Snakes Alive

I like that idea, but it's not an accurate historical representation of philosophy. Plato had a lot of interesting quasi-religious ideas, which haven'...

None of that is true.

I wouldn't say a wound – I don't think it's what it claims to be, but that doesn't mean it's evil or degenerate. The Platonic Socrates comes off to me...

This is not a productive discussion. But I'll just say an account of academia that makes the Academy not academic is pointless. I'm not responding aga...

This is just historically wrong. Philosophers invented Academia, literally, and philosophy was the original discipline housed therein.

I don't think that inquiring about concrete questions in life has much of anything to do with philosophy. And philosophy is an academic discipline, an...

I don't think that's a historically plausible view. If I wanted to know how to live, would I read a philosopher? Why would I?

This isn't part of some defense of Skepticism – it really doesn't matter to me. Though I will say that mature Skepticism was geared precisely toward e...

I don't think you can in the way philosophy traditionally has thought. The Skeptics actually already understood this, that all valid deductive argumen...

There's been the suggestion that philosophers are sort of like people with anosognosia. I think that's right – they sometimes get the inkling somethin...

I take the discovery of the syllogism to be a kind of nascent natural language semantics, hit upon accidentally during considering how legal arguments...

Yeah, fuck Paris! I would like a real history of philosophy to be written. Not a summary of what philosophers have thought, but an actual historical a...

Cool. I've never read Laurelle, but I've heard the name. I like the idea of 'non-philosophy,' but I'd rather not give it a pretentious name like that,...

Yeah, sure, so it's a folk art, but clearly a verbal / legalistic one. But my point is that it's as local as studying hadith. It's not a universal dis...

Reality is not only fake, but also gay. Monad gang.

The core practices of philosophy consist in a family of dialectical moves. The basic idea within which they're housed is that you can 'think about any...

It might superficially seem so, but I deny this. Its core practices are unchanged since Plato, and so is its content. It can be 'about anything' in th...

In general, only an outside view sees something as a 'folk tradition.' For the people in the tradition, it's just 'what's done,' or 'the tradition.' S...

Because it's not what we are, not really. Schop. never really put that last piece together, but his conclusions might imply it.

Not any more than other folk traditions. If you doubt it, well, you're a native, so prone to ethnocentrism...there's lots of ways in which philosophy ...

Western philosophy is a European folk tradition that has remained practiced, pretty much unchanged, since Socrates (as portrayed by Plato).

I'm reminded of Schopenhauer's three stages of the acceptance of an idea! Not that I'm complaining. But I think that the history of philosophy is simp...

Great video. There's more insight in ten minutes there than in the body of work of most philosophers.

I agree that linguistic analysis is 'about the world,' but it's not clear to me how it could not be, and so not clear what this call is supposed to do...

Linguistic analysis tends to be relevant to philosophical problems specifically, because philosophical problems are not typically about the way the wo...

Religion tends to be more interesting than philosophy, because it's less afraid of substantive claims (as opposed to 'conceptually necessary' ones tha...

The length of a reply isn't directly proportional to its seriousness or insightfulness. Sometimes you need to ask clarificatory questions so that you ...

I do, I'm a linguist. All of your responses in this thread just puzzle me, to be honest. It takes less effort to talk to someone than to freak out and...

I didn't ask for an explanation of basic debates in linguistics, though. I asked you a specific question with respect to what you're claiming. And it'...

It doesn't even make sense as a response to what I said. It's a link to the Wikipedia page for functional grammar.

The functionalist doesn't deny this, though – the issue is what the shape of this capacity is, and what its domain-generality is. My experience in stu...

Are you serious? :confused:

So the reason language evolved, was to be used as language? I don't know how to read this except as a tautology, so I'm genuinely perplexed by what yo...

I don't understand this. What does it mean for language to be the means for which language evolved?

I don't understand why this is insane. Exaptation is normal. The exception clause that language is special makes no sense to me – it's 'specialized?' ...

Obviously, that doesn't accurately describe the situation! Again, you shouldn't be getting your opinions about a movement from its ideological opponen...

This is just an ideological screed.

I mostly agree with this, and I'm sympathetic with the idea that patterns seen across the world's languages can't be explained without reference to hi...

Eh, again I have no particular sympathy for Chomsky, but these reactions are hyperbolic, even hysterical. Complaining that a scientific theory postula...

Chomsky is most certainly not famous for that – Generative grammar has always had an interest in linguistic acquisition. Chomsky's whole schtick has a...

No, the conditions under which children successfully learn their first languages is very well-studied. What you quoted was just the more general point...

But this is just not true. For example, exposing a chimp to Portuguese will not result in the chimp learning it; but exposing a Pirahã person to it do...

I've already told you what my issue is, though, twice – I can't tell from what you've written whether you understand Chomsky's objection, and so I can...

Chomsky does not claim that language is disconnected from these things. He thinks it has a different relation to them, to be sure, but the idea that b...

Sure, I agree. It's a substantive speculative hypothesis. Maybe it's crazy – but I think crazy hypotheses are still fair game, while the field is open...

There's a misunderstanding here. What would have falsified Chomsky's claim would have been that Pirahã people were unable to natively acquire a recurs...

The reason there are degrees in philosophy is because of an intellectual tradition in the Western world. There is no top-down function which philosoph...

There are more and less productive ways to make people think. I can't shake the feeling that a lot of analytic philosophy from this period didn't go a...

Philosophers cannot resolve political problems. No one calling for this is genuinely interested in 'truth.' That is what you need to get.

This sounds like a ploy to politicize philosophy. I would recommend avoiding it. The political spats will fade; the philosophical results will still b...