Metaphysician Undercover

Don't you see yet? To create any kind of moral standards, which I am assuming is what you mean by "live well", (to live ethically), we need to establi...

OK, sorry, I'm just trying to understand, and it's difficult because none of this makes any sense to me. If I understand then, realpolitik makes no as...

You haven't done a very good job of explaining to me that you understand what realpolitik is. So far I understand that you shape your goals according ...

Hey, it's the shoutbox, what do you expect? Nevertheless, seeking "your goal", unless it is well principled (meaning ethically) suggests selfishness. ...

Did you just meet me? If it's taken me this long to show you that, I'm not good enough yet. Better keep practising. Perhaps, because I understand real...

Well if they are not the same thing, then when we say that a plant lives, and that a human being lives, we are talking about two distinctly different ...

OK, if you're having difficulty with my English, I'll say that you've denied that there is a dichotomy between "general" and "particular" by saying th...

Then you have dissolved that supposed dichotomy so there is no dichotomy here. You haven't addressed the point.

You, just like Trump, really haven't got a clue as to what made America great. And Trump, judging by his policies, doesn't even have a clue as to what...

So where's the dichotomy? If each one is the same as each other, then there is no dichotomy between the one and the many. We are talking "generality a...

I don't understand your question then. My point is that to know that you are living, you must know what "living" means. The "additional things" then a...

I can't see how anything in your post is at all relevant to anything I've said. In fact, I had a difficult time finding any relevance in your last pos...

Ha! Did you hear Trump's inaugural address? All the things which made America great in the first place, good trade relations with others, aid to other...

I don't accept Craig's formulation, partly due to this ambiguity. In other versions that I have read the authors are clear to distinguish between mate...

I believe that's an improper representation. Clocks and rulers do not measure space and time, human beings measure space and time using clocks and rul...

The latter argument is nonsense only because you make a category error. The first premise "whatever begins to exist...", refers to particular things. ...

As I said, the fact that you do something doesn't produce the logical conclusion that you know what you're doing. The cold temperature makes the water...

When we count a repetitive change, to provide us with a notion on passed time, there is an assumption that each repetition takes the same amount of ti...

But time is not "a sequence of change or development", it is a means by which we measure such. The abstraction is not the same as the thing it is abst...

No, we can say whatever we like, without actually knowing what we are saying. And if we can convince others to accept what we are saying, then what ha...

Perhaps I'm not a Deleuzean specialist, but I can recognize a potential contradiction when I see it. This appears contradictory, because as I understa...

I didn't say that. I said that we can claim to be living without knowing what "living" means. How does the assertion "I am living" produce the necessa...

I don't believe that at all. In order to determine "how" to do something, we must first identify what it is that we want to do. Giving something a nam...

Don't we need to determine what it means "to live", before we can approach the question of how to live?

I believe that the "virtual" must be actual as well as real. But it cannot be actual in the common sense of physical bodies in motion. The need for tw...

I want to return to this point (pardon the pun) because I like it so much. If we assume a particular point (a non-dimensional point of location), then...

I'm with Hanover on this point, I don't see how the economy can destroy the masses. To mass is a fundamental attitude of the human psyche, like a herd...

As I said, we should drop the possibility of an infinite number of jars, because this is an appeal to the principle of plenitude, which in this case, ...

The existence of the difference, or relation, which cannot be expressed quantitatively can be demonstrated by the difference between spatial dimension...

There is reliance on what is called "the principle of plenitude". This principle states that if something is possible, then if given an infinite amoun...

If something presents itself to us, as to "remain so similar through time that the differences may be indistinguishable to us", yet we "know" that it ...

You've forgotten one important step. Prior to reasoning, whether it be "logical reasoning" or "ontological reasoning" (whatever difference there's sup...

This is just circular reasoning. What I'm asking is to ground the dichotomy in ontology, rather than to base your ontology in dichotomy, simply becaus...

This "need" you refer to must be justified, or else it's not a need at all, just an assertion. Any such dichotomy is artificial, created conceptually,...

I don't think Ergo is suggesting that the proportion will always be perfectly even. The question is, how does the reality of a minor variance in propo...

"Positive", "negative", it's all excitement and incitement to me, which needs to be subdued with self-medication. And the medication of course has its...

There's a fine line of dianosability, and who knows when one crosses it. The drug companies would say we all cross it. In the case of medical marijuan...

In general, that's not true, as mania demonstrates.

The mixing machine is analogous to the mixing of tinctures in a can of paint. If every time you open a can of paint, the colours are well mixed, then ...

This approaches the other problem I brought up, and that is the unification on the entertainment and news media. There is something very sick about th...

This is the deep, and most fundamental problem of acceleration. If we assume that an object is at rest, and it is, due to some force, induced to move,...

The outcome isn't randomized though. Ergo uses "random" in the title to throw you off. Nothing in the description of the factory indicates that there ...

Well of course it's not random in any absolute sense. The op describes a very specifically, organized mechanical system, therefore the outcome (the fi...

I'm with Ergo on this. The manufacturing process, conveyors, and mixing mechanism are designed to continually produce a consistent mixture of colour. ...

I'm holding my breath in anticipation.

I agree, to some extent, with apokrisis here, we cannot say that a property is a relation, because the relation is actually something else. We can say...

Take sports for example. Once you start watching, you get a team. The question of whether or not your team wins, makes the playoffs, etc., becomes str...

If you read my earlier post, I find the entire entertainment industry an affront. The reason I feel this way is that it has transformed entertainment ...

This is what relativity theory does, and how physicists come up with "energy". Motion is an expression of relations, and energy is an expression of th...

This is morality though, in a nutshell. It is experimentation and manipulation turned inwards on humanity itself. So this same inward experimentation ...