60 ideas
| 1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
| 13567 | Ontology should give insight into or an explanation of the world revealed by science [Ellis] |
| 22270 | Frege changed philosophy by extending logic's ability to check the grounds of thinking [Potter on Frege] |
| 8939 | We should not describe human laws of thought, but how to correctly track truth [Frege, by Fisher] |
| 4971 | I don't use 'subject' and 'predicate' in my way of representing a judgement [Frege] |
| 17745 | For Frege, 'All A's are B's' means that the concept A implies the concept B [Frege, by Walicki] |
| 13604 | Real possibility and necessity has the logic of S5, which links equivalence classes of worlds of the same kind [Ellis] |
| 7728 | Frege has a judgement stroke (vertical, asserting or judging) and a content stroke (horizontal, expressing) [Frege, by Weiner] |
| 16881 | The laws of logic are boundless, so we want the few whose power contains the others [Frege] |
| 7622 | In 1879 Frege developed second order logic [Frege, by Putnam] |
| 7729 | Frege replaced Aristotle's subject/predicate form with function/argument form [Frege, by Weiner] |
| 9950 | A quantifier is a second-level predicate (which explains how it contributes to truth-conditions) [Frege, by George/Velleman] |
| 9991 | For Frege the variable ranges over all objects [Frege, by Tait] |
| 10536 | Frege's domain for variables is all objects, but modern interpretations first fix the domain [Dummett on Frege] |
| 7730 | Frege introduced quantifiers for generality [Frege, by Weiner] |
| 7742 | Frege reduced most quantifiers to 'everything' combined with 'not' [Frege, by McCullogh] |
| 13824 | Proof theory began with Frege's definition of derivability [Frege, by Prawitz] |
| 13609 | Frege produced axioms for logic, though that does not now seem the natural basis for logic [Frege, by Kaplan] |
| 13606 | Humean conceptions of reality drive the adoption of extensional logic [Ellis] |
| 17855 | It may be possible to define induction in terms of the ancestral relation [Frege, by Wright,C] |
| 10607 | Frege's logic has a hierarchy of object, property, property-of-property etc. [Frege, by Smith,P] |
| 11008 | Existence is not a first-order property, but the instantiation of a property [Frege, by Read] |
| 13584 | The extension of a property is a contingent fact, so cannot be the essence of the property [Ellis] |
| 13587 | There is no property of 'fragility', as things are each fragile in a distinctive way [Ellis] |
| 13577 | Typical 'categorical' properties are spatio-temporal, such as shape [Ellis] |
| 9436 | The property of 'being an electron' is not of anything, and only electrons could have it [Ellis] |
| 13582 | 'Being a methane molecule' is not a property - it is just a predicate [Ellis] |
| 13580 | Causal powers must necessarily act the way they do [Ellis] |
| 13598 | Causal powers are often directional (e.g. centripetal, centrifugal, circulatory) [Ellis] |
| 13568 | Basic powers may not be explained by structure, if at the bottom level there is no structure [Ellis] |
| 13586 | Maybe dispositions can be explained by intrinsic properties or structures [Ellis] |
| 13585 | The most fundamental properties of nature (mass, charge, spin ...) all seem to be dispositions [Ellis] |
| 13596 | A causal power is a disposition to produce forces [Ellis] |
| 13599 | Powers are dispositions of the essences of kinds that involve them in causation [Ellis] |
| 13572 | There are 'substantive' (objects of some kind), 'dynamic' (events of some kind) and 'property' universals [Ellis] |
| 13573 | Universals are all types of natural kind [Ellis] |
| 13571 | Scientific essentialism doesn't really need Kripkean individual essences [Ellis] |
| 13578 | The old idea that identity depends on essence and behaviour is rejected by the empiricists [Ellis] |
| 13576 | Necessities are distinguished by their grounds, not their different modalities [Ellis] |
| 3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 13570 | Individual essences necessitate that individual; natural kind essences necessitate kind membership [Ellis] |
| 13607 | If events are unconnected, then induction cannot be solved [Ellis] |
| 13597 | Good explanations unify [Ellis] |
| 13601 | Explanations of particular events are not essentialist, as they don't reveal essential structures [Ellis] |
| 13569 | To give essentialist explanations there have to be natural kinds [Ellis] |
| 13600 | The point of models in theories is not to idealise, but to focus on what is essential [Ellis] |
| 22280 | Frege's account was top-down and decompositional, not bottom-up and compositional [Frege, by Potter] |
| 1494 | Thales said water is the first principle, perhaps from observing that food is moist [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 13583 | There might be uninstantiated natural kinds, such as transuranic elements which have never occurred [Ellis] |
| 13574 | Natural kinds are distinguished by resting on essences [Ellis] |
| 13575 | If there are borderline cases between natural kinds, that makes them superficial [Ellis] |
| 13595 | Laws don't exist in the world; they are true of the world [Ellis] |
| 13566 | A proton must have its causal role, because without it it wouldn't be a proton [Ellis] |
| 13579 | What is most distinctive of scientific essentialism is regarding processes as natural kinds [Ellis] |
| 13581 | Scientific essentialism is more concerned with explanation than with identity (Locke, not Kripke) [Ellis] |
| 13594 | The ontological fundamentals are dispositions, and also categorical (spatio-temporal and structural) properties [Ellis] |
| 13603 | A primary aim of science is to show the limits of the possible [Ellis] |
| 1713 | Thales must have thought soul causes movement, since he thought magnets have soul [Thales, by Aristotle] |
| 7741 | The predicate 'exists' is actually a natural language expression for a quantifier [Frege, by Weiner] |
| 1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |