29 ideas
| 24032 | Clever scholars can obscure things which are obvious even to peasants [Descartes] |
| 16123 | Whenever you perceive a community of things, you should also hunt out differences in the group [Plato] |
| 24033 | Most scholastic disputes concern words, where agreeing on meanings would settle them [Descartes] |
| 5438 | Hermeneutics of tradition is sympathetic, hermeneutics of suspicion is hostile [Ricoeur, by Mautner] |
| 24024 | The secret of the method is to recognise which thing in a series is the simplest [Descartes] |
| 24018 | One truth leads us to another [Descartes] |
| 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] |
| 24035 | Unity is something shared by many things, so in that respect they are equals [Descartes] |
| 24036 | I can only see the proportion of two to three if there is a common measure - their unity [Descartes] |
| 24029 | Among the simples are the graspable negations, such as rest and instants [Descartes] |
| 24030 | 3+4=7 is necessary because we cannot conceive of seven without including three and four [Descartes] |
| 24019 | If we accept mere probabilities as true we undermine our existing knowledge [Descartes] |
| 24020 | We all see intuitively that we exist, where intuition is attentive, clear and distinct rational understanding [Descartes] |
| 24031 | When Socrates doubts, he know he doubts, and that truth is possible [Descartes] |
| 24025 | Clear and distinct truths must be known all at once (unlike deductions) [Descartes] |
| 24022 | Our souls possess divine seeds of knowledge, which can bear spontaneous fruit [Descartes] |
| 5961 | The soul gets its goodness from god, and its evil from previous existence. [Plato] |
| 24034 | If someone had only seen the basic colours, they could deduce the others from resemblance [Descartes] |
| 24021 | The method starts with clear intuitions, followed by a process of deduction [Descartes] |
| 24027 | Nerves and movement originate in the brain, where imagination moves them [Descartes] |
| 24026 | Our four knowledge faculties are intelligence, imagination, the senses, and memory [Descartes] |
| 24028 | The force by which we know things is spiritual, and quite distinct from the body [Descartes] |
| 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] |
| 24023 | All the sciences searching for order and measure are related to mathematics [Descartes] |
| 279 | Only divine things can always stay the same, and bodies are not like that [Plato] |