14 ideas
| 9764 | Inspiration and social improvement need wisdom, but not professional philosophy [Quine] |
| 9763 | For a good theory of the world, we must focus on our flabby foundational vocabulary [Quine] |
| 14193 | 'Substance theorists' take modal properties as primitive, without structure, just falling under a sortal [Paul,LA] |
| 14195 | If an object's sort determines its properties, we need to ask what determines its sort [Paul,LA] |
| 14196 | Substance essentialism says an object is multiple, as falling under various different sortals [Paul,LA] |
| 14198 | Absolutely unrestricted qualitative composition would allow things with incompatible properties [Paul,LA] |
| 14190 | Deep essentialist objects have intrinsic properties that fix their nature; the shallow version makes it contextual [Paul,LA] |
| 14191 | Deep essentialists say essences constrain how things could change; modal profiles fix natures [Paul,LA] |
| 14192 | Essentialism must deal with charges of arbitrariness, and failure to reduce de re modality [Paul,LA] |
| 14197 | An object's modal properties don't determine its possibilities [Paul,LA] |
| 14361 | Lewis says indicative conditionals are truth-functional [Lewis, by Jackson] |
| 8434 | In good counterfactuals the consequent holds in world like ours except that the antecedent is true [Lewis, by Horwich] |
| 14189 | 'Modal realists' believe in many concrete worlds, 'actualists' in just this world, 'ersatzists' in abstract other worlds [Paul,LA] |
| 9419 | A law of nature is a general axiom of the deductive system that is best for simplicity and strength [Lewis] |