Giving someone an opportunity is not the same as compelling them to take up the opportunity. In some cases work is good for the worker. This doesn't m...
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. Does evolution "need" anything? What does evolution "need"? Sometimes people who don't love each other hav...
I'm not so sure everyone knows what a fact is. I like Banno's reply for starters. These exemplify the two sorts of use of the term I'm most accustomed...
I agree that we can engage in moral deliberation, and speak about things like values, intentions, actions, justifications, and personal responsibility...
Do you have evidence to support the claim that all people of all cultures in all times "don't sing" in solitude? I sometimes read or talk aloud when n...
How do you know the differences that have made it difficult for you are differences that should be accounted for primarily in terms of sex and gender?...
In my experience it's not normally the case that one person changes another's mind in the way you indicate. Rather, each person's encounters with the ...
You might proceed by rereading my previous reply to you. It contains an answer to the question you've just asked that should make it clear that you ha...
Specific speculative claims about what is unknowable are unwarranted conjectures. It seems to me that claims to know the actual limits of the world --...
An excellent point. I agree. It remains to be seen in our conversation how this attitude you've attributed to Nietzsche is manifest in his views on ra...
I might have expected you to reply to my comments by clarifying your interpretation of Nietzsche's use of the terms "instinct" and "race". I didn't th...
Empirical scientists never "get it all right". Neither do mathematicians. Neither do painters or musicians, lawyers or politicians, ballplayers or mai...
So far as I can tell, there are things in the world called dogs, and things in the world called perceptual experiences of dogs, and it's advisable not...
A wise pig builds houses suitable to withstand the huffing and puffing it's reasonable to expect in his neighborhood. There's a matter of costs and be...
Would you agree it seems we've homed in on the region of our disagreement? I would not say "I believe there is no God" is a claim about the nonexisten...
Your claim "If the nature of the universe is established via the scientific method, whatever is the result must be finite", seems fair enough if it's ...
I look forward to hearing how you apply these terms. Consider the Sun, or the mass of the Sun, or the fact that the Sun is more massive than the Earth...
I'm happy to hear this sort of frank acknowledgment, all too rare in conversations like these. I'm getting crankier and grayer too. And the force of r...
I'm not sure why there is still said to be a "philosophical problem" of color. I'm sure there must be something very wrong with my way of thinking abo...
Somewhere down the line I became accustomed to using the term "judgment" to indicate the thing that's said to be true or false in a wide range of cont...
The passage strikes me as a bunch of despicable racist garbage. A good example of the confused romantic tendency to grasp at fiction in anxious reacti...
I'm not inclined to say the self is an illusion. But the notion of a self as an "entity" somehow distinct or distinguishable from an "entity" like a s...
Every house can be demolished. The fact that a house can be demolished does not make it a "weak house" or a "dangerous house". The fact that one demol...
Thanks. Yours too. I suppose I would agree that nihilism is not necessarily a product of cultural or personal decadence. And I'd agree that growth and...
Or as I intended: trope: a significant or recurrent theme; a motif I did not mean to implicate the distinction between truth and fiction. I was asking...
It seems to me that it's only what's called "the known universe" that is "established by scientific method". But there's an important conceptual diffe...
I'm not sure I understand how that distinction is supposed to apply. So far as I can tell, the sort of belief indicated in (iii) should be interpreted...
Doesn't every sort of animal have its own sort of brain? Aren't all the brains similar to all the others in some respect or other? And some more than ...
It's not about popularity. Language can't do its work as a medium of thought and communication without standards, norms, conventions, rules of use. I ...
We find ourselves perceiving and acting in a world characterized by ceaseless motion and change. That experience is organized according to an order of...
What kind of interpretation are you looking for when you ask that sort of question? We might take the legend as promoting a robust ideal of unity in j...
The fact that you say "every photo, every dream..." does not entail that there is a finite number of photos or dreams. It seems you have assumed that ...
Our talk about truth is informed by our grasp of the facts. Truth and falsehood are values we assign to judgments and statements. We don't fabricate t...
Love is not merely a matter of respect and esteem. We care for the beings we love. We feel obliged to care for them, to make ourselves in some respect...
Is nihilism growing or is it just deeply entrenched? I'm not sure how I would tell the difference. Is it necessary to "create new values" to make a sa...
9/11 is one good analogy for the present crisis. The 2008 financial meltdown is another. Discussion of the conditions that produce these crises has so...
How would you account for this distinction and make it explicit, in the case at hand? So far as I can tell, denial of the proposition "x exists" entai...
It's a breezy read on an important topic. It seems likely you and I agree about the speculative character of many theistic and atheistic arguments, bu...
What do facts "require"? Who "applies facts" in practice without "believing" the facts they apply? It seems likely that what you're calling "practical...
So far as I can tell, there are plenty of fools and few wise people, then as now; and the age or period of a saying, text, or doctrine is no sign of i...
I've heard that some scholars interpret the knowledge in the story to mean "knowledge of everything". How is knowledge of everything "subject" to the ...
I'm not sure I follow you here. Do you mean to suggest that the "common ground" I mentioned might be characterized in terms of an "infinite spectrum o...
What is the question you're seeking an answer to? How would you put it, exactly? It seems perhaps you're trying to answer a question like this one: "W...
How do you and Watts unpack this sort of talk? What counts as "knowledge of good and evil"? How does it make humans "like gods"? How do you interpret ...
It sounds to me that we are kindred spirits. I say similar things about myself, about conversations like these, and about the ignorance, error and con...
Why do you say that we do not "believe" matters of fact? It seems to me these are paradigm cases of belief, and paradigm cases of how epistemologists ...
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