19 ideas
| 1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
| 21552 | Common speech is vague; its vocabulary and syntax must be modified, for precision [Russell] |
| 21551 | Empirical words need ostensive definition, which makes them egocentric [Russell] |
| 3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 21550 | Science reduces indexicals to a minimum, but they can never be eliminated from empirical matters [Russell] |
| 23814 | Every human yearns for an unattainable transcendent good [Weil] |
| 23824 | Where human needs are satisfied we find happiness, friendship and beauty [Weil] |
| 23815 | We cannot equally respect what is unequal, so equal respect needs a shared ground [Weil] |
| 23823 | Life needs risks to avoid sickly boredom [Weil] |
| 23822 | We all need to partipate in public tasks, and take some initiative [Weil] |
| 23817 | We need both equality (to attend to human needs) and hierarchy (as a scale of responsibilities) [Weil] |
| 23819 | Deliberate public lying should be punished [Weil] |
| 23818 | We have liberty in the space between nature and accepted authority [Weil] |
| 23820 | People need personal and collective property, and a social class lacking property is shameful [Weil] |
| 23821 | Crime should be punished, to bring the perpetrator freely back to morality [Weil] |
| 1494 | Thales said water is the first principle, perhaps from observing that food is moist [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 1713 | Thales must have thought soul causes movement, since he thought magnets have soul [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 23816 | Attention to a transcendent reality motivates a duty to foster the good of humanity [Weil] |
| 1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |