27 ideas
14092 | Philosophers are often too fussy about words, dismissing perfectly useful ordinary terms [Rosen] |
14100 | Figuring in the definition of a thing doesn't make it a part of that thing [Rosen] |
14096 | Explanations fail to be monotonic [Rosen] |
14097 | Things could be true 'in virtue of' others as relations between truths, or between truths and items [Rosen] |
14095 | Facts are structures of worldly items, rather like sentences, individuated by their ingredients [Rosen] |
14093 | An 'intrinsic' property is one that depends on a thing and its parts, and not on its relations [Rosen] |
9476 | If dispositions are more fundamental than causes, then they won't conceptually reduce to them [Bird on Lewis] |
14094 | The excellent notion of metaphysical 'necessity' cannot be defined [Rosen] |
8425 | For true counterfactuals, both antecedent and consequent true is closest to actuality [Lewis] |
14101 | Are necessary truths rooted in essences, or also in basic grounding laws? [Rosen] |
8424 | Determinism says there can't be two identical worlds up to a time, with identical laws, which then differ [Lewis] |
8420 | A proposition is a set of possible worlds where it is true [Lewis] |
14099 | 'Bachelor' consists in or reduces to 'unmarried' male, but not the other way around [Rosen] |
13304 | Learned men gain more in one day than others do in a lifetime [Posidonius] |
8405 | A theory of causation should explain why cause precedes effect, not take it for granted [Lewis, by Field,H] |
8427 | I reject making the direction of causation axiomatic, since that takes too much for granted [Lewis] |
10392 | It is just individious discrimination to pick out one cause and label it as 'the' cause [Lewis] |
8419 | The modern regularity view says a cause is a member of a minimal set of sufficient conditions [Lewis] |
8421 | Regularity analyses could make c an effect of e, or an epiphenomenon, or inefficacious, or pre-empted [Lewis] |
17525 | The counterfactual view says causes are necessary (rather than sufficient) for their effects [Lewis, by Bird] |
17524 | Lewis has basic causation, counterfactuals, and a general ancestral (thus handling pre-emption) [Lewis, by Bird] |
8397 | Counterfactual causation implies all laws are causal, which they aren't [Tooley on Lewis] |
8423 | My counterfactual analysis applies to particular cases, not generalisations [Lewis] |
8426 | One event causes another iff there is a causal chain from first to second [Lewis] |
4795 | Lewis's account of counterfactuals is fine if we know what a law of nature is, but it won't explain the latter [Cohen,LJ on Lewis] |
20820 | Time is an interval of motion, or the measure of speed [Posidonius, by Stobaeus] |
14098 | An acid is just a proton donor [Rosen] |