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 · gutenberg0.712

   The assertion of thrice, instead of twice, is either an error of the author, or a blunder of the scribe, but the phenomenon is the same, and the expression soft-flowing,[21] has reference to the flood-tide, which has a gentle swell, and does not flow with a full rush. Posidonius believes that where Homer describes the rocks as at one time covered with the waves, and at another left bare, and when he compares the ocean to a river, he alludes to the flow of the ocean. The first supposition is correct, but for the second there is no ground; inasmuch as there can be no comparison between the flow,…

   gutenberg/PG-44884-the-geography-of-strabo-volume-1-of-3-literally-translated-with-notes/PG-44884.txt

2. 02 · blog0.711

   Whilst mind is properly understood as part of nature, this does not diminish its value (Alexander 1914: 279–80). For Alexander, realism is thus naturalistic. This paper is an expansion of Alexander’s less rigorous (1909–10), where he compares the new conception of mind as a mere part of the universe—as opposed to being at the centre of the universe—to the move from geocentrism to heliocentrism. A key part of Alexander’s view is that minds exist in the world alongside other things. Minds are “compresent” with other objects in the world, such as tables and mountains. In fact, all existents are c…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/samuel-alexander.md

3. 03 · yt0.708

   And also, in Britain, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. NARRATOR: The freshwater paradoxides could not have swum the vast, salty ocean. And they were not the only fossils showing bizarre intercontinental distribution. Geologists struggled for an explanation. In 1912, a radical new theory would emerge from Greenland that would lay the foundations for plate tectonics and shake Earth science to its foundations. The new theory was put forward by a German weather scientist, Alfred visionary Wegener, a man who had spent much of his career conducting atmospheric research in Greenland's frozen …

   yt/WgjBaXpuSE4-how-the-earth-was-made-from-molten-rock-to-green-planet-full/transcript.txt

4. 04 · blog0.701

   He infers that Toscar’s word “water” is true of x if and only if x is twater and that when Toscar says, while pointing at a liquid in a glass, “That is water,” his utterance is true if and only if the liquid in the glass is twater. Putnam concludes that the truth conditions of Oscar’s and Toscar’s utterances of sentences containing the term “water” are not determined by their narrow psychological states. In a final step he argues that this was true even in 1750, before chemists on Earth or Twin Earth discovered the chemical structures of water and twater. Illusions of reference for general ter…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/content-externalism-and-skepticism.md

5. 05 · blog0.699

   The first pairing in Dushun’s second discernment seems to violate two quite plausible constraints, namely: nothing limited contains anything boundless; and nothing limited appears throughout anything boundless. Dushun admits that his claim of mutual pervasion “transcends conventional sensibilities.” However, he offers a metaphor for clarification, comparing li to water and shi to waves. This metaphor, originating with the Lankavatara Sutra , posits that each wave contains the entire ocean, and that each wave appears in every part of the ocean. These posits are not entirely implausible. Individ…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/huayan-buddhism.md

6. 06 · blog0.698

   Something is in a category by reduction stricte if and only if it is not an aggregate, and, (a) like differences, it is a component of the reality of a thing which is in a category by itself, but the highest genus of that category is not predicated of it; or (b) it is the privation correlated to a certain property which, in turn, is in a category by itself; or (c), like extra-categorial principle such as God, the unity, and the point, it somehow instantiates the mode of being proper to a certain categorial field, but the highest genus of that category is not one of the constitutive elements of…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/robert-alyngton.md

7. 07 · gutenberg0.697

   8. Perception and experience alike inform us, that the earth we inhabit is an island: since wherever men have approached the termination of the land, the sea, which we designate ocean, has been met with: and reason assures us of the similarity of those places which our senses have not been permitted to survey. For in the east[24] the land occupied by the Indians, and in the west by the Iberians and Maurusians,[25] is wholly encompassed [by water], and so is the greater part on the south[26] and north.[27] And as to what remains as yet unexplored by us, because navigators, sailing from opposite…

   gutenberg/PG-44884-the-geography-of-strabo-volume-1-of-3-literally-translated-with-notes/PG-44884.txt

8. 08 · yt0.696

   The right hemisphere's world is not made up of fragments but is seen as interconnected elements which are never quite certain and fixed because they're always in process. They're always flowing. They're always becoming, not just being things. In fact, it might be right to say that in the right hemisphere there are no things. And that was going to be the title of my more recent book, The Matter with Things, until I realized it gave an idea that I might be some sort of postmodernist that denied the existence of anything. And that's not who I am. That world of the right hemisphere is animate. It …

   yt/FOsX666lCPk-how-left-brain-thinking-is-killing-civilization-dr-iain-mcgi/transcript.txt

9. 09 · blog0.696

   The elements did not have absolute “natural places”; and an elemental part, whether displaced from a whole or chancing to be near a whole, sought to attach itself to it because a whole was the place where it would be best preserved. Once united with a whole, elemental parts were no longer heavy or light and revolved with it naturally, that is, without resistance. This doctrine of gravity drew on Ficino’s Neoplatonic ideas of elemental motion, Copernicus’s doctrine of gravity, Lucretius’s comments on the weightlessness of parts in their wholes and scholastic notions of self-conservation (Knox 2…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/giordano-bruno.md

10. 10 · blog0.695

    Independently of his counterpart theory, Lewis’s definition of a possible object has some peculiar consequences, given that existence in general is understood as bearing of the part-of relation to the whole that constitutes the domain of discourse. Take any two possible worlds w 1 and w 2 . Lewis wants to assert that both w 1 and w 2 exist in some sense. So for the assertion to be true, it must be true relative to a domain of discourse which contains as a sub-domain some whole of which both w 1 and w 2 are part. Not both are part of a single possible world or of its part. The smallest whole of…

    blog/plato-stanford-edu/possible-objects.md