66 ideas
21584 | A sense of timelessness is essential to wisdom [Russell] |
9593 | Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson] |
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] |
6095 | The business of metaphysics is to describe the world [Russell] |
21573 | When problems are analysed properly, they are either logical, or not philosophical at all [Russell] |
6106 | Reducing entities and premisses makes error less likely [Russell] |
6090 | Facts make propositions true or false, and are expressed by whole sentences [Russell] |
18348 | Not only atomic truths, but also general and negative truths, have truth-makers [Russell, by Rami] |
9594 | Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson] |
6103 | Normally a class with only one member is a problem, because the class and the member are identical [Russell] |
21588 | Logic gives the method of research in philosophy [Russell] |
6092 | In a logically perfect language, there will be just one word for every simple object [Russell] |
6101 | Romulus does not occur in the proposition 'Romulus did not exist' [Russell] |
21586 | The logical connectives are not objects, but are formal, and need a context [Russell] |
6102 | You can understand 'author of Waverley', but to understand 'Scott' you must know who it applies to [Russell] |
10423 | There are a set of criteria for pinning down a logically proper name [Russell, by Sainsbury] |
7744 | Treat description using quantifiers, and treat proper names as descriptions [Russell, by McCullogh] |
10426 | A name has got to name something or it is not a name [Russell] |
21585 | The tortoise won't win, because infinite instants don't compose an infinitely long time [Russell] |
6104 | Numbers are classes of classes, and hence fictions of fictions [Russell] |
21684 | Atomic facts may be inferrable from others, but never from non-atomic facts [Russell] |
21708 | Russell's new logical atomist was of particulars, universals and facts (not platonic propositions) [Russell, by Linsky,B] |
19051 | Russell's atomic facts are actually compounds, and his true logical atoms are sense data [Russell, by Quine] |
6089 | Logical atomism aims at logical atoms as the last residue of analysis [Russell] |
6100 | Once you have enumerated all the atomic facts, there is a further fact that those are all the facts [Russell] |
6105 | Logical atoms aims to get down to ultimate simples, with their own unique reality [Russell] |
9601 | The realist/anti-realist debate is notoriously obscure and fruitless [Williamson] |
21709 | You can't name all the facts, so they are not real, but are what propositions assert [Russell] |
18376 | Russell asserts atomic, existential, negative and general facts [Russell, by Armstrong] |
22316 | A positive and negative fact have the same constituents; their difference is primitive [Russell] |
5465 | Modern trope theory tries, like logical atomism, to reduce things to elementary states [Russell, by Ellis] |
9599 | There cannot be vague objects, so there may be no such thing as a mountain [Williamson] |
6060 | 'Existence' means that a propositional function is sometimes true [Russell] |
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] |
9602 | Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson] |
6099 | Modal terms are properties of propositional functions, not of propositions [Russell] |
9598 | Modal thinking isn't a special intuition; it is part of ordinary counterfactual thinking [Williamson] |
16536 | Williamson can't base metaphysical necessity on the psychology of causal counterfactuals [Lowe on Williamson] |
9596 | We scorn imagination as a test of possibility, forgetting its role in counterfactuals [Williamson] |
21580 | Science condemns sense-data and accepts matter, but a logical construction must link them [Russell] |
9597 | There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson] |
21583 | When sense-data change, there must be indistinguishable sense-data in the process [Russell] |
6098 | Perception goes straight to the fact, and not through the proposition [Russell] |
21577 | Empirical truths are particular, so general truths need an a priori input of generality [Russell] |
9592 | Intuition is neither powerful nor vacuous, but reveals linguistic or conceptual competence [Williamson] |
20181 | When analytic philosophers run out of arguments, they present intuitions as their evidence [Williamson] |
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] |
6416 | Other minds seem to exist, because their testimony supports realism about the world [Russell, by Grayling] |
6097 | The theory of error seems to need the existence of the non-existent [Russell] |
9595 | You might know that the word 'gob' meant 'mouth', but not be competent to use it [Williamson] |
9022 | Russell uses 'propositional function' to refer to both predicates and to attributes [Quine on Russell] |
6091 | Propositions don't name facts, because each fact corresponds to a proposition and its negation [Russell] |
21702 | In 1918 still believes in nonlinguistic analogues of sentences, but he now calls them 'facts' [Russell, by Quine] |
6094 | An inventory of the world does not need to include propositions [Russell] |
6096 | I no longer believe in propositions, especially concerning falsehoods [Russell] |
21712 | I know longer believe in shadowy things like 'that today is Wednesday' when it is actually Tuesday [Russell] |
6093 | The names in a logically perfect language would be private, and could not be shared [Russell] |
9600 | If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson] |
21581 | We never experience times, but only succession of events [Russell] |
6119 | You can discuss 'God exists', so 'God' is a description, not a name [Russell] |