53 ideas
13786 | Wisdom is called 'beautiful', because it performs fine works [Plato] |
13780 | Good people are no different from wise ones [Plato] |
13778 | A dialectician is someone who knows how to ask and to answer questions [Plato] |
13776 | Truths say of what is that it is, falsehoods say of what is that it is not [Plato] |
13777 | A name is a sort of tool [Plato] |
13790 | A name-giver might misname something, then force other names to conform to it [Plato] |
13791 | Things must be known before they are named, so it can't be the names that give us knowledge [Plato] |
13789 | Anyone who knows a thing's name also knows the thing [Plato] |
2063 | How can beauty have identity if it changes? [Plato] |
13775 | We only succeed in cutting if we use appropriate tools, not if we approach it randomly [Plato] |
9476 | If dispositions are more fundamental than causes, then they won't conceptually reduce to them [Bird on Lewis] |
13787 | Doesn't each thing have an essence, just as it has other qualities? [Plato] |
13774 | Things don't have every attribute, and essence isn't private, so each thing has an essence [Plato] |
13772 | Is the being or essence of each thing private to each person? [Plato] |
13788 | If we made a perfect duplicate of Cratylus, there would be two Cratyluses [Plato] |
8425 | For true counterfactuals, both antecedent and consequent true is closest to actuality [Lewis] |
13792 | There can't be any knowledge if things are constantly changing [Plato] |
13781 | Soul causes the body to live, and gives it power to breathe and to be revitalized [Plato] |
8424 | Determinism says there can't be two identical worlds up to a time, with identical laws, which then differ [Lewis] |
8420 | A proposition is a set of possible worlds where it is true [Lewis] |
13785 | 'Arete' signifies lack of complexity and a free-flowing soul [Plato] |
23125 | Most good social changes are incremental, rather than revolutionary [Gopnik] |
23126 | Conservatives often want peace, prosperity and tolerance, but not social fairness [Gopnik] |
23132 | Conservatives believe obedience and rank are essential to social order [Gopnik] |
23128 | The opposite of liberalism is dogmatism [Gopnik] |
23142 | People are fallible, so liberalism tries to distribute power [Gopnik] |
23143 | Liberals have tried very hard to build a conscience into their institutions [Gopnik] |
23141 | Left-wingers are inconsistent in their essentialist descriptions of social groups [Gopnik] |
23124 | Liberal community is not blood ties or tradition, but shared choices, and sympathy for the losers [Gopnik] |
23127 | Liberal community includes flight from the family, into energetic reforming groups [Gopnik] |
23129 | Right-wingers attack liberal faith in reason, left-wingers attack its faith in reform [Gopnik] |
23133 | Cosmopolitan liberals lack national loyalty, and welcome excessive immigration [Gopnik] |
23138 | Modern left-wingers criticise liberalism's control of culture [Gopnik] |
23139 | Liberalism's attempt to be neutral and colour-blind erases cultural identities [Gopnik] |
23135 | Classic Marxists see liberalism as the ideology of the bourgeoisie [Gopnik] |
23140 | Environmental disasters result not from capitalism, but from a general drive for growth [Gopnik] |
23130 | Popular imperialism gives the poor the belief that their acts have world historical meaning [Gopnik] |
23131 | Patriots love their place, but nationalists have a paranoid ethnic hostility [Gopnik] |
23136 | Liberal free speech is actually paid speech [Gopnik] |
23134 | A 'free' society implies a free market, which always produces predatory capitalism and inequalities [Gopnik] |
8405 | A theory of causation should explain why cause precedes effect, not take it for granted [Lewis, by Field,H] |
8427 | I reject making the direction of causation axiomatic, since that takes too much for granted [Lewis] |
10392 | It is just individious discrimination to pick out one cause and label it as 'the' cause [Lewis] |
8419 | The modern regularity view says a cause is a member of a minimal set of sufficient conditions [Lewis] |
8421 | Regularity analyses could make c an effect of e, or an epiphenomenon, or inefficacious, or pre-empted [Lewis] |
17525 | The counterfactual view says causes are necessary (rather than sufficient) for their effects [Lewis, by Bird] |
17524 | Lewis has basic causation, counterfactuals, and a general ancestral (thus handling pre-emption) [Lewis, by Bird] |
8397 | Counterfactual causation implies all laws are causal, which they aren't [Tooley on Lewis] |
8423 | My counterfactual analysis applies to particular cases, not generalisations [Lewis] |
8426 | One event causes another iff there is a causal chain from first to second [Lewis] |
4795 | Lewis's account of counterfactuals is fine if we know what a law of nature is, but it won't explain the latter [Cohen,LJ on Lewis] |
13779 | The natural offspring of a lion is called a 'lion' (but what about the offspring of a king?) [Plato] |
13783 | Even the gods love play [Plato] |