Joshs

One of the many differences between what Derrida is getting at with ‘iterability’ and a reductive physicalist account is that the latter presupposes s...

You think he’s counting on reaping the rewards in terms of career advancement? Or maybe he’s a trust fund baby with nothing better to do with his cash...

Keep in mind that Husserl’s apophantic method discloses certainty in the structural features of intentional synthesis, grounded in the synthetic struc...

Derrida's chain of deconstructive tropes (difference, gramme, trace) directs us to the futural difference within presence, the way that a would-be ide...

Reminds me of Nietzsche’s analysis of ‘purpose’:

You probably have in mind thoughts like these from Nietzsche: What one also learns from Nietzsche is that the external world is not a deterministic me...

Excellent point.

I’m a philosopher, and that makes me a bit biased. I tend to think that whatever area of thought one purports to be involved in, one is appealing to o...

I would hope they would be in conflict, just as is the case with contemporary philosophical positions. It’s nice to have so many alternatives to choos...

What’s the difference between philosophically informed politics and politically informed philosophy? Can’t we trace all political frameworks to underl...

Not sure how what you linked to doesn’t count as philosophy. I’m familiar with two of the authors mentioned, Karen Barad and Donna Haraway. Their work...

I was hoping you’d say a bit more about what the mental means to you , taken as a cause. I agree there’s a lot of disagreement within psychology about...

What is it you are envisioning as the structure of the mental? Does it have parts, elements, sub-components? Are you defining it in terms of a neuro-c...

You don’t need a mind detached from reality to defeat physical cause and effect. You can get to the same goal by looking at the non-linear dynamics of...

Looking at the level of detail of a chemical reaction will only reveal a chain of linear causality. Looking at the level of global self-organizing pro...

What distinguishes reductive determinisms from those that allow for the evolution of freedom is whether an effect is determined by a cause in a unidir...

Changing is not the same thing as being ‘wiped away’. I’ll give you an example. In the shift from Newton physics to relativistic and quantum physics, ...

It’s actually intersubjective , at least with regard to empirical truth, and the intersubjective intertwines itself so inextricably with the subjectiv...

Nietzsche often considered suicide due to his physical suffering. It was his philosophy which rescued him. But as you said, any approach only works if...

Is the only alternative to a dead determinism, a determinism of assigned causes and effects that we invented for the convenience of building stuff, a ...

This is not what Nietzsche predicted. Nihilism is not the inevitable result of atheism. In fact , Nietzsche argued in his later works that religion an...

Not everything that matters is calculable.

Can the Universe be ordered without being animated by purpose? Do you see the difference? Purpose and reason seem to suggest A purpose and A reason. T...

What devices akin to a radar gun measure effort? I assume you want to focus your attention on the brain and what is taking place inside of it , rather...

What I mean by fetishizing intent is the assumption that intent can be ethically incorrect, that one can want what one shouldn’t, in addition to succe...

As I wrote to Philosophim in another thread, addiction is so powerful because the rewards are immediate and the detrimental effects are more gradual. ...

If it matters to us, if it is important to our goals, then we are implicitly aware of it, even if we don’t know how to articulate it explicitly in wor...

My objection to Aristotle’s concept of happiness as eudaemonia, and this whose ethical theories are influenced by it, is that it conflates the hedonic...

It’s both a psychological and a philosophical question. It would be strictly a psychological question if I were looking only for an empirical explanat...

I’m trying to distinguish ‘ happy’ from want, desire, preference. When we get what we want, doesn’t that automatically make us happier than we would h...

Great question. What kind of mental processing is taking place when we have an intuition, a gut feeling? How often do experts in a field, such as surg...

And by what criterion do we ‘go against ourselves?’ What higher motive intervenes against ‘emotion’ except another emotion? Let’s say I derive pleasur...

There are positions that purport to go beyond the realism-anti-realism binary. I’m thinking of poststructuralists like Deleuze, Focault, Derrida and H...

Would you be amenable to the idea that it is just as a convenience that we separate affective and rational aspects of thought into district categories...

I know this won’t convince you, but I wanted to counter your comment with Robert Solomon’s view of emotion:

I have a quibble with the way both of you have been opposing the rational and the emotional in this conversation. Are either of you familiar with the ...

Have you read any Heidegger? Philosopher Matthew Ratcliffe captures Heidegger’s approach to the objectivity of science below:

You claim that rationality leads to the conclusion that the universe is absurd, irrational and meaningless, and that therefore spirituality is the onl...

I think one’s explanatory toolbox is limited by the choice to translate philosophical concepts into a naturalistic vocabulary. I’m sure you’re aware t...

I’m thinking of Merleu-Ponty’s position, where he states: It seems to me that this deviates a bit from a modeling relation, in that it relies less on ...

But you’ll notice in the story you were right about Susie not trying her best. It was just that she knew what was going on with her and the reason for...

Do we build a world of intent and expectation ‘in our heads’ or in our embodied patterns of material interaction with an environment? What’s the diffe...

The self is just a way of integrating experiences on the basis of compatibility or similarity. It is a continually evolving point of view or perspecti...

Are you saying that Susie might not be consciously aware that she is not doing her best? Are you imputing some sort of unconscious psychodynamics here...

Oh yeah. The golden rule, like the 10 commandments, pre-supposes what it should be putting into question, that we harm , disrespect and oppress each o...

Nobody asked me, but I hate the Golden Rule. It perpetuates the very violences it is designed to pre-empt, by assuming that morality is a matter of mo...

Let me split up this issue of ‘doing one’s best’ into what I see as its different aspects. Let’s take as an example little Susie and her piano lessons...

Some of the most famous atheists ( Sartre, Marx, Derrida, Nietzsche) believe that rationality evolves or becomes, so that today’s evidence becomes tom...

All scientific paradigms rest on an underlying set of metaphysical presuppositions, but it is not job of the scientist to make this metaphysics explic...

The good for Nietzsche has to be understood not in terms of individual values but in terms of an organized system of values. A scientific theory is on...