28 ideas
22659 | It is wisdom to believe what you desire, because belief is needed to achieve it [James] |
22657 | All good philosophers start from a dumb conviction about which truths can be revealed [James] |
22647 | A complete system is just a classification of the whole world's ingredients [James] |
16123 | Whenever you perceive a community of things, you should also hunt out differences in the group [Plato] |
22648 | A single explanation must have a single point of view [James] |
22644 | Our greatest pleasure is the economy of reducing chaotic facts to one single fact [James] |
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] |
22649 | Classification can only ever be for a particular purpose [James] |
5961 | The soul gets its goodness from god, and its evil from previous existence. [Plato] |
22655 | Scientific genius extracts more than other people from the same evidence [James] |
22658 | Experimenters assume the theory is true, and stick to it as long as result don't disappoint [James] |
22654 | We can't know if the laws of nature are stable, but we must postulate it or assume it [James] |
22656 | Trying to assess probabilities by mere calculation is absurd and impossible [James] |
22646 | We have a passion for knowing the parts of something, rather than the whole [James] |
22652 | The mind has evolved entirely for practical interests, seen in our reflex actions [James] |
22651 | Dogs' curiosity only concerns what will happen next [James] |
7946 | The memory criterion has a problem when one thing branches into two things [Williams,B, by Macdonald,C] |
22650 | How can the ground of rationality be itself rational? [James] |
22643 | It seems that we feel rational when we detect no irrationality [James] |
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] |
22660 | Evolution suggests prevailing or survival as a new criterion of right and wrong [James] |
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] |
22645 | Understanding by means of causes is useless if they are not reduced to a minimum number [James] |
279 | Only divine things can always stay the same, and bodies are not like that [Plato] |
22653 | Early Christianity says God recognises the neglected weak and tender impulses [James] |