32 ideas
| 7454 | Gassendi is the first great empiricist philosopher [Hacking] |
| 9271 | Human knowledge may not produce well-being; the examined life may not be worth living [Gray] |
| 13838 | A decent modern definition should always imply a semantics [Hacking] |
| 13833 | 'Thinning' ('dilution') is the key difference between deduction (which allows it) and induction [Hacking] |
| 13834 | Gentzen's Cut Rule (or transitivity of deduction) is 'If A |- B and B |- C, then A |- C' [Hacking] |
| 13835 | Only Cut reduces complexity, so logic is constructive without it, and it can be dispensed with [Hacking] |
| 13845 | The various logics are abstractions made from terms like 'if...then' in English [Hacking] |
| 13840 | First-order logic is the strongest complete compact theory with Löwenheim-Skolem [Hacking] |
| 13844 | A limitation of first-order logic is that it cannot handle branching quantifiers [Hacking] |
| 13842 | Second-order completeness seems to need intensional entities and possible worlds [Hacking] |
| 13837 | With a pure notion of truth and consequence, the meanings of connectives are fixed syntactically [Hacking] |
| 13839 | Perhaps variables could be dispensed with, by arrows joining places in the scope of quantifiers [Hacking] |
| 13843 | If it is a logic, the Löwenheim-Skolem theorem holds for it [Hacking] |
| 12887 | A whole must have one characteristic, an internal relation, and a structure [Rescher/Oppenheim] |
| 7447 | Probability was fully explained between 1654 and 1812 [Hacking] |
| 7448 | Probability is statistical (behaviour of chance devices) or epistemological (belief based on evidence) [Hacking] |
| 7449 | Epistemological probability based either on logical implications or coherent judgments [Hacking] |
| 7450 | In the medieval view, only deduction counted as true evidence [Hacking] |
| 7451 | Formerly evidence came from people; the new idea was that things provided evidence [Hacking] |
| 9275 | Knowledge does not need minds or nervous systems; it is found in all living things [Gray] |
| 7452 | An experiment is a test, or an adventure, or a diagnosis, or a dissection [Hacking, by PG] |
| 7459 | Follow maths for necessary truths, and jurisprudence for contingent truths [Hacking] |
| 9276 | The will hardly ever does anything; most of our life just happens to us [Gray] |
| 9278 | Nowadays we identify the free life with the good life [Gray] |
| 9280 | Over forty percent of the Earth's living tissue is human [Gray] |
| 23061 | Free atheism should start by questioning its faith in humanity [Gray] |
| 23057 | Gnosticism has a supreme creator God, giving way to a possibly hostile Demiurge [Gray] |
| 23056 | Judaism only became monotheistic around 550 BCE [Gray] |
| 9272 | Without Christianity we lose the idea that human history has a meaning [Gray] |
| 9279 | What was our original sin, and how could Christ's suffering redeem it? [Gray] |
| 23055 | Christians introduced the idea that a religion needs a creed [Gray] |
| 23058 | Buddhism has no divinity or souls, and the aim is to lose the illusion of a self [Gray] |