79 ideas
| 1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
| 9136 | The paradox of analysis says that any conceptual analysis must be either trivial or false [Sorensen] |
| 13407 | All worthwhile philosophy is synthetic theorizing, evaluated by experience [Papineau] |
| 9131 | Two long understandable sentences can have an unintelligible conjunction [Sorensen] |
| 9139 | If nothing exists, no truthmakers could make 'Nothing exists' true [Sorensen] |
| 9140 | Which toothbrush is the truthmaker for 'buy one, get one free'? [Sorensen] |
| 9119 | No attempt to deny bivalence has ever been accepted [Sorensen] |
| 9135 | We now see that generalizations use variables rather than abstract entities [Sorensen] |
| 9125 | Denying problems, or being romantically defeated by them, won't make them go away [Sorensen] |
| 9137 | Banning self-reference would outlaw 'This very sentence is in English' [Sorensen] |
| 3509 | Externalism may be the key idea in philosophical naturalism [Papineau] |
| 9116 | Vague words have hidden boundaries [Sorensen] |
| 13409 | Our best theories may commit us to mathematical abstracta, but that doesn't justify the commitment [Papineau] |
| 9132 | An offer of 'free coffee or juice' could slowly shift from exclusive 'or' to inclusive 'or' [Sorensen] |
| 3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 12583 | Belief truth-conditions are normal circumstances where the belief is supposed to occur [Papineau] |
| 9128 | It is propositional attitudes which can be a priori, not the propositions themselves [Sorensen] |
| 9130 | Attributing apriority to a proposition is attributing a cognitive ability to someone [Sorensen] |
| 13406 | A priori knowledge is analytic - the structure of our concepts - and hence unimportant [Papineau] |
| 9118 | The colour bands of the spectrum arise from our biology; they do not exist in the physics [Sorensen] |
| 9124 | We are unable to perceive a nose (on the back of a mask) as concave [Sorensen] |
| 7871 | Perceptual concepts can't just refer to what causes classification [Papineau] |
| 13408 | Intuition and thought-experiments embody substantial information about the world [Papineau] |
| 9126 | Bayesians build near-certainty from lots of reasonably probable beliefs [Sorensen] |
| 9121 | Illusions are not a reason for skepticism, but a source of interesting scientific information [Sorensen] |
| 7852 | The only serious mind-brain theories now are identity, token identity, realization and supervenience [Papineau] |
| 7864 | Maybe mind and body do overdetermine acts, but are linked (for some reason) [Papineau] |
| 7873 | Young children can see that other individuals sometimes have false beliefs [Papineau] |
| 7874 | Do we understand other minds by simulation-theory, or by theory-theory? [Papineau] |
| 7882 | Researching phenomenal consciousness is peculiar, because the concepts involved are peculiar [Papineau] |
| 7854 | Whether octopuses feel pain is unclear, because our phenomenal concepts are too vague [Papineau] |
| 7889 | Our concept of consciousness is crude, and lacks theoretical articulation [Papineau] |
| 7891 | We can’t decide what 'conscious' means, so it is undecidable whether cats are conscious [Papineau] |
| 7890 | Maybe a creature is conscious if its mental states represent things in a distinct way [Papineau] |
| 7885 | The 'actualist' HOT theory says consciousness comes from actual higher judgements of mental states [Papineau] |
| 7886 | Actualist HOT theories imply that a non-conscious mental event could become conscious when remembered [Papineau] |
| 7887 | States are conscious if they could be the subject of higher-order mental judgements [Papineau] |
| 7888 | Higher-order judgements may be possible where the subject denies having been conscious [Papineau] |
| 7860 | The epiphenomenal relation of mind and brain is a 'causal dangler', unlike anything else [Papineau] |
| 7862 | Maybe minds do not cause actions, but do cause us to report our decisions [Papineau] |
| 3513 | How does a dualist mind represent, exist outside space, and be transparent to itself? [Papineau] |
| 3514 | Functionalism needs causation and intentionality to explain actions [Papineau] |
| 7870 | Role concepts either name the realising property, or the higher property constituting the role [Papineau] |
| 7858 | If causes are basic particulars, this doesn't make conscious and physical properties identical [Papineau] |
| 3510 | Epiphenomenalism is supervenience without physicalism [Papineau] |
| 3511 | Supervenience requires all mental events to have physical effects [Papineau] |
| 7865 | Supervenience can be replaced by identifying mind with higher-order or disjunctional properties [Papineau] |
| 3515 | Knowing what it is like to be something only involves being (physically) that thing [Papineau] |
| 7892 | The completeness of physics is needed for mind-brain identity [Papineau] |
| 7879 | Mind-brain reduction is less explanatory, because phenomenal concepts lack causal roles [Papineau] |
| 20971 | Weak reduction of mind is to physical causes; strong reduction is also to physical laws [Papineau] |
| 7856 | It is absurd to think that physical effects are caused twice, so conscious causes must be physical [Papineau] |
| 7881 | Accept ontological monism, but conceptual dualism; we think in a different way about phenomenal thought [Papineau] |
| 3512 | If a mental state is multiply realisable, why does it lead to similar behaviour? [Papineau] |
| 7866 | Mary acquires new concepts; she previously thought about the same property using material concepts [Papineau] |
| 7850 | Thinking about a thing doesn't require activating it [Papineau] |
| 7851 | Consciousness affects bodily movement, so thoughts must be material states [Papineau] |
| 16369 | There is a single file per object, memorised, reactivated, consolidated and expanded [Papineau, by Recanati] |
| 7884 | Most reductive accounts of representation imply broad content [Papineau] |
| 7863 | If content hinges on matters outside of you, how can it causally influence your actions? [Papineau] |
| 7883 | Verificationists tend to infer indefinite answers from undecidable questions [Papineau] |
| 13410 | Verificationism about concepts means you can't deny a theory, because you can't have the concept [Papineau] |
| 9134 | The negation of a meaningful sentence must itself be meaningful [Sorensen] |
| 7872 | Teleosemantics equates meaning with the item the concept is intended to track [Papineau] |
| 7869 | Truth conditions in possible worlds can't handle statements about impossibilities [Papineau] |
| 7868 | Thought content is possible worlds that make the thought true; if that includes the actual world, it's true [Papineau] |
| 9133 | Propositions are what settle problems of ambiguity in sentences [Sorensen] |
| 3516 | The Private Language argument only means people may misjudge their experiences [Papineau] |
| 9129 | I can buy any litre of water, but not every litre of water [Sorensen] |
| 1494 | Thales said water is the first principle, perhaps from observing that food is moist [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 7853 | Causation is based on either events, or facts, or states of affairs [Papineau] |
| 7857 | Causes are instantiations of properties by particulars, or they are themselves basic particulars [Papineau] |
| 20976 | The completeness of physics cannot be proved [Papineau] |
| 20970 | Determinism is possible without a complete physics, if mental forces play a role [Papineau] |
| 20974 | Modern biological research, especially into the cell, has revealed no special new natural forces [Papineau] |
| 1713 | Thales must have thought soul causes movement, since he thought magnets have soul [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 20975 | Quantum 'wave collapses' seem to violate conservation of energy [Papineau] |
| 9122 | God cannot experience unwanted pain, so God cannot understand human beings [Sorensen] |
| 1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |