47 ideas
| 1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
| 16512 | Semantic facts are preferable to transcendental philosophical fiction [Wiggins] |
| 192 | Only one thing can be contrary to something [Plato] |
| 17529 | Maybe the concept needed under which things coincide must also yield a principle of counting [Wiggins] |
| 17530 | The sortal needed for identities may not always be sufficient to support counting [Wiggins] |
| 16523 | Realist Conceptualists accept that our interests affect our concepts [Wiggins] |
| 16524 | Conceptualism says we must use our individuating concepts to grasp reality [Wiggins] |
| 16526 | Animal classifications: the Emperor's, fabulous, innumerable, like flies, stray dogs, embalmed…. [Wiggins] |
| 190 | If asked whether justice itself is just or unjust, you would have to say that it is just [Plato] |
| 16492 | Individuation needs accounts of identity, of change, and of singling out [Wiggins] |
| 16493 | Individuation can only be understood by the relation between things and thinkers [Wiggins] |
| 16496 | Singling out extends back and forward in time [Wiggins] |
| 16495 | The only singling out is singling out 'as' something [Wiggins] |
| 16501 | In Aristotle's sense, saying x falls under f is to say what x is [Wiggins] |
| 16506 | Every determinate thing falls under a sortal, which fixes its persistence [Wiggins] |
| 16509 | Natural kinds are well suited to be the sortals which fix substances [Wiggins] |
| 16514 | Artefacts are individuated by some matter having a certain function [Wiggins] |
| 16510 | Nominal essences don't fix membership, ignore evolution, and aren't contextual [Wiggins] |
| 16503 | 'What is it?' gives the kind, nature, persistence conditions and identity over time of a thing [Wiggins] |
| 16499 | A restored church is the same 'church', but not the same 'building' or 'brickwork' [Wiggins] |
| 16515 | A thing begins only once; for a clock, it is when its making is first completed [Wiggins] |
| 16517 | Priests prefer the working ship; antiquarians prefer the reconstruction [Wiggins] |
| 16502 | Identity is primitive [Wiggins] |
| 16498 | Identity cannot be defined, because definitions are identities [Wiggins] |
| 16497 | Leibniz's Law (not transitivity, symmetry, reflexivity) marks what is peculiar to identity [Wiggins] |
| 16521 | A is necessarily A, so if B is A, then B is also necessarily A [Wiggins] |
| 16505 | By the principle of Indiscernibility, a symmetrical object could only be half of itself! [Wiggins] |
| 16494 | We want to explain sameness as coincidence of substance, not as anything qualitative [Wiggins] |
| 3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 16522 | It is hard or impossible to think of Caesar as not human [Wiggins] |
| 20184 | The only real evil is loss of knowledge [Plato] |
| 20185 | The most important things in life are wisdom and knowledge [Plato] |
| 16525 | Our sortal concepts fix what we find in experience [Wiggins] |
| 191 | Everything resembles everything else up to a point [Plato] |
| 16518 | We conceptualise objects, but they impinge on us [Wiggins] |
| 16511 | A 'conception' of a horse is a full theory of what it is (and not just the 'concept') [Wiggins] |
| 203 | Courage is knowing what should or shouldn't be feared [Plato] |
| 202 | No one willingly and knowingly embraces evil [Plato] |
| 193 | Some things are good even though they are not beneficial to men [Plato] |
| 200 | People tend only to disapprove of pleasure if it leads to pain, or prevents future pleasure [Plato] |
| 197 | Some pleasures are not good, and some pains are not evil [Plato] |
| 189 | If we punish wrong-doers, it shows that we believe virtue can be taught [Plato] |
| 204 | Socrates is contradicting himself in claiming virtue can't be taught, but that it is knowledge [Plato] |
| 188 | Socrates did not believe that virtue could be taught [Plato] |
| 1494 | Thales said water is the first principle, perhaps from observing that food is moist [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 1713 | Thales must have thought soul causes movement, since he thought magnets have soul [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |