69 ideas
| 16227 | Philosophers are good at denying the obvious [Hawley] |
| 14092 | Philosophers are often too fussy about words, dismissing perfectly useful ordinary terms [Rosen] |
| 14100 | Figuring in the definition of a thing doesn't make it a part of that thing [Rosen] |
| 18851 | Pairing (with Extensionality) guarantees an infinity of sets, just from a single element [Rosen] |
| 16216 | Part of the sense of a proper name is a criterion of the thing's identity [Hawley] |
| 14096 | Explanations fail to be monotonic [Rosen] |
| 14097 | Things could be true 'in virtue of' others as relations between truths, or between truths and items [Rosen] |
| 16211 | A homogeneous rotating disc should be undetectable according to Humean supervenience [Hawley] |
| 14095 | Facts are structures of worldly items, rather like sentences, individuated by their ingredients [Rosen] |
| 16219 | Non-linguistic things cannot be indeterminate, because they don't have truth-values at all [Hawley] |
| 16223 | Maybe for the world to be vague, it must be vague in its foundations? [Hawley] |
| 16226 | Epistemic vagueness seems right in the case of persons [Hawley] |
| 16208 | Supervaluation refers to one vaguely specified thing, through satisfaction by everything in some range [Hawley] |
| 16221 | Supervaluationism takes what the truth-value would have been if indecision was resolved [Hawley] |
| 16230 | Maybe the only properties are basic ones like charge, mass and spin [Hawley] |
| 14093 | An 'intrinsic' property is one that depends on a thing and its parts, and not on its relations [Rosen] |
| 16232 | An object is 'natural' if its stages are linked by certain non-supervenient relations [Hawley] |
| 8915 | How we refer to abstractions is much less clear than how we refer to other things [Rosen] |
| 18852 | A Meinongian principle might say that there is an object for any modest class of properties [Rosen] |
| 16200 | Are sortals spatially maximal - so no cat part is allowed to be a cat? [Hawley] |
| 16237 | The modal features of statue and lump are disputed; when does it stop being that statue? [Hawley] |
| 16238 | Perdurantists can adopt counterpart theory, to explain modal differences of identical part-sums [Hawley] |
| 16220 | Vagueness is either in our knowledge, in our talk, or in reality [Hawley] |
| 16222 | Indeterminacy in objects and in properties are not distinct cases [Hawley] |
| 16228 | The constitution theory is endurantism plus more than one object in a place [Hawley] |
| 16229 | Constitution theory needs sortal properties like 'being a sweater' to distinguish it from its thread [Hawley] |
| 14492 | If the constitution view says thread and sweater are two things, why do we talk of one thing? [Hawley] |
| 16193 | 'Adverbialism' explains change by saying an object has-at-some-time a given property [Hawley] |
| 16195 | Presentism solves the change problem: the green banana ceases, so can't 'relate' to the yellow one [Hawley] |
| 16202 | The problem of change arises if there must be 'identity' of a thing over time [Hawley] |
| 16192 | Endurance theory can relate properties to times, or timed instantiations to properties [Hawley] |
| 16196 | Endurance is a sophisticated theory, covering properties, instantiation and time [Hawley] |
| 16197 | How does perdurance theory explain our concern for our own future selves? [Hawley] |
| 16191 | Perdurance needs an atemporal perspective, to say that the object 'has' different temporal parts [Hawley] |
| 16199 | If an object is the sum of all of its temporal parts, its mass is staggeringly large! [Hawley] |
| 16201 | Perdurance says things are sums of stages; Stage Theory says each stage is the thing [Hawley] |
| 16240 | If a life is essentially the sum of its temporal parts, it couldn't be shorter or longer than it was? [Hawley] |
| 16205 | The stages of Stage Theory seem too thin to populate the world, or to be referred to [Hawley] |
| 16203 | Stage Theory seems to miss out the link between stages of the same object [Hawley] |
| 16204 | Stage Theory says every stage is a distinct object, which gives too many objects [Hawley] |
| 16212 | An isolated stage can't be a banana (which involves suitable relations to other stages) [Hawley] |
| 16213 | Stages of one thing are related by extrinsic counterfactual and causal relations [Hawley] |
| 16206 | Stages must be as fine-grained in length as change itself, so any change is a new stage [Hawley] |
| 16225 | If two things might be identical, there can't be something true of one and false of the other [Hawley] |
| 18850 | 'Metaphysical' modality is the one that makes the necessity or contingency of laws of nature interesting [Rosen] |
| 18849 | Metaphysical necessity is absolute and universal; metaphysical possibility is very tolerant [Rosen] |
| 18857 | Standard Metaphysical Necessity: P holds wherever the actual form of the world holds [Rosen] |
| 14094 | The excellent notion of metaphysical 'necessity' cannot be defined [Rosen] |
| 18858 | Sets, universals and aggregates may be metaphysically necessary in one sense, but not another [Rosen] |
| 18856 | Non-Standard Metaphysical Necessity: when ¬P is incompatible with the nature of things [Rosen] |
| 18848 | Something may be necessary because of logic, but is that therefore a special sort of necessity? [Rosen] |
| 18855 | Combinatorial theories of possibility assume the principles of combination don't change across worlds [Rosen] |
| 14101 | Are necessary truths rooted in essences, or also in basic grounding laws? [Rosen] |
| 18853 | A proposition is 'correctly' conceivable if an ominiscient being could conceive it [Rosen] |
| 16239 | To decide whether something is a counterpart, we need to specify a relevant sortal concept [Hawley] |
| 16218 | On any theory of self, it is hard to explain why we should care about our future selves [Hawley] |
| 8917 | The Way of Abstraction used to say an abstraction is an idea that was formed by abstracting [Rosen] |
| 8912 | Nowadays abstractions are defined as non-spatial, causally inert things [Rosen] |
| 8913 | Chess may be abstract, but it has existed in specific space and time [Rosen] |
| 8914 | Sets are said to be abstract and non-spatial, but a set of books can be on a shelf [Rosen] |
| 8916 | Conflating abstractions with either sets or universals is a big claim, needing a big defence [Rosen] |
| 8918 | Functional terms can pick out abstractions by asserting an equivalence relation [Rosen] |
| 8919 | Abstraction by equivalence relationships might prove that a train is an abstract entity [Rosen] |
| 14099 | 'Bachelor' consists in or reduces to 'unmarried' male, but not the other way around [Rosen] |
| 3031 | The greatest good is not the achievement of desire, but to desire what is proper [Menedemus, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 16215 | Causation is nothing more than the counterfactuals it grounds? [Hawley] |
| 18854 | The MRL view says laws are the theorems of the simplest and strongest account of the world [Rosen] |
| 16207 | Time could be discrete (like integers) or dense (rationals) or continuous (reals) [Hawley] |
| 14098 | An acid is just a proton donor [Rosen] |