85 ideas
| 7500 | Early Greeks cared about city and companions; later Greeks concentrated on the self [Foucault] |
| 15045 | The big issue since the eighteenth century has been: what is Reason? Its effect, limits and dangers? [Foucault] |
| 7426 | Critical philosophy is what questions domination at every level [Foucault] |
| 7423 | Philosophy and politics are fundamentally linked [Foucault] |
| 15038 | Structuralism systematically abstracted the event from sciences, and even from history [Foucault] |
| 7420 | When logos controls our desires, we have actually become the logos [Foucault] |
| 21945 | Foucault originally felt that liberating reason had become an instrument of domination [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 15044 | 'Truth' is the procedures for controlling which statements are acceptable [Foucault] |
| 15042 | Truth doesn't arise from solitary freedom, but from societies with constraints [Foucault] |
| 10987 | Three traditional names of rules are 'Simplification', 'Addition' and 'Disjunctive Syllogism' [Read] |
| 11004 | Necessity is provability in S4, and true in all worlds in S5 [Read] |
| 11018 | There are fuzzy predicates (and sets), and fuzzy quantifiers and modifiers [Read] |
| 11011 | Same say there are positive, negative and neuter free logics [Read] |
| 11020 | Realisms like the full Comprehension Principle, that all good concepts determine sets [Read] |
| 14187 | If logic is topic-neutral that means it delves into all subjects, rather than having a pure subject matter [Read] |
| 10986 | Not all validity is captured in first-order logic [Read] |
| 20100 | Classical liberalism seeks freedom of opinion, of private life, of expression, and of property [Micklethwait/Wooldridge] |
| 10972 | The non-emptiness of the domain is characteristic of classical logic [Read] |
| 11024 | Semantics must precede proof in higher-order logics, since they are incomplete [Read] |
| 10985 | We should exclude second-order logic, precisely because it captures arithmetic [Read] |
| 14188 | Not all arguments are valid because of form; validity is just true premises and false conclusion being impossible [Read] |
| 14182 | If the logic of 'taller of' rests just on meaning, then logic may be the study of merely formal consequence [Read] |
| 14183 | Maybe arguments are only valid when suppressed premises are all stated - but why? [Read] |
| 10970 | A theory of logical consequence is a conceptual analysis, and a set of validity techniques [Read] |
| 10984 | Logical consequence isn't just a matter of form; it depends on connections like round-square [Read] |
| 14184 | In modus ponens the 'if-then' premise contributes nothing if the conclusion follows anyway [Read] |
| 14186 | Logical connectives contain no information, but just record combination relations between facts [Read] |
| 10973 | A theory is logically closed, which means infinite premisses [Read] |
| 11007 | Quantifiers are second-order predicates [Read] |
| 10978 | In second-order logic the higher-order variables range over all the properties of the objects [Read] |
| 10971 | A logical truth is the conclusion of a valid inference with no premisses [Read] |
| 10988 | Any first-order theory of sets is inadequate [Read] |
| 10974 | Compactness is when any consequence of infinite propositions is the consequence of a finite subset [Read] |
| 10975 | Compactness does not deny that an inference can have infinitely many premisses [Read] |
| 10977 | Compactness blocks the proof of 'for every n, A(n)' (as the proof would be infinite) [Read] |
| 10976 | Compactness makes consequence manageable, but restricts expressive power [Read] |
| 11014 | Self-reference paradoxes seem to arise only when falsity is involved [Read] |
| 11025 | Infinite cuts and successors seems to suggest an actual infinity there waiting for us [Read] |
| 10979 | Although second-order arithmetic is incomplete, it can fully model normal arithmetic [Read] |
| 10980 | Second-order arithmetic covers all properties, ensuring categoricity [Read] |
| 10997 | Von Neumann numbers are helpful, but don't correctly describe numbers [Read] |
| 11016 | Would a language without vagueness be usable at all? [Read] |
| 11019 | Supervaluations say there is a cut-off somewhere, but at no particular place [Read] |
| 11012 | A 'supervaluation' gives a proposition consistent truth-value for classical assignments [Read] |
| 11013 | Identities and the Indiscernibility of Identicals don't work with supervaluations [Read] |
| 10995 | A haecceity is a set of individual properties, essential to each thing [Read] |
| 11001 | Equating necessity with truth in every possible world is the S5 conception of necessity [Read] |
| 10992 | The point of conditionals is to show that one will accept modus ponens [Read] |
| 10989 | The standard view of conditionals is that they are truth-functional [Read] |
| 11017 | Some people even claim that conditionals do not express propositions [Read] |
| 14185 | Conditionals are just a shorthand for some proof, leaving out the details [Read] |
| 10983 | Knowledge of possible worlds is not causal, but is an ontology entailed by semantics [Read] |
| 10982 | How can modal Platonists know the truth of a modal proposition? [Read] |
| 10996 | Actualism is reductionist (to parts of actuality), or moderate realist (accepting real abstractions) [Read] |
| 10981 | A possible world is a determination of the truth-values of all propositions of a domain [Read] |
| 11000 | If worlds are concrete, objects can't be present in more than one, and can only have counterparts [Read] |
| 15037 | Why does knowledge appear in sudden bursts, and not in a smooth continuous development? [Foucault] |
| 21942 | Foucault challenges knowledge in psychology and sociology, not in the basic sciences [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7424 | Saying games of truth were merely power relations would be a horrible exaggeration [Foucault] |
| 21941 | Unlike Marxists, Foucault explains thought internally, without deference to conscious ideas [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 10998 | The mind abstracts ways things might be, which are nonetheless real [Read] |
| 7422 | A subject is a form which can change, in (say) political or sexual situations [Foucault] |
| 22235 | Feelings are not unchanging, but have a history (especially if they are noble) [Foucault] |
| 11005 | Negative existentials with compositionality make the whole sentence meaningless [Read] |
| 10966 | A proposition objectifies what a sentence says, as indicative, with secure references [Read] |
| 21939 | The author function of any text is a plurality of selves [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7419 | Ethics is the conscious practice of freedom [Foucault] |
| 7501 | Why couldn't a person's life become a work of art? [Foucault] |
| 7498 | Greeks and early Christians were much more concerned about food than about sex [Foucault] |
| 21940 | Nature is not the basis of rights, but the willingness to risk death in asserting them [Foucault] |
| 15043 | Every society has a politics of truth, concerning its values, functions, prestige and mechanisms [Foucault] |
| 15040 | Marxists denounced power as class domination, but never analysed its mechanics [Foucault] |
| 15041 | Power doesn't just repress, but entices us with pleasure, artefacts, knowledge and discourse [Foucault] |
| 8991 | Foucault can't accept that power is sometimes decent and benign [Foucault, by Scruton] |
| 7425 | The aim is not to eliminate power relations, but to reduce domination [Foucault] |
| 22236 | The big question of the Renaissance was how to govern everything, from the state to children [Foucault] |
| 21947 | Power is localised, so we either have totalitarian centralisation, or local politics [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 20097 | The welfare state aims at freedom from want, and equality of opportunity [Micklethwait/Wooldridge] |
| 20099 | For communists history is driven by the proletariat [Micklethwait/Wooldridge] |
| 20098 | Fans of economic freedom claim that capitalism is self-correcting [Micklethwait/Wooldridge] |
| 21946 | Prisons gradually became our models for schools, hospitals and factories [Foucault, by Gutting] |
| 7418 | The idea of liberation suggests there is a human nature which has been repressed [Foucault] |
| 20096 | Roman law entrenched property rights [Micklethwait/Wooldridge] |
| 21116 | Power is used to create identities and ways of life for other people [Foucault, by Shorten] |
| 15039 | History lacks 'meaning', but it can be analysed in terms of its struggles [Foucault] |