Metaphysician Undercover

The more the handlers try to control the wild beast, the more it rebels. If the dangerous beast escapes the handlers and flees in a final flailing eff...

So, how does Armstrong avoid the infinite regress I referred to? A particular (SOA) is made up of thin particulars. A thin particular, having intrinsi...

Trouble! That's something which materializes out of thin air, don't blame it on the CIA.

Far beyond freedom, the car provides a person with power to exercise one's freedom. A car is much more than a private container, it gets one here, the...

Maybe it's like Cirque du Soleil, where, I've heard, sex amongst the employees is encouraged. Ever noticed how many back rooms there are in a Trader J...

Do you really think so? I don't. That's like spontaneous generation, no one believes that hokey stuff anymore.

That's a weird thing to say.

This doesn't make sense, because you said an SOA is made of (thin) particulars, their intrinsic properties and their extrinsic properties. Now you say...

What I meant is that it is meaningless without a definition of "free"'. If "free" is defined as unrestricted, then "you are free to leave" is meaningf...

Are you familiar with "predication"? https://www.britannica.com/topic/predication The point I made though, is that it doesn't. By the law of identity ...

If I remember correctly, only subscribers are allowed to upload, is this still the case? If so the option of paying more to maintain that privilege mi...

I don't see the relevance, we were talking about identity, which refers to things, not geometrical conceptions. I think that's a similar point. Proper...

Look at your statement "free to leave" means "no restriction being placed on you leaving". "Free" is interpreted as "no restrictions being placed on",...

Ambiguity, and the possibility of equivocation is only the tip of the iceberg. The problem is much more extensive. Suppose we identify a number of dif...

When you speak of the identity of a part, then you are not talking about the identity of the whole, and vise versa. So, I think you have produced an e...

Communist pigs are pinkos, those don't quite qualify. But don't ask me what colour they really are.

"Freedom" is a noun, so we need to treat the word as if it refers to a thing, even if that supposed thing is an abstraction. In this case it is an abs...

By Aristotle's law of identity, identity is proper to the thing itself. "A thing is the same as itself". This allows that a thing may be changing as t...

Since time is always passing, and there is a lot of energy exchange making for a very rapid rate of change, how does an ontology based in "state of af...

So you're not claiming anything about angles, you are making a statement about differences? I thought you were saying something about the "90 degree a...

What are you saying, that it's just by random chance that the words "platonism" and "Platonism" are extremely similar? Are you saying that it's wrong ...

Do you mean that we perceive these as different, our perceptions of such objects are different? I mean science tells us that what we perceive as an ob...

I think you have to poke a hole in it first. Ever hear the one about the stoned babysitter who put the roast to bed and put the baby in the microwave?

Then you have no objective definition of freedom, just a lot of different understandings. Conversation between people with a lot of different understa...

You can divide a circle into four equal angles, but the convention, that each of these angles is 90 degrees is completely arbitrary. The circle could ...

I don't think this is correct. What is instantiated is what we sense as particular things, and that something has a 90 degree angle is a judgement we ...

Back to rice. I think the best rice I ever ate was cooked in a microwave. It's an unbelievable tool for cooking rice.

Rarely, if ever, could someone claim to be !00% certain. And, we assent to belief for all sorts of different reasons, making any specific numerical pe...

Try looking at it this way. We begin with the idea that a free agent has freedom, where "freedom" is defined as "without restriction", no constraint. ...

I don't think I'm trying to solve anything, just pointing out a problem with what you are doing. I believe that the phrase "the kind of freedom that I...

So let's define "act" to make sure we agree. An act is a process, something being done, or happening, an action. As such, we can say that an act alway...

I think that's an arbitrary threshold. It might work as a guide as to when you've crossed the threshold, but it's useless as a guide as to whether or ...

Our disagreement appears to two twofold. First, we disagree as to the causal efficacy of habit. Second, we disagree as to the metaphysical significanc...

To be clear on what the subject of discussion is, this is what I said to Dan: When you engaged me I had said: Notice the last paragraph. You replied t...

You explicitly said you are only interested in "protecting a specific type of freedom" , and this type of freedom is qualified by moral principles. Do...

The problem is that a free rational agent may completely understand, and make a choice which you think ought not be protected because of your moral pr...

Verbal assent would be acceptable except the two parties might later have disagreement as to what exactly was agreed to. The handshake helps to reinfo...

This is why my first post on this thread stated: The fact that you want the right to choose which of my choices ought to be protected indicates that y...

Obviously, there's nothing random about an excellent plate of rice.

What does lowest threshold of assent mean?

Never in my life did I expect that cooking rice was such a precise science. I always thought al dente pasta was the ultimate test of culinary skills. ...

The point is that spoken language and written language have fundamentally different purposes. The principal use for spoken language is communication, ...

I think you ought to notice that "signs that looked like the referents" indicates written language. And written language is viewed, while spoken langu...

No, I don't think I have misunderstood. You state explicitly what I have already acknowledged, there is only a specific type of freedom which you beli...

Look at Saddam Hussein's WMD for example. When there is a faulty interpretation of the intelligence, people are not "making stuff up", because they fi...

Regardless, when a person provides false information which they believe to be true, the person is not guilty of making stuff up.

Yeah, well now that there's been a switch in the competing candidate, the crew focused on consistent messaging will become irrelevant, and the random ...

Ok, so this is what I am saying is problematic. To protect the freedom for a certain type of choice, while excluding the freedom for other types of ch...

You've referred to "morally relevant" in relation to freedom of choice, a number of times. Here are some examples. Here, you appear to be limiting the...

I have a problem with this approach. We are attempting to define "freedom" for the purpose of setting moral principles. If we proceed by reference to ...