Terrapin Station

"Good writing" has something to do with thoroughness if the person doing the assessments cares about thoroughness and prefers that to a lack of the sa...

That wouldn't be anything and everything though. Anything and everything includes contradictions. You couldn't say, "Well, anything and everything pos...

No it doesn't. There is no "valuing something truthfully."

You're explaining what you take a universal to be here. You're not showing evidence that there are real (extramental) universals.

We'd need to be able to somehow "point" (in quotation marks because it wouldn't have to be a literal, direct pointing) at a property that particulars ...

Well, such assessments are subjective. We'll have different preferences, different tastes. Some folks I feel are excellent writers you might think are...

If you believe that anything and everything is possible what would you say that logical possibility even refers to?

Thanks. Problems related to this arise with a "citation/precedence" culture, too. Although folks will overtly say they know this is a fallacy, there's...

Nominalism can be falsified: simply show evidence for a real universal. Of course that's not so simple as there are no real universals, but if there w...

This is an interesting paper on question-begging/circularity with respect to P therefore P arguments: 'P, Therefore, P' Without Circularity by Roy A. ...

I agree with some of Nietzsche's views--and obviously I'm an atheist and have some pomo-like views, but in my opinion Nietzsche was a horrible writer ...

Hume is easily my favorite out of that bunch. It's been clear for awhile that there are a lot of Kant fans around here though (as well as a lot of Ari...

My favorite is probably a tie between Hume and Hans Reichenbach.

Some of my favorite female philosophers: Susan Haack, Martha Nussbaum, Marjorie Grene, Ruth Barcan Marcus, Christine Korsgaard, Susanne Langer, Annett...

Why would you need argumentation for it? It's a matter of what people desire, what they prefer.

They're two of my favorite visual artists (I prefer Picasso, though, and Van Gogh wouldn't quite make my top 10; he'd be in my top 20 though). The Sta...

There have certainly been (later) famous visual artists who made very little from their work while alive, but Picasso isn't one of them. Picasso was q...

I wouldn't say it's meaningless. And the point of saying it is to emphasize the confusion that's being endorsed by not making a distinction between ex...

Exactly. There are some artists who have no concern with making money from their work, but it's extremely unlikely that you've ever heard of any of th...

What would "perception" even be referring to if it's not referring to the reception and processing of information external to our selves? All experien...

Well, there's some phylogenetic beginning to aesthetic reactions--that much is undeniable. Whether it was evolutionarily selected-for or whether it wa...

We agree on one thing: :-}

Sure. Donuts.

"Chomsky's intellectual life had been divided between his work in linguistics and his political activism, philosophy coming as a distant third. Noneth...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYTRknCmyio

There's not an answer to that anyway. The question is flawed because is presupposes that there are things like universal purposes. The Berdyaev stuff ...

The question for me, which I don't have an answer to at the moment, is this: why would aesthetic reactions to phenomena arise (evolutionarily)? Probab...

Most convincing in terms of conclusions on religious issues? I'm tempted to say "no one," although I can't say for sure that that's right, but, I woul...

For philosophy, it's pretty much a guarantee that if I have a choice between someone with a strictly analytic approach and someone with a more "litera...

Also, if it's not just folks who are pro-religion--Nietzsche, for example, then Michael Martin should be on the list, and he'd easily be my choice.

I went with Quine, but I'm wondering if I shouldn't have chosen Davidson instead. Overall, I'd be comfortable renaming this list, "People who have sai...

Some weird absences on the poll--St. Anselm, Kierkegaard and Charles Hartshorne for example. Anyway, I was torn between Plantinga and Swinburne for my...

Wait, but it sounded like you were complaining about how your friends are. You're talking about their faults, their hypocrisy, you're saying that you ...

People tend to be hypocritical--and of course, let's not exclude ourselves from that. It's not a little-known or new phenomenon, of course. This is a ...

Because the whole point was who brought up "physical" first in our discussion in this thread. I wasn't talking about that in this thread. My view on t...

Yeah, no shit. Because your reading comprehension sucks. Even if the two comments were related, as if what you describe above had something to do with...

Yet another example of you not being able to comprehend anything you read. I'm not saying anything about verification in what you're quoting from me. ...

We haven't had enough threads already focused on a general realism vs idealism debate? Why not focus on whether truth is mind-dependent separately fro...

You certainly write a lot--you do here as well. That in no way implies that you understand anything you read or that you can write coherently, of cour...

I wouldn't say that anything you write demonstrates that you can understand or communicate anything. In fact, every single thing you write seems to de...

I don't know if everyone has the same amount of posts per page, but I'm set up so that I see 26 pages of posts at the moment in this thread. If you go...

Yes it is. There are facts about concepts of course, but in general, it's not an "observation," it's simply a conflation. You always talk about ideas ...

Not at all. When someone says "It is a fact that x," they are claiming that states of affairs are such and such. Why would that be nonsense? My analys...

Yeah, my picturing it is a concept, etc. but the facts in question aren't a concept. Realism is an ontological stance. I'm not sure what the heck "it ...

We were talking about possible worlds, or you could just say we were talking about counterfactuals. HIstorically, of course, we had a mind-independent...

Alright, then I'll take that as a "no" to the question I asked. So to answer your questions: Because truths, as I noted above, are judgments about the...

I want to just address this part first, because I want to clarify what you're asking here: Are you wondering why truths wouldn't be the same thing as ...

I'm not sure what you're asking about there.

Yeah, I'm not arguing that anything about ethics, preferences, etc. is anything but subjective--I'm the last person who'd argue that, as anyone famili...

I often have different (interpersonal) behavioral preferences than others (and not just that, I often have different preferences in all sorts of thing...