It is interesting how Marx generates such extreme responses. If this had been about Hegel, or Feuerbach, or Durkheim, or Jung, we might not agree with...
That would not make sense. If Jack had no free will, then why would Mary point the gun at him? We do not threaten rocks or trees with guns, because we...
You cannot both be independent and also work as a network. The two pull in opposite directions. Yes, it would solve many problems if we could just com...
If I have a claim on some land I am asserting ownership. If my claim is because other people of the same race or religion as me have lived in that are...
We shouldn't assume that the land was owned by whatever group happened to live there before it was taken over by others, such that they should be give...
And what is that idea? It seems to me there are many ideas, some taking account of a God who knows in advance what we will do and others where God and...
I do not see the problem. Two subjects; (1) the state of mind of 'you', which is differentiated from (2) 'anything' i.e. the external world, that what...
Our claim about the property of the object depends on a prior claim that the object exists, so it can have a property. 'The Earth is flat' could be ob...
I don't know about succumbed. T'was ever thus. Things have been much worse; think about Heidegger's academic career. Or what passed for Soviet philoso...
There is nothing special about academic philosophy. You could get a similar set of complaints from a schoolteacher, a policeman, a politician and ever...
If we were just noting that 'ruler A is longer than ruler B' ' then we would not strictly be measuring because to measure is to apply an external stan...
The circularity in using a ruler to measure a ruler is that the standard is arbitrary. The official 1 metre ruler has been picked as the standard, but...
Regarding rulers, isn't the point that all rulers are judged for accuracy against a standard ruler, but you cannot judge the standard ruler itself for...
They are anti what might be called pro-Semitism, that is the idea that any people should be grouped according to their race or religion. Rather crudel...
Now you are just twisting your argument to score points. The issue was whether investment in unproductive areas could create a net benefit or whether ...
They do if investment can open opportunities for work. I would have thought Australia was a prime example. What is false; my saying that they wanted t...
You can tell it was underpopulated by the fact that it is now able to support a lot more people that it did at the time. Yes; it was Ottoman land whic...
There was something of that notion in early Jewish settlements in Palestine, They were taking on unproductive land, so bringing it into production wou...
I did not say it was empty, however it was considered under-developed and thus underpopulated, which indeed it was. What you do not seem to be able to...
My answer is that Hitler was a populist politician. When he saw a tactical political advantage he would support emigration to Palestine, or other plac...
No, it was not 'clearly wrong' then. Do you imagine that in the past people did what they did because they woke up one morning and thought 'Let's be e...
The example of colonisation that everyone had in mind was America. An endless frontier of land that could be brought under cultivation. To bring in so...
What is different about Israel are the occupied/controlled territories. If they were annexed then the people living in them should have equal rights t...
I think that what happens is that they land on shore and see a lot of unoccupied land. Land is not an asset as such, it has to be worked to become pro...
It is also confused because Robert Peters originally had two threads on the same subject, one of which seems to have been deleted. There seems to be s...
There is no 'truth in truth' just as there is no 'colour in colour' or 'number in number'. That is because just as 'colour' is not the name of a colou...
'True' is a description of a proposition. Without being attached to a proposition the word 'true' doesn't assert anything, so if what you mean by 'FAC...
Meaning equal punishments, but also that everyone lives in equal circumstances? That there is no occasion for 'moral accident'? Because otherwise we w...
If morals are a matter of whatever a particular society finds 'agreeable', then there is no reason to assume that the new set are an improvement on th...
Marxism describes what is happening, but if we describe anything we are doing so from a state of detachment; the implication is that things might be o...
Since nobody else has mentioned it, I'd remark that in the olden days gender was something words had; masculine, feminine and (in some languages) neut...
The thread is 'What exactly is communism?' As my contribution I'm suggesting that when Marx used the word it was a reference to medieval communes. It ...
Regarding the history lesson, we are discussing what 'communism' is. I'm saying that if somebody had looked up the word in a dictionary when Marx was ...
What they did was to establish themselves within the feudal system. A commune took on the role of a person, like a lord, in the same way as a company ...
What people who read Marx (long before 1917) presumably had in mind were medieval communes. Groups of peasants, or tradesmen, or the inhabitants of a ...
I think fascism can only be understood as a reaction to communism. It is not really an ideology. So a basic point in communism is that people are divi...
It seems to be the case that more men than women suffer from forms of autism. Must we insist that this cannot be the case? That the apparent inequalit...
That suggests that the moon does exist, if we are observing it. But the way in which things exist when we are observing them involves us, the nature o...
Doesn't our notion of justice involve more than equality of treatment? Equality of treatment implies that 'all men' are equal, yet we know that is not...
Yet moral philosophy might question whether we should treat our children better than the children of strangers. And some of us might actually try to t...
'Somehow' indeed! Just because people share a nationality there is no reason to think they have common interests, so to say that a nation will act in ...
In logic a proposition/statement must be something that can have the value of being either true or false. We are free to assume either, since a piece ...
The problem is that these components are not really statements, not in the sense of claims about the world. Statements about the world cannot be reduc...
He did not claim everything was predetermined. What he argued was that systems are not stable, so the current economic system was inevitably going to ...
I'd say both sentences use the same word; 'exist', but the word has a different meaning. I can say 'dreams exist', or 'this concept exists' etc. or 'H...
PossibleAaran Yes, I would say that a deductive argument, in the sense of one where the premise entails the conclusion, isn't any use if we are making...
It seems to me that we are begging the question, as does the formulation 'I think therefore I am'. What sort of argument is that? Plainly, the conclus...
But if it is 'before your mind' then you are not directly acquainted with it. We would have two separate things, subject (your mind) and object (your ...
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