frank

He's been called the Grandfather of existentialism. He drew attention away from grand project building (like Hegel) to the experience of being alive: ...

Yay me.

:pray:

Among the things that peeped up from the dirt in my woodland garden this spring is a... tropical houseplant. Dude.

I think about that every time I vote, so I don't feel so bad. :grin:

I don't think it is. It's a secret.

The war would end. That's actually how WW1 ended: a German mutiny. The French soldiers had also mutinied earlier, but the French government managed to...

Do you mean that if the Nazi soldier took responsibility for his decisions, he'd go home and stop wrecking the world?

Yes. Where I've seen the OP discussed elsewhere, the issue is a psycho-social one rather than a quest to squeeze nuance out of jargon.

You could dwell on the right way to define it, but when a group of people has latched onto the word because it's become useful in their philosophical ...

There's presently a boom in discussions about existentialism vs nihilism on Reddit. Some of the best subreddits are closed to new members, but there a...

The concept of perception has a logical feature that rules out one-to-one mapping, molding, or mirroring. As the parade of sights and sounds changes t...

But some don't even lift a finger to do the stealing. They just marry into it.

Shannon was originally looking at noise on transmission lines. Noise is created by electromagnetism in the vicinity of a line. If it's a digital trans...

We still talk about the psyche, which is another word for ghost or geist: "Geist (German pronunciation: ?) is a German noun with a significant degree ...

I misunderstood, then. It sounded to my ears like: "I sniff an attempt to smuggle in communism, so it's bad." We didn't get the argument for why commu...

I think it works in the vein of the conceivability of a distinction. The stakes are just about who has the burden of proof regarding reduction.

The two have the same extensional definition, so there's a sense in which talk of one is talk of the other.

You tend to do these oblique attacks instead of swapping argument for argument. I'd rather you set out why indirect realism is necessarily dualist (pr...

I think that about sums up the prevailing outlook of our time. I lean toward the notion that all three: the phenomenal, the conceptual (by which we ma...

It's not a matter of mapping. In the Tractatus his very wording tells us we're in the setting of the WWR (although I have to note that I'm not in a mo...

I think the very idea of an intermediary is a red herring. What's really at stake is whether phenomenal experience alone informs us about the world ar...

Yep.

Didn't you ever put your feet up on the desk and say 'fuckit'?

stole your nose

Who doesn't live off the leavings of a kleptocracy? How do you cook your bear?

The basic idea is that explanations are post hoc. You place the event in a historical context as in dreams. Explaining the six dots is not a challenge...

A couple of problems with (A) are Zeno's Paradox and the problem of induction. Fewer bits with a few giant holes.

I meant there's no difference in terms of the force of the supporting argument. In both cases, it's a matter of taste. I think that's what you're disp...

That's a good answer. But say a community finds (B) to be more parsimonious. They would advise you to accept (B) unless there's actual evidence to the...

Think of two scenarios: A. Contemporary science starts with the assumption that each person is a body responding to stimulation (and simultaneously al...

I don't really know what environment you're talking about. I've been focusing more on the evolution of ideas. I'll defer to your knowledge of 20th Cen...

There are a number of ways to interpret the Tractatus. Some of the contemporary interpretations see it as a rejection of metaphysics. The idea is that...

I know. I was thinking about Hiroshima and Nagasaki and I thought, well, the Japanese could have surrendered before the bombing. It went like this: "W...

Over 400,000 Vietnamese were killed by agent orange. Dioxin, its active ingredient, is still present in ground water, and human milk

Because he reminds me that not all humans are completely insane.

I :heart: Jon Stewart

I agree.

You can't really read the Tractatus without picking up on the way he's addressing Schopenhauer, though. Kant was Schopenhauer's primary influence. The...

Schopenhauer leaves us with that question: 'what do the necessities of thought have to do with the way the world is?' Wittgenstein answers that questi...

He says we can't know about that logical orphan: the thing in itself. :grin: :up:

Kripkenstein says normative meaning is a folktale. It sounds great and it fits a socially-centered narrative, but it's really not more than conjecture...

Unfortunately it doesn't work that way. His later philosophy breaks the last rule in the Tractatus. He knew that.

What would you replace that paradigm with? I don't think there is a better solution to the problem of induction. Searle resorted to repeating Hume. Wh...

Which suppositions? I guess my point was that we should take a second to understand Kant's thought experiments before we poo poo him.

You're right. I thought you were saying that space and time are mind independent. Kant shows that they can't be.

I think what you're missing is that there's an aspect of the underlying framework of developmental biology that is a priori. You're putting the scient...

Kant isn't a simple indirect realist where there's some supervenience relation between the noumenon and the phenomenon. What's revolutionary in his in...

Science doesn't confirm that there's a flower independent of our senses and concepts. It starts with that assumption. Spaciotemporal properties are as...

Exactly.