57 ideas
| 14255 | We understand things through their dependency relations [Fine,K] |
| 9593 | Progress in philosophy is incremental, not an immature seeking after drama [Williamson] |
| 14250 | Metaphysics deals with the existence of things and with the nature of things [Fine,K] |
| 6095 | The business of metaphysics is to describe the world [Russell] |
| 6106 | Reducing entities and premisses makes error less likely [Russell] |
| 14259 | Maybe two objects might require simultaneous real definitions, as with two simultaneous terms [Fine,K] |
| 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] |
| 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] |
| 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] |
| 6104 | Numbers are classes of classes, and hence fictions of fictions [Russell] |
| 14253 | An object's 'being' isn't existence; there's more to an object than existence, and its nature doesn't include existence [Fine,K] |
| 14251 | A natural modal account of dependence says x depends on y if y must exist when x does [Fine,K] |
| 14254 | Dependency is the real counterpart of one term defining another [Fine,K] |
| 14257 | An object depends on another if the second cannot be eliminated from the first's definition [Fine,K] |
| 14261 | There is 'weak' dependence in one definition, and 'strong' dependence in all the definitions [Fine,K] |
| 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] |
| 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] |
| 14252 | We should understand identity in terms of the propositions it renders true [Fine,K] |
| 9602 | Common sense and classical logic are often simultaneously abandoned in debates on vagueness [Williamson] |
| 14256 | How do we distinguish basic from derived esssences? [Fine,K] |
| 14258 | Maybe some things have essential relationships as well as essential properties [Fine,K] |
| 14260 | An object only essentially has a property if that property follows from every definition of the object [Fine,K] |
| 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] |
| 9597 | There are 'armchair' truths which are not a priori, because experience was involved [Williamson] |
| 6098 | Perception goes straight to the fact, and not through the proposition [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] |
| 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] |
| 6119 | You can discuss 'God exists', so 'God' is a description, not a name [Russell] |