30 ideas
| 22659 | It is wisdom to believe what you desire, because belief is needed to achieve it [James] |
| 22657 | All good philosophers start from a dumb conviction about which truths can be revealed [James] |
| 22647 | A complete system is just a classification of the whole world's ingredients [James] |
| 22648 | A single explanation must have a single point of view [James] |
| 22644 | Our greatest pleasure is the economy of reducing chaotic facts to one single fact [James] |
| 22649 | Classification can only ever be for a particular purpose [James] |
| 15127 | A categorical basis could hardly explain a disposition if it had no powers of its own [Hawthorne] |
| 15123 | Is the causal profile of a property its essence? [Hawthorne] |
| 15122 | Could two different properties have the same causal profile? [Hawthorne] |
| 15124 | If properties are more than their powers, we could have two properties with the same power [Hawthorne] |
| 15128 | We can treat the structure/form of the world differently from the nodes/matter of the world [Hawthorne] |
| 15121 | An individual essence is a necessary and sufficient profile for a thing [Hawthorne] |
| 22655 | Scientific genius extracts more than other people from the same evidence [James] |
| 22658 | Experimenters assume the theory is true, and stick to it as long as result don't disappoint [James] |
| 22654 | We can't know if the laws of nature are stable, but we must postulate it or assume it [James] |
| 22656 | Trying to assess probabilities by mere calculation is absurd and impossible [James] |
| 22646 | We have a passion for knowing the parts of something, rather than the whole [James] |
| 22652 | The mind has evolved entirely for practical interests, seen in our reflex actions [James] |
| 22651 | Dogs' curiosity only concerns what will happen next [James] |
| 22650 | How can the ground of rationality be itself rational? [James] |
| 22643 | It seems that we feel rational when we detect no irrationality [James] |
| 20416 | By 1790 aestheticians were mainly trying to explain individual artistic genius [Kemp] |
| 20417 | Expression can be either necessary for art, or sufficient for art (or even both) [Kemp] |
| 20419 | We don't already know what to express, and then seek means of expressing it [Kemp] |
| 20418 | The horror expressed in some works of art could equallly be expressed by other means [Kemp] |
| 22660 | Evolution suggests prevailing or survival as a new criterion of right and wrong [James] |
| 15126 | Maybe scientific causation is just generalisation about the patterns [Hawthorne] |
| 22645 | Understanding by means of causes is useless if they are not reduced to a minimum number [James] |
| 15125 | We only know the mathematical laws, but not much else [Hawthorne] |
| 22653 | Early Christianity says God recognises the neglected weak and tender impulses [James] |