36 ideas
| 14611 | Metaphysics should avoid talk of past, present or future [Smart] |
| 17070 | Coherence is consilience, simplicity, analogy, and fitting into a web of belief [Smart] |
| 17072 | We need comprehensiveness, as well as self-coherence [Smart] |
| 6558 | A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds [Emerson] |
| 1553 | No perceptible object is truly straight or curved [Protagoras] |
| 1549 | Everything that exists consists in being perceived [Protagoras] |
| 17073 | I simply reject evidence, if it is totally contrary to my web of belief [Smart] |
| 1545 | Protagoras was the first to claim that there are two contradictory arguments about everything [Protagoras, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 1547 | Man is the measure of all things - of things that are, and of things that are not [Protagoras] |
| 3305 | There is no more purely metaphysical doctrine than Protagorean relativism [Benardete,JA on Protagoras] |
| 3317 | You can only state the problem of the relative warmth of an object by agreeing on the underlying object [Benardete,JA on Protagoras] |
| 3313 | If my hot wind is your cold wind, then wind is neither hot nor cold, and so not as cold as itself [Benardete,JA on Protagoras] |
| 247 | God is "the measure of all things", more than any man [Plato on Protagoras] |
| 606 | Protagoras absurdly thought that the knowing or perceiving man is 'the measure of all things' [Aristotle on Protagoras] |
| 612 | Relativists think if you poke your eye and see double, there must be two things [Aristotle on Protagoras] |
| 17077 | The height of a flagpole could be fixed by its angle of shadow, but that would be very unusual [Smart] |
| 17078 | Universe expansion explains the red shift, but not vice versa [Smart] |
| 17061 | Explanation of a fact is fitting it into a system of beliefs [Smart] |
| 17074 | Explanations are bad by fitting badly with a web of beliefs, or fitting well into a bad web [Smart] |
| 17076 | Deducing from laws is one possible way to achieve a coherent explanation [Smart] |
| 17071 | An explanation is better if it also explains phenomena from a different field [Smart] |
| 17062 | If scientific explanation is causal, that rules out mathematical explanation [Smart] |
| 17075 | Scientific explanation tends to reduce things to the unfamiliar (not the familiar) [Smart] |
| 6016 | Early sophists thought convention improved nature; later they said nature was diminished by it [Protagoras, by Miller,FD] |
| 1580 | For Protagoras the only bad behaviour is that which interferes with social harmony [Protagoras, by Roochnik] |
| 205 | Protagoras contradicts himself by saying virtue is teachable, but then that it is not knowledge [Plato on Protagoras] |
| 22405 | Negative utilitarianism implies that the world should be destroyed, to avoid future misery [Smart] |
| 22404 | Any group interested in ethics must surely have a sentiment of generalised benevolence [Smart] |
| 1659 | Protagoras seems to have made the huge move of separating punishment from revenge [Protagoras, by Vlastos] |
| 532 | Successful education must go deep into the soul [Protagoras] |
| 1552 | He spent public money on education, as it benefits the individual and the state [Protagoras, by Diodorus of Sicily] |
| 14613 | Special relativity won't determine a preferred frame, but we can pick one externally [Smart] |
| 17063 | Unlike Newton, Einstein's general theory explains the perihelion of Mercury [Smart] |
| 14615 | If time flows, then 'how fast does it flow?' is a tricky question [Smart] |
| 14614 | The past, present, future and tenses of A-theory are too weird, and should be analysed indexically [Smart] |
| 1551 | He said he didn't know whether there are gods - but this is the same as atheism [Diogenes of Oen. on Protagoras] |