60 ideas
| 19275 | You cannot understand what exists without understanding possibility and necessity [Hale] |
| 13737 | The empiricist says that metaphysics is meaningless, rather than false [Schlick] |
| 19291 | A canonical defintion specifies the type of thing, and what distinguish this specimen [Hale] |
| 23000 | Vicious regresses force you to another level; non-vicious imply another level [Baron/Miller] |
| 19297 | The two Barcan principles are easily proved in fairly basic modal logic [Hale] |
| 19301 | With a negative free logic, we can dispense with the Barcan formulae [Hale] |
| 19296 | If second-order variables range over sets, those are just objects; properties and relations aren't sets [Hale] |
| 19289 | Maybe conventionalism applies to meaning, but not to the truth of propositions expressed [Hale] |
| 19298 | Unlike axiom proofs, natural deduction proofs needn't focus on logical truths and theorems [Hale] |
| 23024 | A traveller takes a copy of a picture into the past, gives it the artist, who then creates the original! [Baron/Miller] |
| 19295 | Add Hume's principle to logic, to get numbers; arithmetic truths rest on the nature of the numbers [Hale] |
| 23008 | Grounding is intended as a relation that fits dependences between things [Baron/Miller] |
| 19281 | Interesting supervenience must characterise the base quite differently from what supervenes on it [Hale] |
| 19278 | There is no gap between a fact that p, and it is true that p; so we only have the truth-condtions for p [Hale] |
| 19302 | If a chair could be made of slightly different material, that could lead to big changes [Hale] |
| 23018 | How does a changing object retain identity or have incompatible properties over time? [Baron/Miller] |
| 19290 | Absolute necessities are necessarily necessary [Hale] |
| 19286 | 'Absolute necessity' is when there is no restriction on the things which necessitate p [Hale] |
| 19288 | Logical and metaphysical necessities differ in their vocabulary, and their underlying entities [Hale] |
| 19285 | Logical necessity is something which is true, no matter what else is the case [Hale] |
| 19287 | Maybe each type of logic has its own necessity, gradually becoming broader [Hale] |
| 19282 | It seems that we cannot show that modal facts depend on non-modal facts [Hale] |
| 19276 | The big challenge for essentialist views of modality is things having necessary existence [Hale] |
| 19293 | Essentialism doesn't explain necessity reductively; it explains all necessities in terms of a few basic natures [Hale] |
| 19294 | If necessity derives from essences, how do we explain the necessary existence of essences? [Hale] |
| 19279 | What are these worlds, that being true in all of them makes something necessary? [Hale] |
| 19299 | Possible worlds make every proposition true or false, which endorses classical logic [Hale] |
| 19300 | The molecules may explain the water, but they are not what 'water' means [Hale] |
| 23011 | Modern accounts of causation involve either processes or counterfactuals [Baron/Miller] |
| 23013 | The main process theory of causation says it is transference of mass, energy, momentum or charge [Baron/Miller] |
| 23014 | If causes are processes, what is causation by omission? (Distinguish legal from scientific causes?) [Baron/Miller] |
| 23015 | The counterfactual theory of causation handles the problem no matter what causes actually are [Baron/Miller] |
| 23016 | Counterfactual theories struggle with pre-emption by a causal back-up system [Baron/Miller] |
| 23009 | There is no second 'law' of thermodynamics; it just reflects probabilities of certain microstates [Baron/Miller] |
| 23002 | In relativity space and time depend on one's motion, but spacetime gives an invariant metric [Baron/Miller] |
| 22988 | The block universe theory says entities of all times exist, and time is the B-series [Baron/Miller] |
| 22991 | How can we know this is the present moment, if other times are real? [Baron/Miller] |
| 22992 | If we are actually in the past then we shouldn't experience time passing [Baron/Miller] |
| 22994 | Erzatz Presentism allows the existence of other times, with only the present 'actualised' [Baron/Miller] |
| 22998 | How do presentists explain relations between things existing at different times? [Baron/Miller] |
| 23017 | Presentism needs endurantism, because other theories imply most of the object doesn't exist [Baron/Miller] |
| 23023 | How can presentists move to the next future moment, if that doesn't exist? [Baron/Miller] |
| 22995 | Most of the sciences depend on the concept of time [Baron/Miller] |
| 22993 | For abstractionists past times might still exist, althought their objects don't [Baron/Miller] |
| 23001 | The error theory of time's passage says it is either a misdescription or a false inference [Baron/Miller] |
| 22999 | It is meaningless to measure the rate of time using time itself, and without a rate there is no flow [Baron/Miller] |
| 22986 | The C-series rejects A and B, and just sees times as order by betweenness, without direction [Baron/Miller] |
| 22996 | The A-series has to treat being past, present or future as properties [Baron/Miller] |
| 23007 | The B-series can have a direction, as long as it does not arise from temporal flow [Baron/Miller] |
| 23003 | Static theories cannot account for time's obvious asymmetry, so time must be dynamic [Baron/Miller] |
| 23004 | The direction of time is either primitive, or reducible to something else [Baron/Miller] |
| 23005 | The kaon does not seem to be time-reversal invariant, unlike the rest of nature [Baron/Miller] |
| 23006 | Maybe the past is just the direction of decreasing entropy [Baron/Miller] |
| 23010 | We could explain time's direction by causation: past is the direction of causes, future of effects [Baron/Miller] |
| 22989 | Static time theory presents change as one property at t1, and a different property at t2 [Baron/Miller] |
| 23020 | If a time traveller kills his youthful grandfather, he both exists and fails to exist [Baron/Miller] |
| 23022 | Presentism means there no existing past for a time traveller to visit [Baron/Miller] |
| 22987 | The past (unlike the future) is fixed, along with truths about it, by the existence of past objects [Baron/Miller] |
| 22990 | The moving spotlight says entities can have properties of being present, past or future [Baron/Miller] |
| 22997 | The present moment is a matter of existence, not of acquiring a property [Baron/Miller] |