27 ideas
12124 | Metaphysics is the best knowledge, because it is the simplest [Bacon] |
12123 | Natural history supports physical knowledge, which supports metaphysical knowledge [Bacon] |
12119 | Physics studies transitory matter; metaphysics what is abstracted and necessary [Bacon] |
12120 | Physics is of material and efficient causes, metaphysics of formal and final causes [Bacon] |
14092 | Philosophers are often too fussy about words, dismissing perfectly useful ordinary terms [Rosen] |
14100 | Figuring in the definition of a thing doesn't make it a part of that thing [Rosen] |
14096 | Explanations fail to be monotonic [Rosen] |
14097 | Things could be true 'in virtue of' others as relations between truths, or between truths and items [Rosen] |
14095 | Facts are structures of worldly items, rather like sentences, individuated by their ingredients [Rosen] |
14093 | An 'intrinsic' property is one that depends on a thing and its parts, and not on its relations [Rosen] |
472 | No things would be clear to us as entity or relationships unless there existed Number and its essence [Philolaus] |
14094 | The excellent notion of metaphysical 'necessity' cannot be defined [Rosen] |
14101 | Are necessary truths rooted in essences, or also in basic grounding laws? [Rosen] |
12121 | We don't assume there is no land, because we can only see sea [Bacon] |
12117 | Science moves up and down between inventions of causes, and experiments [Bacon] |
12127 | Many different theories will fit the observed facts [Bacon] |
12126 | People love (unfortunately) extreme generality, rather than particular knowledge [Bacon] |
14099 | 'Bachelor' consists in or reduces to 'unmarried' male, but not the other way around [Rosen] |
12125 | Teleological accounts are fine in metaphysics, but they stop us from searching for the causes [Bacon] |
1519 | Harmony must pre-exist the cosmos, to bring the dissimilar sources together [Philolaus] |
1518 | Everything must involve numbers, or it couldn't be thought about or known [Philolaus] |
473 | There is no falsehood in harmony and number, only in irrational things [Philolaus] |
469 | Existing things, and hence the Cosmos, are a mixture of the Limited and the Unlimited [Philolaus] |
476 | Self-created numbers make the universe stable [Philolaus] |
12118 | Essences are part of first philosophy, but as part of nature, not part of logic [Bacon] |
1787 | Philolaus was the first person to say the earth moves in a circle [Philolaus, by Diog. Laertius] |
14098 | An acid is just a proton donor [Rosen] |