30 ideas
| 1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
| 17651 | Without words or other symbols, we have no world [Goodman] |
| 17652 | Truth is irrelevant if no statements are involved [Goodman] |
| 5311 | If observation goes up a level, we expect the laws of the lower level to remain in force [Wilson,EO] |
| 17656 | Being primitive or prior always depends on a constructional system [Goodman] |
| 17661 | We don't recognise patterns - we invent them [Goodman] |
| 17659 | Reality is largely a matter of habit [Goodman] |
| 17657 | We build our world, and ignore anything that won't fit [Goodman] |
| 17654 | A world can be full of variety or not, depending on how we sort it [Goodman] |
| 5312 | A child first sees objects as distinct, and later as members of groups [Wilson,EO] |
| 17653 | Things can only be judged the 'same' by citing some respect of sameness [Goodman] |
| 3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 5309 | Beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival [Wilson,EO] |
| 17660 | Discovery is often just finding a fit, like a jigsaw puzzle [Goodman] |
| 17658 | Users of digital thermometers recognise no temperatures in the gaps [Goodman] |
| 17650 | We lack frames of reference to transform physics, biology and psychology into one another [Goodman] |
| 17655 | Grue and green won't be in the same world, as that would block induction entirely [Goodman] |
| 5310 | Philosophers study the consequences of ethics instead of its origins [Wilson,EO] |
| 5313 | The rules of human decision-making converge and overlap in a 'human nature' [Wilson,EO] |
| 5316 | We undermine altruism by rewarding it, but we reward it to encourage it [Wilson,EO] |
| 5318 | Pure hard-core altruism based on kin selection is the enemy of civilisation [Wilson,EO] |
| 5317 | The actor is most convincing who believes that his performance is real [Wilson,EO] |
| 17649 | If the world is one it has many aspects, and if there are many worlds they will collect into one [Goodman] |
| 5308 | The only human purpose is that created by our genetic history [Wilson,EO] |
| 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] |
| 5314 | Cultural evolution is Lamarckian and fast, biological evolution is Darwinian and slow [Wilson,EO] |
| 5315 | Over 99 percent of human evolution has been in the hunter-gatherer phase [Wilson,EO] |
| 1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 5320 | It is estimated that mankind has produced 100,000 religions [Wilson,EO] |