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 · blog0.750

   (16′) Mary believes that ([the x : x is a present king of France]( x exists) and [the x : x is a present king of France & x exists]( x cleans my pool)) Mary’s belief is strange, but general for all that, so we can report it without being committed to the existence of a present king of France. Nor is this strategy necessarily limited to pronominal anaphora. Ludlow (1999, 2000) has argued that temporal and modal anaphora can be handled in a similar manner. In effect, one can take a temporal anaphor as standing proxy for a when-clause and a modal anaphor like ‘that’ in ‘that would have hurt’ as s…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/descriptions.md

2. 02 · blog0.747

   (8) A woman came to my office today. She worked for Gigantic Academic Press. She tried to persuade me to adopt their logic book. These three uses of pronouns seem quite different. Consequently, Kaplan (1989b, p. 572) sometimes says that ‘he’ is lexically ambiguous, and that the demonstrative ‘he’ and the anaphoric ‘he’ are homonymous expressions (Kaplan 1989b, p. 593). Most theorists, however, do not hold that these pronouns are ambiguous or that these uses involve distinct homonymous words. Many theorists who work on demonstratives and anaphora emphasize their similarities to variables. For d…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/indexicals.md

3. 03 · blog0.746

   But using nei-wai as a mark of gender differentiation does dictate which sphere one should inhabit. Gender-based hierarchy is, first and foremost, embedded in the spousal relationship, since the role of a wife is to follow and the husband’s is to lead. As the same Liji passage on the marriage rite quoted earlier goes on to say, In passing the front door gate, the man precedes and the woman follows, and with this the right relation between husband and wife commences. ( Liji , “ Jiaotesheng ” chapter) To follow and to lead indicate more than just complementary role differentiations; they indicat…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/gender-in-confucian-philosophy.md

4. 04 · blog0.738

   Again, the goal is metaphysical austerity and faithfulness to our epistemic position. Clearly descriptive anaphora represents a powerful extension of Russell’s theory of descriptions and a useful tool for presentists and modal antirealists. For all of that, the theory has encountered a number of objections. Consider (19), for example, and a paraphrase (20) in which the pronoun is rendered as a description. (19) If a man enters the room, he will turn the switch. (20) If a man enters the room, the man who enters will turn the switch. Heim (1982) observed that (20) (unlike (19)) implies that a un…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/descriptions.md

5. 05 · blog0.736

   The lowest of the created intellects—namely, the Agent Intellect—creates the form and matter of the sublunary world, as well as the rational souls of individual human beings. Avicenna adapts his account of emanation from al-Fārābī (870–950), known among the philosophers as the “Second Teacher”, though his version of emanation differs from that of al-Fārābī in several ways (Davidson 1992). Avicenna’s hierarchical account of agency acknowledges the superiority of divine causation and identifies the differences between creative and non-creative efficient causes. Still, it supports his earlier sug…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/causation-in-arabic-and-islamic-thought.md

6. 06 · blog0.735

   Therefore a final decision about aspectual class cannot be reached below the sentence level. Steedman’s famous sentence (16) 16. It took me two years to play the “Minute Waltz” in less than sixty seconds for one hour without stopping. shows that coercion can be iterated and that aspectual class can switch back and forth in this iteration process. We close this section with two further examples of aspectual coercion. In the first one a stative verb is transformed into an activity. The verb resemble is a stative verb and therefore (17a) is unacceptable but (17b) is fine. 17. (a) *She is resembli…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/tense-and-aspect.md

7. 07 · blog0.734

   [ 4 ] The Confucian reverence for the role of mother is best shown in the enduring maternal icon of Mengmu (mother of Mencius) perpetuated in countless didactic texts for women. Furthermore, the marriage rite, that commences the spousal relationship, as proscribed in the Liji , “ Jiaotesheng ” chapter, dignifies the bride by requiring the groom to perform the job of a servant standing by the carriage and handing the bride the strap to assist her in mounting. This ritual gesture is meant to convey the reverence that the husband owes to the wife, since spousal affection is built on mutual respec…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/gender-in-confucian-philosophy.md

8. 08 · blog0.733

   And these two parts moreover are concordant in their virtue since the inferior part is earth which is called nurse and ferment, and the superior part is the spirit which quickens the whole stone and raises it up. Wherfore separation made, and conjunction celebrated, many miracles are effected." Burckhardt: "This refers to the reciprocal dependence of the active and the passive... essential form cannot be manifested without passive materia.. the efficacy of the spiritual power depends on the preparedness of the human ‘container' and vice versa.... ‘Above' and ‘below' are thus related to this on…

   blog/www-sacred-texts-com/emerald-tablet-of-hermes.md

9. 09 · blog0.733

   The content of ‘I’ varies from context to context: its content is Mary in \(c_1\), John in \(c_2\), someone else in \(c_3\), and so on. But given a single context \(c\), the referent of ‘I’ with respect to \(c\) and world \(w\) is the same for any world \(w\) whatsoever. For example, if Mary is the content of ‘I’ with respect to \(c_1\), then Mary is the referent of ‘I’ with respect to \(c_1\) and any world whatsoever. That is why, for any world \(w\), ‘I am a philosopher’ is true at \(c_1\) and \(w\) if and only if Mary is a philosopher in \(w\). When a singular term refers to object \(o\) wi…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/indexicals.md

10. 10 · blog0.730

    That is, can either model plausibly extend to other sorts of referential terms, beyond just names?” To answer this question, and ultimately to introduce a third distinct model of linguistic reference, we turn now to the indexicals: words like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘here’, ‘now’, ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘this’, and ‘that’. As we will soon see, it is hardly clear that all indexicals refer in the same way. In particular, a distinction has often been drawn between what are called ‘pure’ and ‘impure’ indexicals, with rather different theories of reference being offered for each. The challenges that arise in trying to o…

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/reference.md