49 ideas
| 3240 | There is more insight in fundamental perplexity about problems than in their supposed solutions [Nagel] |
| 3242 | Philosophy is the childhood of the intellect, and a culture can't skip it [Nagel] |
| 3241 | It seems mad, but the aim of philosophy is to climb outside of our own minds [Nagel] |
| 22270 | Frege changed philosophy by extending logic's ability to check the grounds of thinking [Potter on Frege] |
| 3248 | Realism invites scepticism because it claims to be objective [Nagel] |
| 20989 | Views are objective if they don't rely on a person's character, social position or species [Nagel] |
| 22354 | Things cause perceptions, properties have other effects, hence we reach a 'view from nowhere' [Nagel, by Reiss/Sprenger] |
| 8939 | We should not describe human laws of thought, but how to correctly track truth [Frege, by Fisher] |
| 4971 | I don't use 'subject' and 'predicate' in my way of representing a judgement [Frege] |
| 17745 | For Frege, 'All A's are B's' means that the concept A implies the concept B [Frege, by Walicki] |
| 7728 | Frege has a judgement stroke (vertical, asserting or judging) and a content stroke (horizontal, expressing) [Frege, by Weiner] |
| 16881 | The laws of logic are boundless, so we want the few whose power contains the others [Frege] |
| 7622 | In 1879 Frege developed second order logic [Frege, by Putnam] |
| 7729 | Frege replaced Aristotle's subject/predicate form with function/argument form [Frege, by Weiner] |
| 9950 | A quantifier is a second-level predicate (which explains how it contributes to truth-conditions) [Frege, by George/Velleman] |
| 9991 | For Frege the variable ranges over all objects [Frege, by Tait] |
| 10536 | Frege's domain for variables is all objects, but modern interpretations first fix the domain [Dummett on Frege] |
| 7730 | Frege introduced quantifiers for generality [Frege, by Weiner] |
| 7742 | Frege reduced most quantifiers to 'everything' combined with 'not' [Frege, by McCullogh] |
| 13824 | Proof theory began with Frege's definition of derivability [Frege, by Prawitz] |
| 13609 | Frege produced axioms for logic, though that does not now seem the natural basis for logic [Frege, by Kaplan] |
| 17855 | It may be possible to define induction in terms of the ancestral relation [Frege, by Wright,C] |
| 10607 | Frege's logic has a hierarchy of object, property, property-of-property etc. [Frege, by Smith,P] |
| 11008 | Existence is not a first-order property, but the instantiation of a property [Frege, by Read] |
| 3249 | Modern science depends on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities [Nagel] |
| 22429 | We achieve objectivity by dropping secondary qualities, to focus on structural primary qualities [Nagel] |
| 3247 | Epistemology is centrally about what we should believe, not the definition of knowledge [Nagel] |
| 3252 | Scepticism is based on ideas which scepticism makes impossible [Nagel] |
| 3251 | Observed regularities are only predictable if we assume hidden necessity [Nagel] |
| 3244 | Personal identity cannot be fully known a priori [Nagel] |
| 3245 | The question of whether a future experience will be mine presupposes personal identity [Nagel] |
| 3246 | I can't even conceive of my brain being split in two [Nagel] |
| 22280 | Frege's account was top-down and decompositional, not bottom-up and compositional [Frege, by Potter] |
| 3257 | Total objectivity can't see value, but it sees many people with values [Nagel] |
| 3265 | We don't worry about the time before we were born the way we worry about death [Nagel] |
| 3263 | If our own life lacks meaning, devotion to others won't give it meaning [Nagel] |
| 3256 | Pain doesn't have a further property of badness; it gives a reason for its avoidance [Nagel] |
| 3261 | Something may be 'rational' either because it is required or because it is acceptable [Nagel] |
| 3258 | If cockroaches can't think about their actions, they have no duties [Nagel] |
| 3254 | If we can decide how to live after stepping outside of ourselves, we have the basis of a moral theory [Nagel] |
| 3264 | We should see others' viewpoints, but not lose touch with our own values [Nagel] |
| 3255 | We find new motives by discovering reasons for action different from our preexisting motives [Nagel] |
| 3262 | Utilitarianism is too demanding [Nagel] |
| 8430 | Causal statements are used to explain, to predict, to control, to attribute responsibility, and in theories [Kim] |
| 8396 | Many counterfactuals have nothing to do with causation [Kim, by Tooley] |
| 8429 | Counterfactuals can express four other relations between events, apart from causation [Kim] |
| 8428 | Causation is not the only dependency relation expressed by counterfactuals [Kim] |
| 4781 | Many counterfactual truths do not imply causation ('if yesterday wasn't Monday, it isn't Tuesday') [Kim, by Psillos] |
| 7741 | The predicate 'exists' is actually a natural language expression for a quantifier [Frege, by Weiner] |