110 ideas
8013 | In the Reformation, morality became unconditional but irrational, individually autonomous, and secular [MacIntyre] |
8021 | The Levellers and the Diggers mark a turning point in the history of morality [MacIntyre] |
8060 | In the 17th-18th centuries morality offered a cure for egoism, through altruism [MacIntyre] |
8053 | Twentieth century social life is re-enacting eighteenth century philosophy [MacIntyre] |
8047 | Philosophy has been marginalised by its failure in the Enlightenment to replace religion [MacIntyre] |
8062 | Proof is a barren idea in philosophy, and the best philosophy never involves proof [MacIntyre] |
6007 | If you know your father, but don't recognise your father veiled, you know and don't know the same person [Eubulides, by Dancy,R] |
6006 | If you say truly that you are lying, you are lying [Eubulides, by Dancy,R] |
6008 | Removing one grain doesn't destroy a heap, so a heap can't be destroyed [Eubulides, by Dancy,R] |
19482 | Current physics says matter and antimatter should have reduced to light at the big bang [New Sci.] |
19483 | CP violation shows a decay imbalance in matter and antimatter, leading to matter's dominance [New Sci.] |
8052 | To find empiricism and science in the same culture is surprising, as they are really incompatible [MacIntyre] |
10356 | Relativism can be seen as about the rationality of different cultural traditions [MacIntyre, by Kusch] |
8057 | Unpredictability doesn't entail inexplicability, and predictability doesn't entail explicability [MacIntyre] |
19737 | A system can infer the structure of the world by making predictions about it [New Sci.] |
8054 | Social sciences discover no law-like generalisations, and tend to ignore counterexamples [MacIntyre] |
8006 | When Aristotle speaks of soul he means something like personality [MacIntyre] |
19736 | Neural networks can extract the car-ness of a car, or the chair-ness of a chair [New Sci.] |
21050 | I can only make decisions if I see myself as part of a story [MacIntyre] |
16419 | No one has yet devised a rationality test [New Sci.] |
16417 | About a third of variation in human intelligence is environmental [New Sci.] |
16418 | People can be highly intelligent, yet very stupid [New Sci.] |
19484 | Psychologists measure personality along five dimensions [New Sci.] |
8056 | AI can't predict innovation, or consequences, or external relations, or external events [MacIntyre] |
8059 | The good life for man is the life spent seeking the good life for man [MacIntyre] |
8034 | We still have the appearance and language of morality, but we no longer understand it [MacIntyre] |
8036 | Unlike expressions of personal preference, evaluative expressions do not depend on context [MacIntyre] |
8049 | Moral judgements now are anachronisms from a theistic age [MacIntyre] |
8045 | The failure of Enlightenment attempts to justify morality will explain our own culture [MacIntyre] |
8051 | Mention of 'intuition' in morality means something has gone wrong with the argument [MacIntyre] |
8048 | When 'man' is thought of individually, apart from all roles, it ceases to be a functional concept [MacIntyre] |
8035 | In trying to explain the type of approval involved, emotivists are either silent, or viciously circular [MacIntyre] |
8037 | The expression of feeling in a sentence is in its use, not in its meaning [MacIntyre] |
8040 | Emotivism cannot explain the logical terms in moral discourse ('therefore', 'if..then') [MacIntyre] |
8042 | Nowadays most people are emotivists, and it is embodied in our culture [MacIntyre] |
8002 | Sophists don't distinguish a person outside one social order from someone outside all order [MacIntyre] |
8012 | The value/fact logical gulf is misleading, because social facts involve values [MacIntyre] |
8005 | 'Happiness' is a bad translation of 'eudaimonia', which includes both behaving and faring well [MacIntyre] |
8058 | Maybe we can only understand rules if we first understand the virtues [MacIntyre] |
7097 | Virtue is secondary to a role-figure, defined within a culture [MacIntyre, by Statman] |
8043 | Characters are the masks worn by moral philosophies [MacIntyre] |
8061 | If morality just is emotion, there are no external criteria for judging emotions [MacIntyre] |
8001 | 'Dikaiosune' is justice, but also fairness and personal integrity [MacIntyre] |
8023 | My duties depend on my identity, which depends on my social relations [MacIntyre] |
8038 | Since Moore thinks the right action produces the most good, he is a utilitarian [MacIntyre] |
8022 | I am naturally free if I am not tied to anyone by a contract [MacIntyre] |
8050 | There are no natural or human rights, and belief in them is nonsense [MacIntyre] |
23080 | Liberals debate how conservative or radical to be, but don't question their basics [MacIntyre] |
8031 | Fans of natural rights or laws can't agree on what the actual rights or laws are [MacIntyre] |
21167 | Gravity is unusual, in that it always attracts and never repels [New Sci.] |
19950 | Entropy is the only time-asymmetric law, so time may be linked to entropy [New Sci.] |
21176 | In the Big Bang general relativity fails, because gravity is too powerful [New Sci.] |
21147 | Quantum electrodynamics incorporates special relativity and quantum mechanics [New Sci.] |
21155 | Photons have zero rest mass, so virtual photons have infinite range [New Sci.] |
19478 | Light moves at a constant space-time speed, but its direction is in neither space nor time [New Sci.] |
21161 | In the standard model all the fundamental force fields merge at extremely high energies [New Sci.] |
21146 | Electrons move fast, so are subject to special relativity [New Sci.] |
19474 | Quantum states are measured by external time, of unknown origin [New Sci.] |
19473 | The Schrödinger equation describes the evolution of an object's wave function in Hilbert space [New Sci.] |
21148 | The strong force is repulsive at short distances, strong at medium, and fades at long [New Sci.] |
21151 | Gluons, the particles carrying the strong force, interact because of their colour charge [New Sci.] |
21152 | The strong force binds quarks tight, and the nucleus more weakly [New Sci.] |
21143 | Quarks in threes can build hadrons with spin ½ or with spin 3/2 [New Sci.] |
21142 | Classifying hadrons revealed two symmetry patterns, produced by three basic elements [New Sci.] |
21150 | Three different colours of quark (as in the proton) can cancel out to give no colour [New Sci.] |
21153 | The weak force explains beta decay, and the change of type by quarks and leptons [New Sci.] |
21154 | Three particles enable the weak force: W+ and W- are charged, and Z° is not [New Sci.] |
21156 | The weak force particles are heavy, so the force has a short range [New Sci.] |
21164 | Why do the charges of the very different proton and electron perfectly match up? [New Sci.] |
21170 | The Standard Model cannot explain dark energy, survival of matter, gravity, or force strength [New Sci.] |
21145 | The four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong) are the effects of particles [New Sci.] |
21140 | Spin is a built-in ration of angular momentum [New Sci.] |
21149 | Quarks have red, green or blue colour charge (akin to electric charge) [New Sci.] |
21158 | Fermions, with spin ½, are antisocial, and cannot share quantum states [New Sci.] |
21165 | Spin is akin to rotation, and is easily measured in a magnetic field [New Sci.] |
21157 | Particles are spread out, with wave-like properties, and higher energy shortens the wavelength [New Sci.] |
21163 | The mass of protons and neutrinos is mostly binding energy, not the quarks [New Sci.] |
21168 | Gravitional mass turns out to be the same as inertial mass [New Sci.] |
21138 | Neutrons are slightly heavier than protons, and decay into them by emitting an electron [New Sci.] |
21144 | Top, bottom, charm and strange quarks quickly decay into up and down [New Sci.] |
21141 | Neutrinos were proposed as the missing energy in neutron beta decay [New Sci.] |
21169 | Only neutrinos spin anticlockwise [New Sci.] |
21166 | Standard antineutrinos have opposite spin and opposite lepton number [New Sci.] |
21171 | The symmetry of unified electromagnetic and weak forces was broken by the Higgs field [New Sci.] |
19954 | It is impossible for find a model of actuality among the innumerable models in string theory [New Sci.] |
21178 | String theory is now part of 11-dimensional M-Theory, involving p-branes [New Sci.] |
19476 | String theory needs at least 10 space-time dimensions [New Sci.] |
21179 | Supersymmetric string theory can be expressed using loop quantum gravity [New Sci.] |
21175 | String theory might be tested by colliding strings to make bigger 'stringballs' [New Sci.] |
21177 | String theory offers a quantum theory of gravity, by describing the graviton [New Sci.] |
19953 | In string theory space-time has a grainy indivisible substructure [New Sci.] |
21162 | Only supersymmetry offers to incorporate gravity into the scheme [New Sci.] |
21173 | Supersymmetry says particles and superpartners were unities, but then split [New Sci.] |
21172 | The evidence for supersymmetry keeps failing to appear [New Sci.] |
21159 | Supersymmetry has extra heavy bosons and heavy fermions [New Sci.] |
19947 | Hilbert Space is an abstraction representing all possible states of a quantum system [New Sci.] |
21160 | The Higgs field means even low energy space is not empty [New Sci.] |
19948 | Einstein's merging of time with space has left us confused about the nature of time [New Sci.] |
19955 | Space-time may be a geometrical manifestation of quantum entanglement [New Sci.] |
19475 | Relativity makes time and space jointly basic; quantum theory splits them, and prioritises time [New Sci.] |
19949 | Quantum theory relies on a clock outside the system - but where is it located? [New Sci.] |
19951 | Entropy is puzzling, so we may need to build new laws which include time directionality [New Sci.] |
19477 | General relativity predicts black holes, as former massive stars, and as galaxy centres [New Sci.] |
19952 | Black holes have entropy, but general relativity says they are unstructured, and lack entropy [New Sci.] |
16420 | 84.5 percent of the universe is made of dark matter [New Sci.] |
21174 | Dark matter must have mass, to produce gravity, and no electric charge, to not reflect light [New Sci.] |
17604 | We are halfway to synthesising any molecule we want [New Sci.] |
17603 | Chemistry just needs the periodic table, and protons, electrons and neutrinos [New Sci.] |
8055 | If God is omniscient, he confronts no as yet unmade decisions, so decisions are impossible [MacIntyre] |
8008 | The Bible is a story about God in which humans are incidental characters [MacIntyre] |