28 ideas
22659 | It is wisdom to believe what you desire, because belief is needed to achieve it [James] |
22657 | All good philosophers start from a dumb conviction about which truths can be revealed [James] |
22647 | A complete system is just a classification of the whole world's ingredients [James] |
22648 | A single explanation must have a single point of view [James] |
22644 | Our greatest pleasure is the economy of reducing chaotic facts to one single fact [James] |
11211 | If a sound conclusion comes from two errors that cancel out, the path of the argument must matter [Rumfitt] |
11210 | Standardly 'and' and 'but' are held to have the same sense by having the same truth table [Rumfitt] |
11212 | The sense of a connective comes from primitively obvious rules of inference [Rumfitt] |
22649 | Classification can only ever be for a particular purpose [James] |
304 | Beautiful things must be different from beauty itself, but beauty itself must be present in each of them [Plato] |
16120 | Knowing how to achieve immortality is pointless without the knowledge how to use immortality [Plato] |
303 | Say how many teeth the other has, then count them. If you are right, we will trust your other claims [Plato] |
22655 | Scientific genius extracts more than other people from the same evidence [James] |
22658 | Experimenters assume the theory is true, and stick to it as long as result don't disappoint [James] |
22654 | We can't know if the laws of nature are stable, but we must postulate it or assume it [James] |
22656 | Trying to assess probabilities by mere calculation is absurd and impossible [James] |
22646 | We have a passion for knowing the parts of something, rather than the whole [James] |
22652 | The mind has evolved entirely for practical interests, seen in our reflex actions [James] |
22651 | Dogs' curiosity only concerns what will happen next [James] |
22650 | How can the ground of rationality be itself rational? [James] |
22643 | It seems that we feel rational when we detect no irrationality [James] |
11214 | We learn 'not' along with affirmation, by learning to either affirm or deny a sentence [Rumfitt] |
302 | What knowledge is required to live well? [Plato] |
22660 | Evolution suggests prevailing or survival as a new criterion of right and wrong [James] |
301 | Only knowledge of some sort is good [Plato] |
305 | Something which lies midway between two evils is better than either of them [Plato] |
22645 | Understanding by means of causes is useless if they are not reduced to a minimum number [James] |
22653 | Early Christianity says God recognises the neglected weak and tender impulses [James] |