148 | Human organisms can exercise downward causation [Merricks] |
6146 | Before Creation it is assumed that God still had many many mental properties [Merricks] |
6147 | The hypothesis of solipsism doesn't seem to be made incoherent by the nature of mental properties [Merricks] |
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] |
5845 | Niceratus learnt the whole of Homer by heart, as a guide to goodness [Xenophon] |