Terrapin Station

It's possible for "causeless effects" to occur? Sure. Because what makes something impossible is that it would amount to a contradiction obtaining. It...

When I asked you what a "unified concept" was supposed to amount to (I'd never use the phrase "unified concept" myself--it seems like a category error...

Well, you can tell well enough if there's a consensus by looking at the language (from an objective perspective --utterances, text, etc.) folks are as...

I think that both metaphysics and epistemology are impossible to avoid if one is doing philosophy. All that's required for each is to at all wonder ab...

Well, you can't literally have a collective concept. Concepts are inherently individual, personal.

We'd simply do a survey of each individual's concept.

It could vacillate between just two states forever, or any other arbitrary number of states.

Wait, but everyone is just an object.

I didn't at all agree with what he said, but did he actually say anything like "man in his rightful position . . . "?

What I was disagreeing with was the claim that "we too should be open to the possibility of being influenced since doing otherwise would negate our in...

Well, "consensus" refers to agreeing with each other. The claim is about relative agreement on what one concept refers to versus what another concept ...

Maybe the phrase "not everyone" is confusing? "Not everyone" negates "all." Or, in other words, rather than it being true that "F is the case for all ...

Okay, but that's different than how I defined it, no?

It's the other way around. Causality negates free will as I defined it because we're talking about causal determinism, not the opposite of causal dete...

You don't believe in causality at all?

You'd have to be more specific re what you're not understanding, what you're reading to be inconsistent.

Well, some people claim that you never have free will with respect to how I characterized it. And I'd say that definitely you don't have free will whe...

I asked you what made something a "unified concept." You said that a consensus about it made it "unified." So I'm asking for the empirical evidence of...

I was asking for the empirical support of a particular claim.

Not to speak for him bit I'd say "will" refers to the intent/directedness/conscious motivation driving actions, and "free" refers to the opposite of c...

One way that people are different from each other is that not everyone sticks to what they believe no matter what. Also, people who do stick to what t...

The problem with that sort of nonsense--and there are tons of examples of this sort of thing, including things that are very noncontroversial that man...

I think they have free will. That doesn't mean that every option available is equally easy to follow through.

Are there really rules that aren't laws, though? And even if there are, what if someone doesn't want to break (some of) them? Do they have to live ina...

We realize that not everyone is the same (especially not in every situation)?

It doesn't have anything to do with rationality, really. It's simply a matter of what individuals relatively value, what their preferences are. That d...

But I'm not saying anything akin to "We can make no empirical claims."

So I like to go into referee mode as soon as I see a foul, and this seems to be one. How are you figuring the above?

An obvious problem with this one is that plenty of people would buy it for one cent. One would have to be unfamiliar with "sell your soul to the devil...

We actually have no idea if that's the case, either.

There's no way to know whether that's the case or not.

Those all have promises with their premises, such as "Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another"

There are proofs in the sense of: (1) If P, then there is a first cause. (2) P (c) Therefore, there is a first cause. Which goes to show us just how m...

A lot of postmodernists, by the way, are going to object to being characterized in any particular way, as either supporting or attacking anything (re ...

Logic doesn't have anything to do with empirical evidence, it only has to do with formal implication/inference. That's even the case with so-called in...

And indeed I said nothing like that. That should have been obvious to you by the fact that I used the phrase "and more broadly continentalism." "And m...

One problem with this is that "surprise" seems to be used in two rather incompatible ways. One is the sense of an emotional reaction that someone has ...

I think you're vastly overstating the premise. Postmodernism and more broadly continentalism aren't very popular among certain analytic-leaning philos...

Doesn't this rather completely dismiss relations and processes? The Empire State Building doesn't exist as anything like the Empire State Building if ...

The idea of a fallacy in philosophy/logic is a very targeted idea. Fallacies pertain only to arguments, which are sets of premises with conclusions th...

That's an interesting perspective. It might actually help me understand Heidegger a bit.

Thanks for answering. I can't make much sense of the answer, unfortunately, but it's too much to get into, because we'd basically have to have a conve...

At the moment I'm only interested in exploring your views as I have been attempting to do. If you don't want to respond to the questions I'm asking, t...

So would you say that something is a guess if it has evidential support, even if it's not certain?

Did he suggest what he was going to replace it with?

Say what? I'm not saying that it's a fact that either something is x or y. I'm asking you if it's the case that you use the term "guess" so that eithe...

Correct. Otherwise, what would you suggest as a third option?

It's just a question. Either you see things that way or you do not.

Do you see the only options as "Either P is a guess or it's certain"?

The problem is that you can thrive by making others' lives worse, by crippling them/putting them out of business, etc. It's possible to keep things co...