43 ideas
5333 | Philosophy needs wisdom about who we are, as well as how we ought to be [Flanagan] |
9271 | Human knowledge may not produce well-being; the examined life may not be worth living [Gray] |
5334 | We resist science partly because it can't provide ethical wisdom [Flanagan] |
12887 | A whole must have one characteristic, an internal relation, and a structure [Rescher/Oppenheim] |
9275 | Knowledge does not need minds or nervous systems; it is found in all living things [Gray] |
5340 | Explanation does not entail prediction [Flanagan] |
5346 | In the 17th century a collisionlike view of causation made mental causation implausible [Flanagan] |
21833 | Research suggest that we overrate conscious experience [Flanagan] |
5341 | Only you can have your subjective experiences because only you are hooked up to your nervous system [Flanagan] |
5351 | We only have a sense of our self as continuous, not as exactly the same [Flanagan] |
5353 | The self is an abstraction which magnifies important aspects of autobiography [Flanagan] |
5354 | We are not born with a self; we develop a self through living [Flanagan] |
5349 | For Buddhists a fixed self is a morally dangerous illusion [Flanagan] |
5338 | Normal free will claims control of what I do, but a stronger view claims control of thought and feeling [Flanagan] |
5344 | Free will is held to give us a whole list of desirable capacities for living [Flanagan] |
5332 | People believe they have free will that circumvents natural law, but only an incorporeal mind could do this [Flanagan] |
5345 | We only think of ourselves as having free will because we first thought of God that way [Flanagan] |
9276 | The will hardly ever does anything; most of our life just happens to us [Gray] |
5343 | People largely came to believe in dualism because it made human agents free [Flanagan] |
5347 | Behaviourism notoriously has nothing to say about mental causation [Flanagan] |
5339 | Cars and bodies obey principles of causation, without us knowing any 'strict laws' about them [Flanagan] |
21834 | Sensations may be identical to brain events, but complex mental events don't seem to be [Flanagan] |
5342 | Physicalism doesn't deny that the essence of an experience is more than its neural realiser [Flanagan] |
5335 | Emotions are usually very apt, rather than being non-rational and fickle [Flanagan] |
5348 | Intellectualism admires the 'principled actor', non-intellectualism admires the 'good character' [Flanagan] |
5355 | Cognitivists think morals are discovered by reason [Flanagan] |
21837 | Morality is normative because it identifies best practices among the normal practices [Flanagan] |
5336 | Ethics is the science of the conditions that lead to human flourishing [Flanagan] |
21830 | For Darwinians, altruism is either contracts or genetics [Flanagan] |
21835 | We need Eudaimonics - the empirical study of how we should flourish [Flanagan] |
21831 | Alienation is not finding what one wants, or being unable to achieve it [Flanagan] |
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] |
5350 | The Hindu doctrine of reincarnation only appeared in the eighth century CE [Flanagan] |
23057 | Gnosticism has a supreme creator God, giving way to a possibly hostile Demiurge [Gray] |
23056 | Judaism only became monotheistic around 550 BCE [Gray] |
23055 | Christians introduced the idea that a religion needs a creed [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] |
21832 | Buddhists reject God and the self, and accept suffering as key, and liberation through wisdom [Flanagan] |
23058 | Buddhism has no divinity or souls, and the aim is to lose the illusion of a self [Gray] |
5352 | The idea of the soul gets some support from the scientific belief in essential 'natural kinds' [Flanagan] |