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 · gutenberg0.786

   Proof.--Also evident from Def. iii. For each must exist in itself, and be conceived through itself; in other words, the conception of one does not imply the conception of the other.

   gutenberg/PG-3800-ethics/PG-3800.txt

2. 02 · blog0.785

   When presenting this version of the argument in the First Replies, Descartes sets aside this first premise and focuses our attention on the second. In so doing, he is indicating the relative unimportance of the proof itself. Having learned how to apply Descartes’ alternative method of reasoning, one need only perceive that necessary existence pertains to the idea of a supremely perfect being. Once one attains this perception, formal arguments are no longer required; God’s existence will be self-evident (Second Replies, Fifth Postulate; AT 7:163–4; CSM 2:115). Descartes sometimes uses tradition…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/descartes-ontological-argument.md

3. 03 · blog0.784

   Simply saying, as Frege had, that they are “Laws of Truth” doesn’t seem to explain how we could know them a priori . But perhaps they, too, are “analytic” involving perhaps some sort of “implicit” acceptance of certain rules merely by virtue of accepting certain patterns of reasoning. But any such proposal has to account for people’s frequent, often apparent violations of rules of logic in fallacious reasoning and in ordinary speech, as well as of disputes about the laws of logic of the sort that are raised, for example, by mathematical intuitionists, who deny the Law of Excluded Middle (“p or…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/the-analytic-synthetic-distinction.md

4. 04 · blog0.780

   However, in the Principles Descartes offers the following definitions: I call a perception “clear” when it is present and accessible to the attentive mind … I call a perception “distinct” if, as well as being clear, it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear. ( Prin . 1:45, AT 8a:21f, CSM 1:207f) Other texts indicate that clarity contrasts with obscurity , and distinctness with confusedness . Though having clear and distinct apprehension is epistemically impressive, we’ll see clear texts indicating that this marks a merely necessary …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/descartes-epistemology.md

5. 05 · gutenberg0.780

   _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

6. 06 · blog0.780

   It exists by its own power: [2] when we attend to immense power of this being, we shall be unable to think of its existence as possible without also recognizing that it can exist by its own power; and we shall infer from this that this being does really exist and has existed from eternity, since it is quite evident by the natural light that what can exist by its own power always exists. So we shall come to understand that necessary existence is contained in the idea of a supremely perfect being …. ( ibid .) Some readers have thought that Descartes offers yet a third version of the ontological …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/descartes-ontological-argument.md

7. 07 · gutenberg0.778

   Therefore, for a person to say that he has a clear and distinct--that is, a true--idea of a substance, but that he is not sure whether such substance exists, would be the same as if he said that he had a true idea, but was not sure whether or no it was false (a little consideration will make this plain); or if anyone affirmed that substance is created, it would be the same as saying that a false idea was true--in short, the height of absurdity. It must, then, necessarily be admitted that the existence of substance as its essence is an eternal truth. And we can hence conclude by another process…

   gutenberg/PG-3800-ethics/PG-3800.txt

8. 08 · blog0.777

   According to Du Châtelet once this principle as stated is acknowledged, one can divide claims into the impossible and the possible: ‘It follows from this [principle] that the impossible is that which implies contradiction, and the possible does not imply it at all’ (IP §5). The possibles include the possibilities from among which God created the world. But the PC does more work for Du Châtelet than just separating out the possible from the impossible, and on this point, she leans more toward Leibniz's use of this principle than toward Wolff's use of it, for the PC secondarily divides the categ…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/milie-du-ch-telet.md

9. 09 · blog0.777

   [ 3 ] Possibilists claim that we can: we must simply broaden our understanding of reality, of what there is in the broadest sense, beyond the actual , beyond what actually exists , so that it also includes the merely possible . In particular, says the possibilist, there are merely possible people, things that are not, in fact, people but which could have been . So, for the possibilist, (4) is true after all so long as we acknowledge that reality also includes possibilia , things that are not in fact actual but which could have been ; things that do not in fact exist alongside us in the concret…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/the-possibilism-actualism-debate.md

10. 10 · yt0.775

    Okay, the objectivity of contradiction. So just very quickly rather than go through in in close detail the objectivity of contradiction um namely contradiction is not a subjective phenomenon. Contradiction is not merely on the side of the subject or in what the subject is doing but the contradiction is in reality itself. It's not just in our ideas or our concepts or in our use of them. But contradiction is actually in reality itself. In that sense, contradiction is objective. Now again, it's in reality in our reality in reality as it presents itself to us. It's in the objective reality that pr…

    yt/88CFLcDqNak-chris-cutrone-lecture-on-adorno-s-negative-dialectics-2/transcript.txt