MetaphysicsNow

Yes, but even if you were an idealist in your fundamental metaphysics you will still find it useful to have a distinction between the physical and the...

Not really. Newton's corpuscular theory of light failed (and still fails) to account for the diffraction phenomena that Huygen's wave theory adequatel...

I did try, and here's something else wrong with it: You don't seem to understand how electromagnetic radiation was discovered. Maxwell gave us electro...

Bernard Williams once made a "joke" that whilst Australia wasn't the only place where materialist theories of mind were believed, it was the only plac...

One evil demon is enough to get the skeptical argument about certainty going - in fact you don't strictly speaking need the evil demon in any case. If...

This is a reasonably clear article casting doubt on the usefulness of the notion of physicalism in philosophy (a little dated now perhaps, but makes s...

Unless you expand on what you mean by "physical" that description is unilluminatingly circular.

Sorry, I should not say "abstract things" more like "non-particular things" - i.e. things that cannot be identified uniquely by their spatiotemporal l...

If I remember rightly (and I'm not 100% certain I do) David Armstrong was a mind-brain identity theorist (of the functionalist kind I believe) but arg...

We also describe laws as physical of course, and they don't seem to be covered by either of our definitions, but presumably the idea is that a law is ...

That is an epistemological notion of the physical. Perhaps a metaphysical definition would be that an event or object is physical if and only if it ha...

To get a general skeptical conclusion of course you'd need to add a premise to the effect that to know that you see your hand you need sufficient evid...

Going back to the original post here - insofar as you are trying to represent Descartes in any case - the argument would probably better be expressed ...

Like one or two other people on this site, it seems that as soon as you are caught out in a contradiction, rather than rethink your position, you simp...

@"JKG20" said: "For the latter, their truth consists in the logical relations between propositions used to express the non-if-then-facts. " You replie...

I've only skimmed it, but typing in "scholastic roots of the private language argument" turned up this link: Origns of the Private Language Argument I...

Well, on a perhaps superficial reading of Locke, he had a philosophy of language whereby words signified ideas and not things in the world and the ide...

Well, the exposure of the fraud begins with Simpcox accepting a premise along the lines that if he has just gained sight then he ought to be able to p...

I don't think anything to do with qualia would be lurking in the back of Shakespeare's mind when he wrote this scene, or any of the philosophically in...

Specifically on the colour point, Gloucester exposes Simpcox by saying that in supposing he could name colours as he claims to be able to do, we would...

I'd have to reread the play, but is it really that the courtier is supersmart or just not as gullible as the rest? Are you suggesting that Shakespeare...

What do you consider to be the philosophers' party trick here? Pointing out that there is a difference between seeing a colour and naming a colour? Do...

Actually, not the undoubted champion - I'm forgetting that there are some strong contenders on other posts I've been involved in.

I humbly apologise for my spelling mistake - as it happens I am not Scottish at all, but I happen to have finished Wheen's biography of Marx not so lo...

No, just one more reason for concluding that the Free Will Theorem does not refute the PSR. I refer readers of this post to exchanges between tom, @"M...

It's a marketing event for the promotion of porcelain goods.

And it still does for those who uphold it - such as Della Rocca. Framed in terms of "everything has an explanation" it turns out that for him the acce...

OK, I'll look at that reference - as far as I am aware the Greeks proved there were irrational numbers, even if some of them weren't happy about it. I...

Basically, the authors need to work on the example a little more and expand on exactly what they take their criteria to be criteria for.

The irrationals show that criteria (2) as I developed it (which could be an incorrect development, I grant you) is just false - there is simply no "de...

Well, if the two criteria are criteria, what are they criteria for? As I say, I don't think they can be criteria that provide us with the rules for te...

@"jkg20" I think LD Saunders was more having a dig at me, not you - but perhaps you just meant people like you who (I assume) hold some form or anothe...

The authors talk about criteria, not definitions (although, by giving criteria you might supply a definition I suppose). I don't think the Greeks woul...

It is an interesting paper - thanks for the link. I have one perhaps stupid question: The two criteria the authors mention need actually be unpacked a...

Sophisticat is correct about PSR having a number of different formulations, but in some of them the notion of sufficiency just falls away (or is cover...

I think the most sensible thing we can draw out from these various exchanges before we move on to other things, is that the distinction between logica...

@"Michael Ossipoff" And here you display your equally superficial knowledge of number theory - I guess you pick that up from a cursory reading of webs...

@"Uber" Agreed, and I'm guilty of being one of the people that tend to compartmentalise Marx's economics from the rest of his theorizing. I happen to ...

@"Bitter Crank" I believe you and I are largely on the same page, but in terms of Marxist economics, one thing that bothers me about this remark is th...

@"LD Saunders" We know no such thing. As I stated in my earlier post in which I questioned how much of Marx you had actually read, I said that there i...

@"LD Saunders" Where does he state that? Marx recognised that real wages could go up as well as down in capitalist systems. You may have read Marx, bu...

OK, I'll have to read van Inwagen, which I don't believe I ever have, but if by "way things are" he simply means "way things are independently of what...

In brief your argument seems to be that if realism is true (in the sense that the truth of a proposition consists in its having a certain kind of conn...

I think the author takes it to follow based on the idea that insofar as propositions are concerned, the PSR requires a reason for each proposition. Ho...

Not sure I understand what you are driving at here. What question is begged by framing the PSR in terms of explanations? Even when couched in terms of...

Oh, I cannot help myself, correcting conceptual errors is addictive. @"Michael Ossipoff" Take the last sentence, to what does the possessive pronoun "...

Thanks for the advice - I think I will indeed move on to other more interesting threads.

Perhaps formulating the principle in the terms "Everything that happens has an explanation" would bypass the problematic distinction between reasons a...

@"Michael Ossipoff" The central issue here is not about facts, the issue is about the difference between vacuously true propositions - i.e. tautologie...

No, nothing I said implied or suggested a belief in the existence in "material things and stuff". What I do think is that if there are facts then they...