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Interesting, I didn’t know that. So a proposition, say, has something resembling a matter/form division? Yes, I do, if the subvenient term you’re refe...

This is an important clarification, and if I appeared to be asking for matter without form, I shouldn’t have been. The question, whether matter can be...

I agree with all of this, and I think it’s a good account of how the process works. My nagging question is, in a way, terminological, but it may be im...

Right, that’s what we want to say. But is this really a supervenience on strictly physical reality? Let’s back up: What makes a letter the key unit of...

Interesting. I think the problem here is that a written symbol or a spoken phoneme already has meaning built into it, in your sense. Consider the writ...

I agree, it's a good question, but I think we need to sharpen it, as follows: "What caused the last domino to fall?" This prevents at least some of th...

Your reply reveals an unintended ambiguity in what I wrote. By talking about consciousness as an "exclusively biological phenomenon" I was meaning to ...

Getting back to your original question: I’d rather answer it as if you’d asked, “What should be the outstanding issues?” I’m sure @"Wayfarer" and othe...

Clear and helpful, thank you.

I hold no brief for Ehrman or any other particular Biblical scholar, but surely this is taking skepticism about history too far. What counts as a "con...

Good citations, thanks. If I have a beef, it's clearly with Witt and not your interpretation of him!

I'm no Tractatus expert, but I don't think this is right -- wouldn't it be more Witt's position in the Phil. Investigations, rather than here? Leaving...

The tragic view of philosophy! Quite possibly the correct one -- we will never get what we need, but, like Sisyphus, we can't stop pushing the philoso...

If you want to read a first-rate philosopher discuss all these issues, try Reality+, David Chalmers' new book. It sheds light on a lot of what's being...

I was getting at a different question about causality -- not whether the lamp causes the perception (in sense-1) of the lamp, but whether the superven...

Very clear and helpful. If we can say that Hegel's view was pretty close to the idea that "reality" doesn't mean "whatever's 'out there' apart from ph...

Good, that's what I hoped you would say. The "direction of fit" question is important, and we don't want the two senses of "perception" to escape very...

Not to take sides on Searle's contributions to philosophy overall, but this distinction is extremely useful, I think. You mention that this ambiguity ...

Your translations from Hegelese are excellent, thank you! And the bolded paragraph from the Encyc. Brit. does seem very close to the question at issue...

OK, I think I understand you. You're saying that the "assumption" is not about a specific P being true prior to verification, but rather about truth i...

This has been fun to watch from the sidelines. I more or less share Banno’s point of view on this, but I have a feeling some basic clarification might...

I don't read Rawls as saying that definitions of the good have to be unanalyzable preferences. This seems to set up a false binary: Either the good fo...

This is a scary vision, all right. I don’t think it has much to do with Rawls or political liberalism, though. It’s a huge subject, obviously, so let ...

Habermas is exactly who I was thinking of as an exponent of this ongoing, rational, consensus-driven approach to knowledge and values! This is complic...

OK, the world may be "disenchanted" in Weber's sense, but surely "the individual as the sole arbiter of value" isn't the only remaining alternative. I...

Yes, what you say about Simpson's criticism is similar to the points that Nussbaum and others have made. There is a claim to a sort of obviousness in ...

We should probably start a different thread to pursue this. But I think you're right that the liberal/Kantian ethical position begins by refusing to s...

I'm not a Rawlsian all down the line, but I do think you're being unfair here. The veil of ignorance, or the "original position," is a technical contr...

Hmm, I'm wondering who you have in mind here. If we take John Rawls as a paradigm liberal political philosopher, we certainly don't find him making su...

:lol:

Right, that would be the question. PI 194 turns out to be a good test case, because the description LW gives of philosophers -- "we are like savages, ...

I don’t. If anything, Habermas seems sympathetic to the later Wittgenstein (less so to the Tractatus). But there’s a lot I don’t know about Habermas. ...

. . . and a general reply to this conversation: In his excellent book The Logic of Reflection, Julian Roberts reads LW as asserting in the Tractatus t...

Makes sense to me as well, though I think there is indeed a parallel, which you've pointed out.

Very interesting. Do you think the later Wittgenstein was in sympathy with the idea that reason can be self-reflective, or at any rate can reflect cri...

Yes, this is helpful. I agree. This seems to be key. Is an "actual" S-T region one that can only change in certain ways? What I mean is, adding to and...

I figured. Just wanted to make sure I understood you, thanks!

Agreed. The skeptical position is almost always about the limits of knowledge, not a declaration about what does or doesn't exist. And it tends to equ...

Love it! Can we see his picture? Well, not "his" picture, if by that you mean Noumenal Former Fred . . . Of course the Kantian analysis can be played ...

OK, I thought you were referring to brain states (P) giving rise to mental states (M). The P ("exterior" object) to M (perception of it) is different,...

I don't want to lose sight of this exchange between Jamal and Hanover. Hanover is uneasy with the idea of an “intersubjective” way-station between ind...

No, I think your OP is right. I suppose it depends on whether we can really imagine that "identical B-minimal properties do not entail identical P-reg...

Could you refer us to a paper or discussion about this? This is an important implication, and I'm glad you brought it out. If one is looking for a dif...

I also find this a promising direction. Has anyone ever written a piece called "Kant: The First Phenomenologist"? :smile: At any rate, it's proved imp...

Another way to think about this, using terminology I don't believe was available to Kant: Objectivity would be universal intersubjectivity. We can the...

Okay, I can at least start with this . . . Concerning Finn & Bueno: as I said, a wonderful paper, full of insight. I’m particularly grateful for the f...

Funny, I was just sitting down to start a reply. I thought the article was brilliant, in about a dozen ways. Enormously helpful in clarifying the issu...

Agree about the profound implications. It's all part of the same discussion we visited back with Davidson et al. Thanks for appreciating the thread!

Thanks, Banno. The paper looks right on target. Sider also has a lot of arguments against quantifier variance. I'll read it carefully and reply. But j...

Alisdair MacIntyre, Elizabeth Anscombe, and others would say that the words "moral", "virtue", "obligation", and similar ethical terms no longer descr...