23 ideas
1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
18935 | Semantic theory should specify when an act of naming is successful [Sawyer] |
18945 | Millians say a name just means its object [Sawyer] |
18934 | Sentences with empty names can be understood, be co-referential, and even be true [Sawyer] |
18938 | Frege's compositional account of truth-vaues makes 'Pegasus doesn't exist' neither true nor false [Sawyer] |
18947 | Definites descriptions don't solve the empty names problem, because the properties may not exist [Sawyer] |
16554 | Activities have place, rate, duration, entities, properties, modes, direction, polarity, energy and range [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16556 | Penicillin causes nothing; the cause is what penicillin does [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
16562 | We understand something by presenting its low-level entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16563 | The explanation is not the regularity, but the activity sustaining it [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16555 | Functions are not properties of objects, they are activities contributing to mechanisms [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16529 | Mechanisms are systems organised to produce regular change [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16530 | A mechanism explains a phenomenon by showing how it was produced [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16553 | Our account of mechanism combines both entities and activities [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16559 | Descriptions of explanatory mechanisms have a bottom level, where going further is irrelevant [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16528 | Mechanisms are not just push-pull systems [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16564 | There are four types of bottom-level activities which will explain phenomena [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
16561 | We can abstract by taking an exemplary case and ignoring the detail [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
1494 | Thales said water is the first principle, perhaps from observing that food is moist [Thales, by Aristotle] |
16558 | Laws of nature have very little application in biology [Machamer/Darden/Craver] |
1713 | Thales must have thought soul causes movement, since he thought magnets have soul [Thales, by Aristotle] |
1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |