47 ideas
| 14092 | Philosophers are often too fussy about words, dismissing perfectly useful ordinary terms [Rosen] |
| 14100 | Figuring in the definition of a thing doesn't make it a part of that thing [Rosen] |
| 18851 | Pairing (with Extensionality) guarantees an infinity of sets, just from a single element [Rosen] |
| 14096 | Explanations fail to be monotonic [Rosen] |
| 14097 | Things could be true 'in virtue of' others as relations between truths, or between truths and items [Rosen] |
| 14095 | Facts are structures of worldly items, rather like sentences, individuated by their ingredients [Rosen] |
| 14093 | An 'intrinsic' property is one that depends on a thing and its parts, and not on its relations [Rosen] |
| 15127 | A categorical basis could hardly explain a disposition if it had no powers of its own [Hawthorne] |
| 15123 | Is the causal profile of a property its essence? [Hawthorne] |
| 15124 | If properties are more than their powers, we could have two properties with the same power [Hawthorne] |
| 15122 | Could two different properties have the same causal profile? [Hawthorne] |
| 8915 | How we refer to abstractions is much less clear than how we refer to other things [Rosen] |
| 18852 | A Meinongian principle might say that there is an object for any modest class of properties [Rosen] |
| 14590 | If we accept scattered objects such as archipelagos, why not think of cars that way? [Hawthorne] |
| 15128 | We can treat the structure/form of the world differently from the nodes/matter of the world [Hawthorne] |
| 12887 | A whole must have one characteristic, an internal relation, and a structure [Rescher/Oppenheim] |
| 15121 | An individual essence is a necessary and sufficient profile for a thing [Hawthorne] |
| 14591 | Four-dimensionalists say instantaneous objects are more fundamental than long-lived ones [Hawthorne] |
| 8970 | Our notion of identical sets involves identical members, which needs absolute identity [Hawthorne] |
| 18850 | 'Metaphysical' modality is the one that makes the necessity or contingency of laws of nature interesting [Rosen] |
| 18849 | Metaphysical necessity is absolute and universal; metaphysical possibility is very tolerant [Rosen] |
| 18857 | Standard Metaphysical Necessity: P holds wherever the actual form of the world holds [Rosen] |
| 14094 | The excellent notion of metaphysical 'necessity' cannot be defined [Rosen] |
| 18858 | Sets, universals and aggregates may be metaphysically necessary in one sense, but not another [Rosen] |
| 18856 | Non-Standard Metaphysical Necessity: when ¬P is incompatible with the nature of things [Rosen] |
| 18848 | Something may be necessary because of logic, but is that therefore a special sort of necessity? [Rosen] |
| 14589 | A modal can reverse meaning if the context is seen differently, so maybe context is all? [Hawthorne] |
| 18855 | Combinatorial theories of possibility assume the principles of combination don't change across worlds [Rosen] |
| 14101 | Are necessary truths rooted in essences, or also in basic grounding laws? [Rosen] |
| 18853 | A proposition is 'correctly' conceivable if an ominiscient being could conceive it [Rosen] |
| 19553 | Commitment to 'I have a hand' only makes sense in a context where it has been doubted [Hawthorne] |
| 19551 | How can we know the heavyweight implications of normal knowledge? Must we distort 'knowledge'? [Hawthorne] |
| 19552 | We wouldn't know the logical implications of our knowledge if small risks added up to big risks [Hawthorne] |
| 19554 | Denying closure is denying we know P when we know P and Q, which is absurd in simple cases [Hawthorne] |
| 8917 | The Way of Abstraction used to say an abstraction is an idea that was formed by abstracting [Rosen] |
| 8912 | Nowadays abstractions are defined as non-spatial, causally inert things [Rosen] |
| 8913 | Chess may be abstract, but it has existed in specific space and time [Rosen] |
| 8914 | Sets are said to be abstract and non-spatial, but a set of books can be on a shelf [Rosen] |
| 8916 | Conflating abstractions with either sets or universals is a big claim, needing a big defence [Rosen] |
| 8918 | Functional terms can pick out abstractions by asserting an equivalence relation [Rosen] |
| 8919 | Abstraction by equivalence relationships might prove that a train is an abstract entity [Rosen] |
| 14099 | 'Bachelor' consists in or reduces to 'unmarried' male, but not the other way around [Rosen] |
| 15126 | Maybe scientific causation is just generalisation about the patterns [Hawthorne] |
| 18854 | The MRL view says laws are the theorems of the simplest and strongest account of the world [Rosen] |
| 15125 | We only know the mathematical laws, but not much else [Hawthorne] |
| 14588 | Modern metaphysicians tend to think space-time points are more fundamental than space-time regions [Hawthorne] |
| 14098 | An acid is just a proton donor [Rosen] |