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The Implications of Saunt Lora's Assertion for Rationalists.
For those who are unfamiliar, Saunt Lora's Assertion comes from the novel Anathem, and expresses the view that there are no genuinely new ideas; every idea has already been thought of.
A lot of purportedly new ideas can be seen as, at best, a slightly new spin on an old idea. The parallels between, Leibniz's views on the nature of possibility and Arnauld's objection, and David Lewis's views on the nature of possibility and Kripke's objection are but one striking example. If there is anything to the claim that we are, to some extent, stuck recycling old ideas, rather than genuinely/interestingly widening the range of views, it seems as though this should have some import for rationalists.
It would first require a usable definition of "genuinely new" not susceptible to goalpost-shifting and that is actually useful for anything.
That was part of the joke in Anathem. Saunt Lora's assertion had actually first been stated by Saunt X, but it also occurs in the pre-X writings of Saunt Y, and so on...