51 ideas
| 21584 | A sense of timelessness is essential to wisdom [Russell] |
| 21572 | Philosophical disputes are mostly hopeless, because philosophers don't understand each other [Russell] |
| 21571 | Philosophical systems are interesting, but we now need a more objective scientific philosophy [Russell] |
| 21574 | Hegel's confusions over 'is' show how vast systems can be built on simple errors [Russell] |
| 21587 | Philosophers sometimes neglect truth and distort facts to attain a nice system [Russell] |
| 21582 | Physicists accept particles, points and instants, while pretending they don't do metaphysics [Russell] |
| 6891 | Quine's naturalistic and empirical view is based entirely on first-order logic and set theory [Quine, by Mautner] |
| 6310 | Enquiry needs a conceptual scheme, so we should retain the best available [Quine] |
| 21573 | When problems are analysed properly, they are either logical, or not philosophical at all [Russell] |
| 21588 | Logic gives the method of research in philosophy [Russell] |
| 21586 | The logical connectives are not objects, but are formal, and need a context [Russell] |
| 12798 | Plurals can in principle be paraphrased away altogether [Quine] |
| 21585 | The tortoise won't win, because infinite instants don't compose an infinitely long time [Russell] |
| 17905 | Any progression will do nicely for numbers; they can all then be used to measure multiplicity [Quine] |
| 9556 | Nearly all of mathematics has to quantify over abstract objects [Quine] |
| 21684 | Atomic facts may be inferrable from others, but never from non-atomic facts [Russell] |
| 22316 | A positive and negative fact have the same constituents; their difference is primitive [Russell] |
| 16462 | The quest for ultimate categories is the quest for a simple clear pattern of notation [Quine] |
| 21576 | With asymmetrical relations (before/after) the reduction to properties is impossible [Russell] |
| 21575 | When we attribute a common quality to a group, we can forget the quality and just talk of the group [Russell] |
| 15723 | Either dispositions rest on structures, or we keep saying 'all things being equal' [Quine] |
| 15490 | Explain unmanifested dispositions as structural similarities to objects which have manifested them [Quine, by Martin,CB] |
| 8504 | Quine aims to deal with properties by the use of eternal open sentences, or classes [Quine, by Devitt] |
| 8464 | Physical objects in space-time are just events or processes, no matter how disconnected [Quine] |
| 7924 | The notion of a physical object is by far the most useful one for science [Quine] |
| 8482 | Mathematicians must be rational but not two-legged, cyclists the opposite. So a mathematical cyclist? [Quine] |
| 12136 | Cyclist are not actually essentially two-legged [Brody on Quine] |
| 17594 | We can paraphrase 'x=y' as a sequence of the form 'if Fx then Fy' [Quine] |
| 15725 | Normal conditionals have a truth-value gap when the antecedent is false. [Quine] |
| 15722 | Conditionals are pointless if the truth value of the antecedent is known [Quine] |
| 15719 | We feign belief in counterfactual antecedents, and assess how convincing the consequent is [Quine] |
| 15721 | Counterfactuals are plausible when dispositions are involved, as they imply structures [Quine] |
| 15720 | What stays the same in assessing a counterfactual antecedent depends on context [Quine] |
| 15724 | Counterfactuals have no place in a strict account of science [Quine] |
| 21580 | Science condemns sense-data and accepts matter, but a logical construction must link them [Russell] |
| 21583 | When sense-data change, there must be indistinguishable sense-data in the process [Russell] |
| 21577 | Empirical truths are particular, so general truths need an a priori input of generality [Russell] |
| 21579 | Objects are treated as real when they connect with other experiences in a normal way [Russell] |
| 21578 | Global scepticism is irrefutable, but can't replace our other beliefs, and just makes us hesitate [Russell] |
| 4630 | Two theories can be internally consistent and match all the facts, yet be inconsistent with one another [Quine, by Baggini /Fosl] |
| 6416 | Other minds seem to exist, because their testimony supports realism about the world [Russell, by Grayling] |
| 3131 | Quine expresses the instrumental version of eliminativism [Quine, by Rey] |
| 3988 | Indeterminacy of translation also implies indeterminacy in interpreting people's mental states [Dennett on Quine] |
| 6311 | The firmer the links between sentences and stimuli, the less translations can diverge [Quine] |
| 6312 | We can never precisely pin down how to translate the native word 'Gavagai' [Quine] |
| 6313 | Stimulus synonymy of 'Gavagai' and 'Rabbit' does not even guarantee they are coextensive [Quine] |
| 6317 | Dispositions to speech behaviour, and actual speech, are never enough to fix any one translation [Quine] |
| 6315 | We should be suspicious of a translation which implies that a people have very strange beliefs [Quine] |
| 6314 | Weird translations are always possible, but they improve if we impose our own logic on them [Quine] |
| 21581 | We never experience times, but only succession of events [Russell] |
| 5994 | Is the cosmos open or closed, mechanical or teleological, alive or inanimate, and created or eternal? [Robinson,TM, by PG] |