45 ideas
| 20455 | Philosophy really got started as the rival mode of discourse to tragedy [Critchley] |
| 20446 | Philosophy begins in disappointment, notably in religion and politics [Critchley] |
| 3358 | Metaphysics focuses on Platonism, essentialism, materialism and anti-realism [Benardete,JA] |
| 3312 | There are the 'is' of predication (a function), the 'is' of identity (equals), and the 'is' of existence (quantifier) [Benardete,JA] |
| 3352 | Analytical philosophy analyses separate concepts successfully, but lacks a synoptic vision of the results [Benardete,JA] |
| 3329 | Presumably the statements of science are true, but should they be taken literally or not? [Benardete,JA] |
| 20449 | Science gives us an excessively theoretical view of life [Critchley] |
| 20448 | Phenomenology uncovers and redescribes the pre-theoretical layer of life [Critchley] |
| 3326 | Set theory attempts to reduce the 'is' of predication to mathematics [Benardete,JA] |
| 3327 | The set of Greeks is included in the set of men, but isn't a member of it [Benardete,JA] |
| 3335 | The standard Z-F Intuition version of set theory has about ten agreed axioms [Benardete,JA, by PG] |
| 3332 | Greeks saw the science of proportion as the link between geometry and arithmetic [Benardete,JA] |
| 3330 | Negatives, rationals, irrationals and imaginaries are all postulated to solve baffling equations [Benardete,JA] |
| 3337 | Natural numbers are seen in terms of either their ordinality (Peano), or cardinality (set theory) [Benardete,JA] |
| 3310 | If slowness is a property of walking rather than the walker, we must allow that events exist [Benardete,JA] |
| 12793 | Early pre-Socratics had a mass-noun ontology, which was replaced by count-nouns [Benardete,JA] |
| 3353 | If there is no causal interaction with transcendent Platonic objects, how can you learn about them? [Benardete,JA] |
| 11184 | Aristotelian essentialism is about shared properties, individuating essentialism about distinctive properties [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11181 | Aristotelian essentialism involves a 'natural' or 'causal' interpretation of modal operators [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 3304 | Why should packed-together particles be a thing (Mt Everest), but not scattered ones? [Benardete,JA] |
| 3350 | Could a horse lose the essential property of being a horse, and yet continue to exist? [Benardete,JA] |
| 11180 | Essentialist sentences are not theorems of modal logic, and can even be false [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11186 | 'Essentially' won't replace 'necessarily' for vacuous properties like snub-nosed or self-identical [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11185 | 'Is essentially' has a different meaning from 'is necessarily', as they often cannot be substituted [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11182 | If essences are objects with only essential properties, they are elusive in possible worlds [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 3309 | If a soldier continues to exist after serving as a soldier, does the wind cease to exist after it ceases to blow? [Benardete,JA] |
| 3351 | One can step into the same river twice, but not into the same water [Benardete,JA] |
| 3314 | Absolutists might accept that to exist is relative, but relative to what? How about relative to itself? [Benardete,JA] |
| 3323 | Maybe self-identity isn't existence, if Pegasus can be self-identical but non-existent [Benardete,JA] |
| 11183 | The use of possible worlds is to sort properties (not to individuate objects) [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 11187 | In possible worlds, names are just neutral unvarying pegs for truths and predicates [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 3306 | The clearest a priori knowledge is proving non-existence through contradiction [Benardete,JA] |
| 3349 | If we know truths about prime numbers, we seem to have synthetic a priori knowledge of Platonic objects [Benardete,JA] |
| 3341 | Logical positivism amounts to no more than 'there is no synthetic a priori' [Benardete,JA] |
| 3344 | Assertions about existence beyond experience can only be a priori synthetic [Benardete,JA] |
| 3345 | Appeals to intuition seem to imply synthetic a priori knowledge [Benardete,JA] |
| 20454 | Wallace Stevens is the greatest philosophical poet of the twentieth century in English [Critchley] |
| 20456 | Interesting art is always organised around ethical demands [Critchley] |
| 20447 | The problems is not justifying ethics, but motivating it. Why should a self seek its good? [Critchley] |
| 20452 | Anarchism used to be libertarian (especially for sexuality), but now concerns responsibility [Critchley] |
| 20450 | The state, law, bureaucracy and capital are limitations on life, so I prefer federalist anarchism [Critchley] |
| 20451 | Belief that humans are wicked leads to authoritarian politics [Critchley] |
| 11189 | Dispositional essences are special, as if an object loses them they cease to exist [Marcus (Barcan)] |
| 3334 | Rationalists see points as fundamental, but empiricists prefer regions [Benardete,JA] |
| 3308 | In the ontological argument a full understanding of the concept of God implies a contradiction in 'There is no God' [Benardete,JA] |