60 ideas
| 1606 | You have to be a Platonist to debate about reality, so every philosopher is a Platonist [Roochnik] |
| 1595 | Philosophy aims to satisfy the chief human desire - the articulation of beauty itself [Roochnik] |
| 1571 | 'Logos' ranges from thought/reasoning, to words, to rational structures outside thought [Roochnik] |
| 1572 | In the seventeenth century the only acceptable form of logos was technical knowledge [Roochnik] |
| 1573 | The hallmark of a person with logos is that they give reasons why one opinion is superior to another [Roochnik] |
| 1592 | Logos cannot refute the relativist, and so must admit that it too is a matter of desire (for truth and agreement) [Roochnik] |
| 1593 | Human desire has an ordered structure, with logos at the pinnacle [Roochnik] |
| 1603 | Logos is not unconditionally good, but good if there is another person willing to engage with it [Roochnik] |
| 1598 | We prefer reason or poetry according to whether basics are intelligible or not [Roochnik] |
| 1584 | Modern science, by aiming for clarity about the external world, has abandoned rationality in the human world [Roochnik] |
| 1591 | Unfortunately for reason, argument can't be used to establish the value of argument [Roochnik] |
| 1599 | Attempts to suspend all presuppositions are hopeless, because a common ground must be agreed for the process [Roochnik] |
| 19023 | Slippery slope arguments are challenges to show where a non-arbitrary boundary lies [Vetter] |
| 19033 | Deontic modalities are 'ought-to-be', for sentences, and 'ought-to-do' for predicates [Vetter] |
| 19032 | S5 is undesirable, as it prevents necessities from having contingent grounds [Vetter] |
| 19036 | The Barcan formula endorses either merely possible things, or makes the unactualised impossible [Vetter] |
| 19034 | The world is either a whole made of its parts, or a container which contains its parts [Vetter] |
| 19015 | Grounding can be between objects ('relational'), or between sentences ('operational') [Vetter] |
| 19012 | The Humean supervenience base entirely excludes modality [Vetter] |
| 1605 | Reality can be viewed neutrally, or as an object of desire [Roochnik] |
| 19024 | A determinate property must be a unique instance of the determinable class [Vetter] |
| 17954 | Essence is a thing's necessities, but what about its possibilities (which may not be realised)? [Vetter] |
| 19021 | I have an 'iterated ability' to learn the violin - that is, the ability to acquire that ability [Vetter] |
| 19016 | We should think of dispositions as 'to do' something, not as 'to do something, if ....' [Vetter] |
| 19017 | Nomological dispositions (unlike ordinary ones) have to be continually realised [Vetter] |
| 19014 | How can spatiotemporal relations be understood in dispositional terms? [Vetter] |
| 12887 | A whole must have one characteristic, an internal relation, and a structure [Rescher/Oppenheim] |
| 17953 | Real definition fits abstracta, but not individual concrete objects like Socrates [Vetter] |
| 17952 | Modal accounts make essence less mysterious, by basing them on the clearer necessity [Vetter] |
| 19030 | Why does origin matter more than development; why are some features of origin more important? [Vetter] |
| 19040 | We take origin to be necessary because we see possibilities as branches from actuality [Vetter] |
| 19008 | The modern revival of necessity and possibility treated them as special cases of quantification [Vetter] |
| 19029 | It is necessary that p means that nothing has the potentiality for not-p [Vetter] |
| 17959 | Metaphysical necessity is even more deeply empirical than Kripke has argued [Vetter] |
| 17957 | Maybe possibility is constituted by potentiality [Vetter] |
| 17955 | Possible worlds allow us to talk about degrees of possibility [Vetter] |
| 19028 | Possibilities are potentialities of actual things, but abstracted from their location [Vetter] |
| 19010 | All possibility is anchored in the potentiality of individual objects [Vetter] |
| 19013 | Possibility is a generalised abstraction from the potentiality of its bearer [Vetter] |
| 19019 | Potentiality is the common genus of dispositions, abilities, and similar properties [Vetter] |
| 19022 | Water has a potentiality to acquire a potentiality to break (by freezing) [Vetter] |
| 23705 | A potentiality may not be a disposition, but dispositions are strong potentialities [Vetter, by Friend/Kimpton-Nye] |
| 19009 | Potentiality does the explaining in metaphysics; we don't explain it away or reduce it [Vetter] |
| 19027 | Potentiality logic is modal system T. Stronger systems collapse iterations, and necessitate potentials [Vetter] |
| 19025 | Potentialities may be too weak to count as 'dispositions' [Vetter] |
| 19031 | There are potentialities 'to ...', but possibilities are 'that ....'. [Vetter] |
| 17958 | The apparently metaphysically possible may only be epistemically possible [Vetter] |
| 17956 | Closeness of worlds should be determined by the intrinsic nature of relevant objects [Vetter] |
| 19011 | If worlds are sets of propositions, how do we know which propositions are genuinely possible? [Vetter] |
| 19037 | Are there possible objects which nothing has ever had the potentiality to produce? [Vetter] |
| 1577 | Relativism is a disease which destroys the possibility of rational debate [Roochnik] |
| 19018 | Explanations by disposition are more stable and reliable than those be external circumstances [Vetter] |
| 19020 | Grounding is a kind of explanation, suited to metaphysics [Vetter] |
| 1578 | If relativism is the correct account of human values, then rhetoric is more important than reasoning [Roochnik] |
| 1596 | Reasoning aims not at the understanding of objects, but at the desire to give beautiful speeches [Roochnik] |
| 19039 | The view that laws are grounded in substance plus external necessity doesn't suit dispositionalism [Vetter] |
| 19038 | Dispositional essentialism allows laws to be different, but only if the supporting properties differ [Vetter] |
| 17993 | Laws are relations of kinds, quantities and qualities, supervening on the essences of a domain [Vetter] |
| 19026 | If time is symmetrical between past and future, why do they look so different? [Vetter] |
| 19041 | Presentists explain cross-temporal relations using surrogate descriptions [Vetter] |