25 ideas
1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
18270 | Choice suggests that intensions are not needed to ensure classes [Coffa] |
9476 | If dispositions are more fundamental than causes, then they won't conceptually reduce to them [Bird on Lewis] |
8425 | For true counterfactuals, both antecedent and consequent true is closest to actuality [Lewis] |
3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
18263 | The semantic tradition aimed to explain the a priori semantically, not by Kantian intuition [Coffa] |
18272 | Platonism defines the a priori in a way that makes it unknowable [Coffa] |
18266 | Mathematics generalises by using variables [Coffa] |
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] |
1494 | Thales said water is the first principle, perhaps from observing that food is moist [Thales, by Aristotle] |
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] |
1713 | Thales must have thought soul causes movement, since he thought magnets have soul [Thales, by Aristotle] |
18279 | Relativity is as absolutist about space-time as Newton was about space [Coffa] |
1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |