Mariner

Teleological, not normative. Hyperbole, not description. The proportion of children lacking a powerful, instinctive "will to like" is precisely 0%, by...

My 5-year old kid asked me something similar a few days ago. "Dad, explain love to me"' (It is a style of question that he enjoys, this "explain X to ...

Besides awareness? Humility, I suppose. When we don't know the answers, we look for them; if we can't find them, we still try to minimize externalitie...

Amen. One major beef -- rather, the greatest beef -- I have with mainstream "environmentalism" is that it mostly replaces one ideological discourse wi...

As said earlier, with some added emphasis: a. Reduce, as much as possible, externalizations. In other words, people who are responsible for X must pay...

How about, "you have been unable to find an irrefutable fact?" Looks irrefutable enough to me.

I have no objection to anything you said in this post. Stewards are a subspecies of managers (one with special responsibilities). The issue is "how sh...

Once you accept that mutations can become stable in subpopulations of a species (as in the case of the moths), it becomes a case of special pleading (...

I shrug at the realization that management assumes a dominating position; not at the task of management itself. As for the religious aspect, note that...

Note also that while the imagination immediately runs to costs in this discussion, externalization of benefits is also very harmful. Free riders (peop...

Management is, by design, an instrument of domination. Is that what you are driving at? If it is, I agree, but with a shrug. It is inevitable that we ...

Ring species. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species

Yep, freudian slip by me there. I intended to write "philosopher". But I guess my subconscious was aghast at the thought of doing it.

This is the topic of one of the books I have not written. But at least I have the sketch of the book ready. I've written it many years ago. It goes li...

In other words, people are bad reasoners (because they have competing passions in their souls). I agree with Hume. But this is clearly no reason to be...

20 years ago I gave lessons on speciation. From memory, there are very obvious (and instantaneous) cases of speciation in plants, through chromosomes ...

Alex Rosenberg (physicist) is a known proponent of "scientism". Check this very short essay about it: https://philpapers.org/archive/PIGISA

Good and evil are ethical terms, and ethical terms are never inequivocally objective or subjective. (Ethics are a favorite Platonic instance of the me...

Compare the gospel sentence -- "When I have been lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people toward me" -- with the Buddhist mindset and the diff...

And is this scenario more akin to "attracting agent" or to "necessary precondition"? That's the core of the difference.

The difference is that in one case (Christian grace) it is a gift from an agent (God) to the subject; in the other case, it is a precondition that is ...

The thesis that belief is unnecessary for salvation deals with salvation as something extrinsic to the subject. Christian theology has thousands of pa...

According to your interpretation, none of them is explaining anything. A full description of all the details involved in an event is not an explanatio...

@"Wayfarer" You lost that bet. Where can I collect? ;)

Mr. Reductionist thinks, mistakenly, that a description is an explanation. But this is a serious definitional issue, which is why I voted for methodol...

Please elaborate. Show me some ordinary sentences in which chaos is something which acts. (I want to get a grip on what you mean by chaos, to translat...

By the way, chaos as defined in mathematics has very little to do with chaos as used in metaphysics (and in everyday discourse, too).

It does not do anything and cannot do anything, but that does not make it "nothing". It makes it "something which cannot do anything". Pretty much con...

Nope. Potency without act is something. Nothing is no thing. In nothing, there is no potency.

Chaos is unlimited potency, while order (of a given kind) is a given actualization of said potency. How else would you categorize chaos and order?

Aristotle already answered that in the Metaphysics. Act has metaphysical precedence over potency.

When we speak of randomness, we are talking about unpredictable events enmeshed within a contextual order. Take the two most common examples of random...

Sounds like the depiction of the ancient Athenians in Thucydides. It has been among us for a very long time.

Trustworthiness of the reporter. If the author of the account has a strong track record for reliability, it makes for a more probably trustworthy acco...

It is one way to look at it. But another way is to consider that the immense suffering of those personally involved in it, and the recurrence of simil...

Nah, threads are not personal fiefs. And this one had served its purpose (of musing out loud about something curious).

"The system is not working right now, there is nothing we can do". As if this were my problem rather than theirs.

Check out Jesus` reaction (after the resurrection) when St. Thomas says, "my Lord and my God".

No disagreement from me on that. But the facts listed there remain (and are verifiable, at least at a general news level). The narratives offered ther...

Oh well, Google is your friend if you were not following the news at the time. Is the Guardian ok? First link on the google search: https://www.google...

Must be great to know so much about the world that strange phenomena do not inspire doubt. This kind of knowledge is really fun if it allows one to di...

A good example of the difference between a narrative and a fact. The fact is that the US authorities divulged the name of the suspect mere 3 hours aft...

This is an argument for they having the same rate of "passport carrying" as the average citizen, but it appears they have a far higher rate.

The police are not necessarily the ones planting the documents. But the salient point is that, given the accumulation of cases, I think it is more rea...

I would question this in the case of passports. Driver's licenses (especially when you are driving!), I agree. But passports? Anyone has data on the %...

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.". H.L. Mencken Direct democracy (as per anci...

In a nutshell, because the freedom to search for the right ethical values is the freedom to search for God. Without this freedom, man's happiness woul...

You can think they are for everyone, but people may disagree with you. Because they are free. And you must cherish this ability that they have, of dis...

For ourselves. Yes, we can. Because we are ethically free. Hence the value of that freedom.

Says you. It is easy to say that John Doe is wrong when we are discussing serial killing. But some moral issues are not so beyond the pale. Note, I do...