Leontiskos

Yes, that is a good argument. :up: The virtuous person does not value their own life above every other thing.

- The text has a cultural context. It does no good to read "just the text" while ignoring that context.

Okay, but this isn't really relevant to an argument regarding courage or virtue. The question here is, "Should we be virtuous, even if means dying?" W...

Scholars see other possibilities, some of which I already gave: Sure, but this goes back to my point about an elevation of the core of the Law. It is ...

No, I don't think happiness is one species of pleasure. Think of an exchange like this: Son: Having sex with prostitutes whenever I please gives me gr...

:up: Yes, and that seems in line with what I found when looking at firefighter's oaths, i.e. "Protecting people." We must oppose all the immorality th...

Or devolution? Either way, I think the distinction between pleasure and happiness is still alive in our contemporary lexicon, and it avoids these argu...

Okay, but how so? What is a counterexample? (And note that in following @"J"'s argumentation I perhaps should have italicized "your". He is emphasizin...

My point is that the prohibition of cocaine (or methamphetamine or whatever you like) has everything to do with the drug use, and that the pleasure is...

Actually the idea that some pleasures are intense but empty strikes me as a unanimous idea in both ethics and psychology. I think it would be hard to ...

Aristotle would call this pleasure. (This is quite similar to the discussion @"Count Timothy von Icarus" and @"J" are having elsewhere.)

We could rephrase my argument for the firefighter: If one were bound to save every person from fire then they would be bound to do the impossible; but...

You often raise this strawman. I don't see anyone thinking that Hitler self-consciously believed himself to be evil. The example of Hitler is often ra...

That is prima facie contradictory. "This crime deserves a maximum sentence, and also we shouldn't lose any sleep over crimes like this."

I am always amazed at how much attention a suggestion gets. Reading Groups is only slightly different from Primary Sources, and it has the great benef...

- So do you see it as a mistake to make Reading Groups a category? Would it have instead been better for individuals to simply post individual reading...

Here is the counterargument: It is always to your benefit to be courageous. (Supposition) It is never to your benefit to die. Some courageous acts get...

This is part and parcel of the incoherence of Kantian ethics: right action absent motivation (because all motivation is selfish). @"J" keeps dancing a...

That's the avoidance of an answer and the avoidance of philosophy. Let's talk about what truth-bearers are. Michael: Impossible! Again, philosophers h...

- Yep. :up:

- And half of it about that one. :smile:

Methodologically, I think a lot of this comes back to this: Which is an example of what I said here: When people on TPF and elsewhere contradict other...

I argued that truth cannot exist without minds. You adapted that by replacing "minds" with "sentences." But then when you were pressed on what a sente...

- Good points. I was essentially thinking of a space where everyone is mutually on board with paying attention to primary sources, whether or not any ...

- Yes, I suppose that's pretty much the same thing. :up:

That's right. I don't think that just because something is immoral I therefore have a duty to stop or prevent it. If that were true then I would have ...

Here is the point of origin for the discussion: It turns into this: If minds (or else truth-bearers) do not exist, does truth exist? The idea is that ...

This whole discussion is directly related to the metaphysical status of truth bearers, and this has been an important question throughout the history ...

Sorry, I forgot about this. They are the same insofar as moral standing is not infinite. Not everything is our responsibility to rectify. Why? If I do...

A suggestion: perhaps have a forum devoted to primary sources? Where OPs are meant to revolve around a primary source and the threads are supposed to ...

The implicit premise is incompatibilism, which seems right to me even though it is not uncontroversial. If there is an argument that we disagree with,...

Well said. In general I think we want to properly recognize prima facie judgments. For example, Michael may want to claim that there is some prima fac...

- :up:

You have this weird idea that truth and accuracy can only be properties and cannot be relations. Historical philosophy says otherwise.

"Greater than" (>) is a relation.

Okay, then I can see why you want to include interpretation. I would err on the side of saying that interpretation/perspective can simply be taken for...

I think world is the key missing element here. To say that a painting is accurate in itself makes no sense without reference to something outside the ...

What do we think the Gadfly would say after he hears Kant speak on morality?

A priori or a posteriori? Because when someone who offers very few arguments and has a self-admittedly thin exposure to philosophical history opposes ...

- I could explain the difference between sight and hearing, but it would no doubt be lost on you.

Compare: So Kant was enormously original and insightful, raising questions that have been impossible to ignore, and there is nothing new in Kant - not...

Do you know of ancients who say that you cannot get an ought from an is? Is Hume progressing something that already existed, or is he doing something ...

Yup. And it is odd to appeal to a vacuous aphorism over and over again as if one is saying something substantial. ...Not to mention refusing to go bey...

I'm absolutely certain you're wrong. And lots of people use the ignore extension for just this reason. Welcome to the internet. (And note that standar...

Inferences from empirical premises run in both directions, past and future. Both similarly depend on the physical perdurance of matter. There is no su...

What follows is Javascript (and JQuery) to round out the ignore extension. I am using it with the Tampermonkey extension for Chrome. It removes ignore...

This definition is what is leading to so many of your contradictions. Sentences have no existence or meaning apart from minds. You can't separate out ...

Truths and sentences are about things, not sentences.

Well the discussion began when I pointed out that Banno thinks there are truths even where there are no minds: So that is the starting point, and this...

This is Janus' future-truths transposed to be about the past instead of the future: "You want to say that a claim about the past involves no claim abo...