31 ideas
| 1597 | Thales was the first western thinker to believe the arché was intelligible [Roochnik on Thales] |
| 23634 | Accepting the existence of anything presupposes the notion of existence [Reid] |
| 8780 | Attributes are functions, not objects; this distinguishes 'square of 2' from 'double of 2' [Geach] |
| 11910 | Being 'the same' is meaningless, unless we specify 'the same X' [Geach] |
| 3013 | Nothing is stronger than necessity, which rules everything [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |
| 23635 | Truths are self-evident to sensible persons who understand them clearly without prejudice [Reid] |
| 7631 | Sensation is not committed to any external object, but perception is [Reid] |
| 23637 | Primary qualities are the object of mathematics [Reid] |
| 23638 | Secondary qualities conjure up, and are confused with, the sensations which produce them [Reid] |
| 23639 | It is unclear whether a toothache is in the mind or in the tooth, but the word has a single meaning [Reid] |
| 6492 | Reid is seen as the main direct realist of the eighteenth century [Reid, by Robinson,H] |
| 23641 | People dislike believing without evidence, and try to avoid it [Reid] |
| 23642 | If non-rational evidence reaches us, it is reason which then makes use of it [Reid] |
| 8775 | A big flea is a small animal, so 'big' and 'small' cannot be acquired by abstraction [Geach] |
| 8776 | We cannot learn relations by abstraction, because their converse must be learned too [Geach] |
| 2567 | You can't define real mental states in terms of behaviour that never happens [Geach] |
| 2568 | Beliefs aren't tied to particular behaviours [Geach] |
| 8781 | The mind does not lift concepts from experience; it creates them, and then applies them [Geach] |
| 8769 | If someone has aphasia but can still play chess, they clearly have concepts [Geach] |
| 23640 | Only mature minds can distinguish the qualities of a body [Reid] |
| 8770 | 'Abstractionism' is acquiring a concept by picking out one experience amongst a group [Geach] |
| 8771 | 'Or' and 'not' are not to be found in the sensible world, or even in the world of inner experience [Geach] |
| 8772 | We can't acquire number-concepts by extracting the number from the things being counted [Geach] |
| 8773 | Abstractionists can't explain counting, because it must precede experience of objects [Geach] |
| 8774 | The numbers don't exist in nature, so they cannot have been abstracted from there into our languages [Geach] |
| 8778 | Blind people can use colour words like 'red' perfectly intelligently [Geach] |
| 8777 | If 'black' and 'cat' can be used in the absence of such objects, how can such usage be abstracted? [Geach] |
| 8779 | We can form two different abstract concepts that apply to a single unified experience [Geach] |
| 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] |
| 1742 | Thales said the gods know our wrong thoughts as well as our evil actions [Thales, by Diog. Laertius] |