Jamal

I agree with all or very nearly all of that, but it's a more nuanced point than you were making before. In putting your case too strongly I think you ...

@"John" Actually, I do think it's important to understand that for something to be empirical does not imply the exclusion of language, symbolic meanin...

Okay, I get you, I think. I agree that knowledge is about more than bare sensation, but then I'm not sure there is such a thing anyway.

@"John" We find the reports of others in experience. I think you just have an eccentrically narrow notion of the empirical. Also we can look at this K...

What is quasi-analytic? My first thought is that any sentence that is true only partly by definition is merely non, rather than quasi.

Maybe I wouldn't like it so much today. I hadn't read anything else at the time and it seemed like I'd found a genuinely new truth, or at least a stun...

That's cheating, John. Anyway, bachelors will always be unmarried men, even if "bachelor" changes meaning and refers to something else. Kripke sorts t...

N&N was actually the first real philosophy book I read. Odd place to start but I liked it.

If it's possible you could be deceived about it, as you admit it is, and it's possible that the capital of France might change in the future, as you a...

This is just because he already knows it's not true, not because it's analytic or a priori. If he didn't know, he could check.

"merely looking"? What does it matter?

Yes, butter too. I have a whole spreadsheet here exhaustively and comprehensively listing the essential and inessential properties of France.

Not only is that distinction quite slippery, but I don't quite see its relevance.

Paris as the capital is inessential, baguettes are essential. Simple.

But if being a capital did consist in "nothing other than people calling it the capital or saying it is," it could still be an empirical fact that Par...

I don't really understand the question to be honest. You're saying that because Paris is the capital of France merely by decree, it is somehow less an...

Well I think others here are equally astonished at your position. So as you say, 'Paris is the capital of France' cannot be false given that Paris is ...

In other words, 'Paris is the capital of France' cannot be false given that Paris is the capital of France.

He's got another definition of analytic: a truth whose negation is a contradiction. Note that the question of how to define 'analytic' has been addres...

I don't really understand the question, and I'm not sure I want to get into it right now anyway, as TG has hit the nail already. Plus I'm on a crappy ...

:D Sorry John, but this made me laugh heartily. France could have had another capital, just as the US could have had a different president. TG is righ...

No way Tchaikovsky's more profound than John Coltrane.

I appear to have shifted into Banno mode. What's going on?

Cool, so we end up with this: She intends to live in harmony with others. To live in harmony with others you have to treat others as you would wish to...

All right. Ought from is, second attempt: She intends to be a firefighter. To be a fighter you have to get training at firefighters' school. Therefore...

I agree this looks like a problem, but as we're in the realm of virtue ethics here, we probably shouldn't ignore the basic distinctions in Aristotle b...

It's in After Virtue. There are reasonable summaries of the argument here on Wikipedia and here on the IEP. I think that's wise, not only with psychol...

Well, the significant shift I was referring to began in the Enlightenment and came to full fruition in the early twentieth century, so I don't think t...

In my experience, when people say "I am lying" they mean something more like "What I just said was a lie". I don't think anyone says that language can...

It's actually an example that MacIntyre uses in After Virtue to make the point about function (he uses a sea captain). I'll have to read that bit agai...

8-) Yes. I was just playing with the is-ought thing to see what happened.

Yeah, I guess it only works insofar as the ought is understood non-morally.

Empty rhetoric. The firefighter may be said to express her telos.

Ought from is: She is a firefighter. Therefore she ought to do whatever a firefighter ought to do. This works because a firefighter is defined functio...

No, he doesn't. No, it isn't.

@"TheWillowOfDarkness" It is a mistake to understand that for the sake of which as something like a Kantian imperative we are somehow bound to follow....

The human telos, and the purposes and intentions of human action deriving from it, have nothing to do with a "grand outside rule".

So far, no. I'm asking again for the "ignore list" function the next time I send a list of feature requests to the developers.

I don't know if I have the energy or ability to mount a critique of your posts, because I can't see how to do so without the hard job of correcting wh...

Looks backwards to me Willow.

So, is the concept of a moral fact any more odd than the concept of any fact? For me, @"Wayfarer" and @"Moliere" are looking at this the right way: Th...

To expand on @"The Great Whatever"'s concise answer... Good question. Some philosophers have believed analytic and a priori to be coextensive, and the...

Eek. My first instinct is to say that there is no barrier in principle to the creation of artificial persons, or agentive rational beings, or what hav...

Hey, nice dodge. ;)

I guess the question is, could there possibly be artificial "I"s? Computational A.I. might not get us more than clever devices, but why in principle c...

Are you joking? I already said:

Yeah, recently I've been feeling like reading Schop again, and I never thought I'd say that. I never did read much of volume 2.

That was an important book in my philosophical education, the one that suddenly made transcendental idealism click. It didn't detract too much from it...

Though they're old-fashioned in media terms, I thought the Magee videos were wonderful. Not black and white, not all men, and not all wearing ties. Ma...