44 ideas
| 16123 | Whenever you perceive a community of things, you should also hunt out differences in the group [Plato] |
| 16512 | Semantic facts are preferable to transcendental philosophical fiction [Wiggins] |
| 16125 | To reveal a nature, divide down, and strip away what it has in common with other things [Plato] |
| 16124 | No one wants to define 'weaving' just for the sake of weaving [Plato] |
| 12766 | Logical space is abstracted from the actual world [Stalnaker] |
| 17529 | Maybe the concept needed under which things coincide must also yield a principle of counting [Wiggins] |
| 17530 | The sortal needed for identities may not always be sufficient to support counting [Wiggins] |
| 16523 | Realist Conceptualists accept that our interests affect our concepts [Wiggins] |
| 16524 | Conceptualism says we must use our individuating concepts to grasp reality [Wiggins] |
| 16526 | Animal classifications: the Emperor's, fabulous, innumerable, like flies, stray dogs, embalmed…. [Wiggins] |
| 16492 | Individuation needs accounts of identity, of change, and of singling out [Wiggins] |
| 16493 | Individuation can only be understood by the relation between things and thinkers [Wiggins] |
| 16496 | Singling out extends back and forward in time [Wiggins] |
| 16495 | The only singling out is singling out 'as' something [Wiggins] |
| 16501 | In Aristotle's sense, saying x falls under f is to say what x is [Wiggins] |
| 16506 | Every determinate thing falls under a sortal, which fixes its persistence [Wiggins] |
| 12764 | For the bare particular view, properties must be features, not just groups of objects [Stalnaker] |
| 16509 | Natural kinds are well suited to be the sortals which fix substances [Wiggins] |
| 12761 | An essential property is one had in all the possible worlds where a thing exists [Stalnaker] |
| 12763 | Necessarily self-identical, or being what it is, or its world-indexed properties, aren't essential [Stalnaker] |
| 16514 | Artefacts are individuated by some matter having a certain function [Wiggins] |
| 16510 | Nominal essences don't fix membership, ignore evolution, and aren't contextual [Wiggins] |
| 12762 | Bare particular anti-essentialism makes no sense within modal logic semantics [Stalnaker] |
| 16503 | 'What is it?' gives the kind, nature, persistence conditions and identity over time of a thing [Wiggins] |
| 16499 | A restored church is the same 'church', but not the same 'building' or 'brickwork' [Wiggins] |
| 16515 | A thing begins only once; for a clock, it is when its making is first completed [Wiggins] |
| 16517 | Priests prefer the working ship; antiquarians prefer the reconstruction [Wiggins] |
| 16498 | Identity cannot be defined, because definitions are identities [Wiggins] |
| 16497 | Leibniz's Law (not transitivity, symmetry, reflexivity) marks what is peculiar to identity [Wiggins] |
| 16502 | Identity is primitive [Wiggins] |
| 16521 | A is necessarily A, so if B is A, then B is also necessarily A [Wiggins] |
| 16505 | By the principle of Indiscernibility, a symmetrical object could only be half of itself! [Wiggins] |
| 16494 | We want to explain sameness as coincidence of substance, not as anything qualitative [Wiggins] |
| 16522 | It is hard or impossible to think of Caesar as not human [Wiggins] |
| 12765 | Why imagine that Babe Ruth might be a billiard ball; nothing useful could be said about the ball [Stalnaker] |
| 5961 | The soul gets its goodness from god, and its evil from previous existence. [Plato] |
| 16525 | Our sortal concepts fix what we find in experience [Wiggins] |
| 16518 | We conceptualise objects, but they impinge on us [Wiggins] |
| 16511 | A 'conception' of a horse is a full theory of what it is (and not just the 'concept') [Wiggins] |
| 283 | The question of whether or not to persuade comes before the science of persuasion [Plato] |
| 282 | Non-physical beauty can only be shown clearly by speech [Plato] |
| 281 | The arts produce good and beautiful things by preserving the mean [Plato] |
| 22559 | Democracy is the worst of good constitutions, but the best of bad constitutions [Plato, by Aristotle] |
| 279 | Only divine things can always stay the same, and bodies are not like that [Plato] |