43 ideas
| 9593 | Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson] |
| 15169 | Metaphysics is clarifying how we speak and think (and possibly improving it) [Sidelle] |
| 15164 | We seem to base necessities on thought experiments and imagination [Sidelle] |
| 9594 | Correspondence to the facts is a bad account of analytic truth [Williamson] |
| 9601 | The realist/anti-realist debate is notoriously obscure and fruitless [Williamson] |
| 9599 | There cannot be vague objects, so there may be no such thing as a mountain [Williamson] |
| 15180 | There doesn't seem to be anything in the actual world that can determine modal facts [Sidelle] |
| 9602 | Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson] |
| 15184 | Causal reference presupposes essentialism if it refers to modally extended entities [Sidelle] |
| 15172 | Clearly, essential predications express necessary properties [Sidelle] |
| 15181 | Being a deepest explanatory feature is an actual, not a modal property [Sidelle] |
| 15173 | That the essence of water is its microstructure is a convention, not a discovery [Sidelle] |
| 15185 | We aren't clear about 'same stuff as this', so a principle of individuation is needed to identify it [Sidelle] |
| 15175 | Evaluation of de dicto modalities does not depend on the identity of its objects [Sidelle] |
| 15032 | Necessary a posteriori is conventional for necessity and nonmodal for a posteriority [Sidelle, by Sider] |
| 15179 | To know empirical necessities, we need empirical facts, plus conventions about which are necessary [Sidelle] |
| 9598 | Modal thinking isn't a special intuition; it is part of ordinary counterfactual thinking [Williamson] |
| 15171 | The necessary a posteriori is statements either of identity or of essence [Sidelle] |
| 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] |
| 15167 | Empiricism explores necessities and concept-limits by imagining negations of truths [Sidelle] |
| 15177 | Contradictoriness limits what is possible and what is imaginable [Sidelle] |
| 15176 | The individuals and kinds involved in modality are also a matter of convention [Sidelle] |
| 15174 | A thing doesn't need transworld identity prior to rigid reference - that could be a convention of the reference [Sidelle] |
| 15183 | 'Dthat' operates to make a singular term into a rigid term [Sidelle] |
| 9597 | There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson] |
| 15165 | A priori knowledge is entirely of analytic truths [Sidelle] |
| 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] |
| 15168 | That water is essentially H2O in some way concerns how we use 'water' [Sidelle] |
| 9595 | You might know that the word 'gob' meant 'mouth', but not be competent to use it [Williamson] |
| 15166 | Causal reference seems to get directly at the object, thus leaving its nature open [Sidelle] |
| 15182 | Because some entities overlap, reference must have analytic individuation principles [Sidelle] |
| 9600 | If languages are intertranslatable, and cognition is innate, then cultures are all similar [Williamson] |
| 15178 | Can anything in science reveal the necessity of what it discovers? [Sidelle] |
| 21332 | We don't get a love of 'order' from nature - which is thoroughly chaotic [Mill] |
| 21335 | Belief that an afterlife is required for justice is an admission that this life is very unjust [Mill] |
| 21334 | No necessity ties an omnipotent Creator, so he evidently wills human misery [Mill] |
| 21333 | Evil comes from good just as often as good comes from evil [Mill] |
| 21329 | Nature dispenses cruelty with no concern for either mercy or justice [Mill] |
| 21328 | Killing is a human crime, but nature kills everyone, and often with great tortures [Mill] |
| 21331 | Hurricanes, locusts, floods and blight can starve a million people to death [Mill] |
| 21330 | Nature makes childbirth a miserable experience, often leading to the death of the mother [Mill] |