34 ideas
| 22659 | It is wisdom to believe what you desire, because belief is needed to achieve it [James] |
| 22657 | All good philosophers start from a dumb conviction about which truths can be revealed [James] |
| 22647 | A complete system is just a classification of the whole world's ingredients [James] |
| 22648 | A single explanation must have a single point of view [James] |
| 22644 | Our greatest pleasure is the economy of reducing chaotic facts to one single fact [James] |
| 13007 | Archimedes defined a straight line as the shortest distance between two points [Archimedes, by Leibniz] |
| 22649 | Classification can only ever be for a particular purpose [James] |
| 22655 | Scientific genius extracts more than other people from the same evidence [James] |
| 22658 | Experimenters assume the theory is true, and stick to it as long as result don't disappoint [James] |
| 22654 | We can't know if the laws of nature are stable, but we must postulate it or assume it [James] |
| 22656 | Trying to assess probabilities by mere calculation is absurd and impossible [James] |
| 22646 | We have a passion for knowing the parts of something, rather than the whole [James] |
| 22652 | The mind has evolved entirely for practical interests, seen in our reflex actions [James] |
| 22651 | Dogs' curiosity only concerns what will happen next [James] |
| 22650 | How can the ground of rationality be itself rational? [James] |
| 22643 | It seems that we feel rational when we detect no irrationality [James] |
| 20014 | Actions include: the involuntary, the purposeful, the intentional, and the self-consciously autonomous [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20019 | Maybe bodily movements are not actions, but only part of an agent's action of moving [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20021 | Is the action the arm movement, the whole causal process, or just the trying to do it? [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20022 | To be intentional, an action must succeed in the manner in which it was planned [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20023 | If someone believes they can control the lottery, and then wins, the relevant skill is missing [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20025 | We might intend two ways to acting, knowing only one of them can succeed [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20031 | On one model, an intention is belief-desire states, and intentional actions relate to beliefs and desires [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20028 | Groups may act for reasons held by none of the members, so maybe groups are agents [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20027 | If there are shared obligations and intentions, we may need a primitive notion of 'joint commitment' [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20016 | Strong Cognitivism identifies an intention to act with a belief [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20017 | Weak Cognitivism says intentions are only partly constituted by a belief [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20018 | Strong Cognitivism implies a mode of 'practical' knowledge, not based on observation [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20012 | Maybe the explanation of an action is in the reasons that make it intelligible to the agent [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20013 | It is generally assumed that reason explanations are causal [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 20029 | Causalists allow purposive explanations, but then reduce the purpose to the action's cause [Wilson/Schpall] |
| 22660 | Evolution suggests prevailing or survival as a new criterion of right and wrong [James] |
| 22645 | Understanding by means of causes is useless if they are not reduced to a minimum number [James] |
| 22653 | Early Christianity says God recognises the neglected weak and tender impulses [James] |