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 · blog0.797

   my understanding of any kind of change, such as eclipses or even yesterday’s lunar eclipse, depends on and cannot exist without my understanding of change in general) and it is also more certain (e.g. that change exists in the physical world is much more certain than that a meteorite is currently entering the earth’s southern atmosphere at 12.6745327 km/s). Those very basic and certain notions, manifested by common everyday experience and in need of no confirmation from more specialized experience or sciences, initially provide only a confused understanding. Their exact content and everything …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/albert-the-great.md

2. 02 · blog0.778

   Aristotle nonetheless argued that change is distinct from time because change occurs at different rates, whereas time does not (Physics IV,10). This essay focusses on the topic of change, while not denying that the topic of time is inseparable from it. Motion, as change in place, will figure prominently in our discussion. One well-known idea is that of Cambridge change. This can be arrived at by following the well-tried analytical technique of re-casting philosophically important discussions and concepts in the meta-language. Thus a Cambridge change in a thing is a change in the descriptions (…

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/change-and-inconsistency.md

3. 03 · gutenberg0.761

   "The things that can be seen, heard, and learned," he says, "are what I prize the most." This is the language of the empiricist, to whom observation is the sole guarantee of truth. "The sun is new every day," is another fragment; and this opinion, in spite of its paradoxical character, is obviously inspired by scientific reflection, and no doubt seemed to him to obviate the difficulty of understanding how the sun can work its way underground from west to east during the night. Actual observation must also have suggested to him his central doctrine, that Fire is the one permanent substance, of …

   gutenberg/PG-25447-mysticism-and-logic-and-other-essays/PG-25447.txt

4. 04 · blog0.761

   Instead, only a few medical demonstrations are subalternate to geometry. They are, however, subalternate to geometry in exactly the same way as the demonstrations in optics are, for optics is the science of light, and geometry bears only on certain accidents of light, not on light itself, and does not explain why light has those accidents. Thomas Aquinas agrees with Albert on these matters. In his literal commentary on the Posterior Analytics (1269-72) he notes that mathematics bears on matter because of the nature of matter, which leads it to have mathematical accidents, dimensions, that is, …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/medieval-theories-of-demonstration.md

5. 05 · blog0.758

   It is in light of that influence that it has been argued (Anzulewicz 2000a and 2000b) that there is a general but profound underlying unity to Albert’s whole project and that it is provided by his adhesion to the triad exitus - perfectio - reductio : 1) the procession of the world from God, its one and simple creator and exemplar ( exitus ), 2) the world’s concrete unfolding and realization in multiplicity, contingency, potentiality, time and materiality ( perfectio ); 3) the return and reduction of all created things to God, their ultimate end ( reductio ). Much of the work done by Aristotle …

   blog/plato-stanford-edu/albert-the-great.md

6. 06 · yt0.757

   And finally, just looking at where they're coming from philosophically, it's a clear split. Modern innovation versus ancient tradition. Absolutely. Whitehead builds a completely new system, process philosophy, explicitly designed to integrate modern science, relativity, quantum theory, evolution into a coherent metaphysics for our time. Smith revives ancient and medieval metaphysics, perennial philosophy, scholasticism. He argues against the modern turn, saying we need to return to this older wisdom to find a more complete truth. So even their fundamental response to that initial problem, the …

   yt/3sDxoZuNlJc-11-two-paths-from-the-crisis-of-modernity/transcript.txt

7. 07 · blog0.757

   Underlying this viewpoint is a conception of the relationship between cause and effect as one of correspondence, which entails the consistency of an action with the essential nature of its cause (Kogan 1984: 249). Accordingly, a simple cause has one act and produces only a single effect. In keeping with this conception, and considering the absolute simplicity of the First Principle, al-Ghazali describes a cosmological scheme in terms of emanation, where the First Principle causes multiplicity of effects not directly, but through a series of emanative intermediary causes proceeding from one ano…

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

8. 08 · archive0.755

   If statements of fact themselves depend upon the person who observes them, how much more distinct is the reflection of the per- sonality of him who gives an account of methods and of philosophical speculations which form the essence of science ! For this reason there will inevitably be much that is subjective in every objective exposi- tion of scieuce. And as an individual production is only significant in virtue of that which has preceded and that which is contemporary with it, it resembles a mirror which in reflecting exaggerates the size and clearness of neighbouring objects, and causes a p…

   archive/principlesofchem01menduoft/principlesofchem01menduoft_djvu.txt

9. 09 · gutenberg0.752

   Then he heard some one reading out of a book of Anaxagoras, that mind is the cause of all things. And he said to himself: If mind is the cause of all things, surely mind must dispose them all for the best. The new teacher will show me this 'order of the best' in man and nature. How great had been his hopes and how great his disappointment! For he found that his new friend was anything but consistent in his use of mind as a cause, and that he soon introduced winds, waters, and other eccentric notions. (Compare Arist. Metaph.) It was as if a person had said that Socrates is sitting here because …

   gutenberg/PG-1658-phaedo/PG-1658.txt

10. 10 · yt0.752

    Uh which is a kind of breeding and creating of better human beings, which we are doing and will continue to do from his point of view. This is deeply important because from Darwinian from a Darwinian perspective, if there's nothing special about man, there's no reason to we think man has much dignity. And so we see, uh for those of you who's going to study human rights in part, one of the things you'll you'll be confronted with is that human rights uh thinkers have given up the ability to justify why humans have rights. And uh the reason they have given that up is because they no longer believ…

    yt/OxavWGRTDtM-roger-berkowitz-exploring-the-human-condition/transcript.txt