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 · blog0.756

   But since true reason here Protests, denying that the mind can think it, Convinced thou must confess such things there are As have no parts, the minimums of nature. And since these are, likewise confess thou must That primal bodies are solid and eterne. Again, if Nature, creatress of all things, Were wont to force all things to be resolved Unto least parts, then would she not avail To reproduce from out them anything; Because whate'er is not endowed with parts Cannot possess those properties required Of generative stuff- divers connections, Weights, blows, encounters, motions, whereby things F…

   blog/www-sacred-texts-com/on-the-nature-of-things-internet-sacred-text-archive.md

2. 02 · blog0.755

   In effect, by distinguishing the two relative senses of “essentially,” Avicenna has made room for Aristotle’s definition to include nature as an active and as passive principle. To sum up, for Avicenna, a substance’s nature is the immediate efficient cause for all of the naturally characteristic actions and motions it produces (active nature) as well as explaining why the body is subject to those characteristic actions and motions (passive nature). 2. Bodies and Magnitudes 2.1 General Background With the distinction between nature as active and nature as passive in place, it becomes clear why …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/ibn-sina-s-natural-philosophy.md

3. 03 · blog0.750

   He refutes arguments purporting to show the actual sempiternity of the world, but not arguments adduced to show that such sempiternity is possible , while he characterizes traditional would-be proofs of a temporal beginning as invalid (“sophistic”). The central piece of the work is a demonstration that no branch of philosophy can prove the “newness” of the world. The natural scientist cannot, because that would require relying on an assumption that is not included in the principles of his science and would make them an inconsistent set if included. The natural scientist can explain how somethi…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/boethius-of-dacia.md

4. 04 · gutenberg0.750

   It therefore follows that, if a given number of individual things exist in nature, there must be some cause for the existence of exactly that number, neither more nor less. For example, if twenty men exist in the universe (for simplicity's sake, I will suppose them existing simultaneously, and to have had no predecessors), and we want to account for the existence of these twenty men, it will not be enough to show the cause of human existence in general; we must also show why there are exactly twenty men, neither more nor less: for a cause must be assigned for the existence of each individual. …

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

5. 05 · blog0.748

   It is important to be more precise about what one is asking when one asks this broader metaphysical question about why there is something rather than nothing. Second, the cosmological argument lies at the heart of attempts to answer the questions, and to this we now turn. 4. Argument for a Non-contingent Cause Thomas Aquinas held that among the things whose existence needs explanation are contingent beings that depend for their existence upon other beings. Richard Taylor (1992: 84–94) discusses the argument in terms of the world (“everything that ever does exist, except God, in case there is a…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/cosmological-argument.md

6. 06 · blog0.747

   Let us consider all possible things as an “aggregate” ( jumlah) . This raises two assumptions: (1) the aggregate is self-caused, or (2) the aggregate is caused by an external cause (Avicenna, al-Najāt : 2: 89). Avicenna excludes the former assumption, explaining that the nature of what is possible in itself cannot change without a cause. Hence, an aggregate of possible things remains possible in itself; it must be caused by another cause to become necessary. Given that the series of causes and effects cannot progress ad infinitum , we must conclude that the existence of an aggregate of possibl…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/isaac-albalag.md

7. 07 · blog0.746

   And such a theory has been defended. Ned Markosian (1998) argues that not only does brutalism, the doctrine that there are brute facts about when the x s compose a y , solve the Problem of the Many, the account of composition it implies fits more naturally with our intuitions about composition. It seems objectionable, in some not easy-to-pin-down way, to rely on brute facts in just this way. Here is how Terrence Horgan puts the objection: In particular, a good metaphysical theory or scientific theory should avoid positing a plethora of quite specific, disconnected, sui generis , compositional …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/the-problem-of-the-many.md

8. 08 · archive0.744

   I hope that from these considerations the world will come to know that if other nations have navigated more, we have not theorized less. It is not from failing to take count of what others have thought that we have yielded to asserting that the earth is motionless, and holding the contrary to be a mere mathematical caprice, but (if for nothing else) for those reasons that are supplied by piety, religion, the knowledge of Divine Omnipotence, and a consciousness of the limitations of the human mind I have thought it most appropriate to explain these concepts in the form of dialogues, which, no! …

   archive/GalileiGalileoDialogueConcerningTheTwoChiefWorldSystemsEN155P./Galilei, Galileo - Dialogue Concerning the two Chief World Systems (EN, 155 p.)_djvu.txt

9. 09 · blog0.743

   This last conclusion was presented merely as a hypothesis whose fruitfulness could be tested and “proven,” or perhaps merely confirmed (see McMullin 2008), by the results contained in the attached essays on Dioptrics and Meteorology (the latter covering “atmospheric” phenomena). In his Meteorology , Descartes described his general hypothesis (or supposition) about the nature of matter, before offering accounts of vapors, salt, winds, clouds, snow, rain, hail, lightning, the rainbow, coronas, and parhelia. His hypothesis was as follows: that the water, earth, air, and all other such bodies that…

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

10. 10 · blog0.741

    Parmenides can be seen as arguing that any acceptable cosmological account must be rational, i.e., in conformity with the canons for proper inquiry, and must begin with metaphysically acceptable entities that are wholly and completely what they are; are not subject to generation, destruction, or alteration; and are wholly knowable i.e., graspable by thought and understanding (Parmenides B2, B3, B7, B8; see Mourelatos 2008a). Anaxagoras bases his account of the natural world on three principles of metaphysics, all of which can be seen as grounded in these Eleatic requirements: No Becoming or Pa…

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/anaxagoras.md