Corpus evidence — top 10 passages

Most-relevant passages from the entire indexed corpus (67,286 paragraph chunks across YouTube transcripts, PubMed, arXiv, archive.org, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, OpenAlex, and more) ranked by semantic similarity (bge-small-en-v1.5).

1. 01 · blog0.721

   We teach our students in propositional logic to disambiguate these with brackets but we are not so lucky when it comes to the orthographic and phonetic groupings in natural language. An interesting case is the semantics of modals. At least some modal auxiliaries and adverbs seem to allow for distinct senses such as metaphysical, deontic, doxastic and perhaps practical. Consider John ought to be at home by now. (4) can mean that John’s presence at home is, given everything we know, guaranteed. It might mean that, though we have no idea where he is, he is under the obligation to be at home. Simi…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/ambiguity.md

2. 02 · wikisource0.719

   === 9 === It is better to leave a vessel unfilled, than to attempt to carry it when it is full. If you keep feeling a point that has been sharpened, the point cannot long preserve its sharpness. When gold and jade fill the hall, their possessor cannot keep them safe. When wealth and honours lead to arrogancy, this brings its evil on itself. When the work is done, and one's name is becoming distinguished, to withdraw into obscurity is the way of Heaven.

   wikisource/t-o-teh-king/page.txt

3. 03 · wikisource0.718

   === 20 === When we renounce learning we have no troubles. The (ready) 'yes,' and (flattering) 'yea;'-- Small is the difference they display. But mark their issues, good and ill;-- What space the gulf between shall fill? What all men fear is indeed to be feared; but how wide and without end is the range of questions (asking to be discussed)! The multitude of men look satisfied and pleased; as if enjoying a full banquet, as if mounted on a tower in spring. I alone seem listless and still, my desires having as yet given no indication of their presence. I am like an infant which has not yet smiled…

   wikisource/t-o-teh-king/page.txt

4. 04 · gutenberg0.712

   _M._ As if it did not follow that whatever you speak of in that manner either is or is not. Are you not acquainted with the first principles of logic? For this is the first thing they lay down, Whatever is asserted (for that is the best way that occurs to me, at the moment, of rendering the Greek term [Greek: axiôma]; if I can think of a more accurate expression hereafter, I will use it), is asserted as being either true or false. When, therefore, you say, "Miserable M. Crassus," you either say this, "M. Crassus is miserable," so that some judgment may be made whether it is true or false, or y…

   gutenberg/PG-14988-cicero-s-tusculan-disputations-also-treatises-on-the-nature-of-the-god/PG-14988.txt

5. 05 · blog0.710

   For instance, reasons are claimed not to combine in a simple additive way, or to vary with context, or to be sometimes incomparable (see, e.g., Dancy 2004, 2018; Bader 2016; Cullity 2018; and the entry on incommensurable values ). An important question is thus how an account of reasons’ weights can make sense of those observations (Schroeder 2007: ch.7; Horty 2012; Nair 2021; McHugh & Way 2022: ch.5). Another worry is that the metaphor of weight and strength is inappropriate in portraying the relation between some reasons. For instance, a longstanding idea is that some moral reasons—say, that …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/reasons-for-action-justification-motivation-explanation.md

6. 06 · gutenberg0.710

   congruous with our powers, 82. But these differ from man to man, 88. Faith is one of them, 90. Inseparable from doubt, 95. May verify itself, 96. Its rôle in ethics, 98. Optimism and pessimism, 101. Is this a moral universe?--what does the problem mean? 103. Anaesthesia _versus_ energy, 107. Active assumption necessary, 107. Conclusion, 110.

   gutenberg/PG-26659-the-will-to-believe-and-other-essays-in-popular-philosophy/PG-26659.txt

7. 07 · blog0.710

   (Bradley 1893:17) To understand what Bradley means by this, we need to keep in mind that he is here presupposing a bundle view of particulars and that he is using “is” to indicate the identity of the subject with the bundle of qualities (see Wollheim (1959), Bonino (2012) and Baxter (1996) for an interpretation that reads his “is” as an “is” of identity in this context). His concern is thus with the relationship between the whole, conceived as a bundle of qualities, and the qualities themselves. He is worried that if a given quality, say blackness , is different from the whole, and separate fr…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/bradley-s-regress.md

8. 08 · blog0.709

   The later Mohist discussion of weighing can be seen as addressing this issue on the basis of the principle of favoring the greater part of a whole and thus choosing the greater of two benefits or the lesser of two harms. The Mohists identify two forms of “weighing.” The first appears to be weighing of ends or things for which we act (the phrase in the text is “things treated as units”) (EC8). This sort of judgment is what the text calls weighing proper ( quán ). The second appears to be weighing of means (the phrase reads “affairs and action”). The text deems this process “seeking” ( qiú 求), a…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/mohist-canons.md

9. 09 · wikisource0.709

   However, I feel no reluctance toward refusing to admit meanings, for I do not thereby deny that words and statements are meaningful. McX and I may agree to the letter in our classification of linguistic forms into the meaningful and the meaningless, even though McX construes meaningfulness as the having (in some sense of ‘having’) of some abstract entity which he calls a meaning, whereas I do not. I remain free to maintain that the fact that a given linguistic utterance is meaningful (or significant, as I prefer to say so as not to invite hypostasis of meanings as entities) is an ultimate and …

   wikisource/on-what-there-is/page.txt

10. 10 · blog0.706

    So we can’t assimilate the use of the word “I” to other more tractable types of referring expressions. Second, she argues that the only remaining possibility is that the word “I” refers to an immaterial substance (a Cartesian ego), or at least a stretch of such a substance that exists so long as one is thinking a thought. But that would still leave us no way to identify the same referent in different “I”-thoughts at different times, an “intolerable” result. Moreover, Anscombe explicitly denied that there are immaterial substances. She described the very conception of an immaterial substance as…

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/gertrude-elizabeth-margaret-anscombe.md