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 · yt0.714

   It ultimately has to be the If to be and to be understood is to one, that which one's, right? Can't be grasped by anything that has any the any difference or distinction within it. This is Plotinus's famous argument. Yeah. Uh, and I I take it that that's ultimately the case. If we claimed to measure the one, it can't possibly be the one. Um, And then the last thing I just wanted to get in is Karen's comment about the control of some men by other men, right? Which is where we've gotten to with science and with nominalism, right? There is this, uh, situation now culturally where, cuz, you know, …

   yt/QvLSkzes_II-convergence-to-neoplatonism-w-wolfgang-smith/transcript.txt

2. 02 · blog0.695

   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

3. 03 · gutenberg0.693

   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

4. 04 · yt0.691

   just to say a few general for the self about what matters we live in a world in which utilitarian values are not just triumphant but for many people the only values that there are that there seems to be no no sense that things can have a value which is not a form of use and this means that all of us are engaged all the time in what some philosophers call instrumental reasoning whenever we're asked to justify something we try and find a purpose for it we say that you know justify for instance the shape of this room you know you're justified in terms of its purpose which is to gather people toge…

   yt/M8BEM3intis-roger-scruton-beauty-and-desecration-power-of-beauty-confere/transcript.txt

5. 05 · blog0.690

   But this idea flouts the initially plausible principle of recombination for possibility of objects, which says that if x is a possible object and y is a possible object independent of x , then the totality consisting exactly of x and y is a possible object. Defenders of Lewis’s theory may take this to mean that the principle of recombination, despite its initial plausibility, is to be rejected. There is another unexpected consequence of Lewis’s theory. If the sum of w 1 and w 2 is an impossible object, then the sum of all possible worlds is an impossible object, for the former is part of the l…

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

6. 06 · archive0.688

   You have all this doctrine in the second text. Afterwards, in the third we read, ad pleniorem Scientiam , (note: For greater knowledge.) that All, and Whole, and Perfect are formally one and the same; and that therefore among figures only the solid is complete. For it alone is determined by three, which is All; and, being divisible in three ways, it is divisible in every possible way. Of the other figures, one is divisible in one way, and the other in two, because they have their divisibility and their continuity according to the number of dimensions allotted to them. Thus one figure is contin…

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

7. 07 · blog0.686

   He then undertakes an exhaustive survey of the various types of “utterance ( lafz ).” Following Porphyry’s Isagoge , he classifies all predicates or terms ( maqulat ) into genus, species, difference, individual, proper accident, and common accident. Taking them in turn, al-Kindi argues that each type of predicate implies both unity and multiplicity. For example, animal is one genus, but it is made up of a multiplicity of species; human is one species but is made up of many individuals; and a single human is one individual but made up of many bodily parts. Finally, al-Kindi seeks an explanation…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/al-kindi.md

8. 08 · yt0.686

   And uh one of the amazing things that I argue in this article that I've just finished, I I I claim at least that it was regarded as a theorem in Platonist days that the corporeal world, which thus represents the lowest of the three strata, is itself tripartite. In other words, the tripartite uh division of the cosmos in its integrality is repeated on the on the corporeal level itself. And guess what? The tripartite uh division uh which we associate with the Ptolemaic uh division into the sidereal world, the world of the stars, the Earth at the center. Platonism is incurably geocentric. And the…

   yt/1Lm3y_4a--0-wolfgang-smith-and-john-vervaeke-the-perpetual-promise-inexh/transcript.txt

9. 09 · blog0.686

   For any constitutive standard, it’s the thing as a whole that’s supposed to live up to the standard; so what’s distinctive about one standard or another is what the thing does or is, and not that it does it, or is it, as a whole. If, when it came to understanding chairs, you devoted your theoretical attention to that ‘as a whole,’ as opposed to the seating, something would clearly have gone wrong. (Imagine a theorist of chairs arguing that the constitutive standards for being a chair must be met by the chair as a whole, and thus the essential feature of chairs, and the key to understanding the…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/practical-reason-and-the-structure-of-actions.md

10. 10 · gutenberg0.685

    This path—the only one now remaining—has been entered upon by me; and I flatter myself that I have, in this way, discovered the cause of—and consequently the mode of removing—all the errors which have hitherto set reason at variance with itself, in the sphere of non-empirical thought. I have not returned an evasive answer to the questions of reason, by alleging the inability and limitation of the faculties of the mind; I have, on the contrary, examined them completely in the light of principles, and, after having discovered the cause of the doubts and contradictions into which reason fell, hav…

    gutenberg/PG-4280-the-critique-of-pure-reason/PG-4280.txt