Terrapin Station

You'd answer yes if you don't find anything useful and you don't believe that anything has a point. You'd answer no otherwise. So "No."

There's a serious point there, though, and that's that someone answering that way in that context would be demonstrating that they do not at all under...

I just want to do this one step at a time, and I want you to think about this. Don't just defer until you get a chance to read something someone else ...

Broken record time: That's because you're grafting a contemporary, narrow sense of "cause" on to this.

Which is you not caring that you're grafting a contemporary, narrow sense of "cause" on to this. You think I'm misunderstanding it. I think you're mis...

You're confusing scope. "To win the World Series" is identical to the goal. It's the goal under a different name. "To intend to win the world series" ...

First, in Aristotle, intention isn't necessarily implied by ends or goals, because objects that have nothing to do with sentient creation have ends or...

Right, the goal itself, and not the intention prior to the object in question. Not in the contemporary, especially colloquial, more limited sense of "...

I'd also say that the mental sense of self is not among the objects of perception, because the very concept of perception is that of receiving and pro...

There are two connotations of "self" that are important to distinguish: * There's a mental "sense of self"--your conscious "I"/"Me" phenomena * There'...

The principle of identity doesn't conventionally necessarily refer to the identity of numerically distinct entities. If you were under the impression ...

Per realists on universals, sure. But denying that they share an identical property isn't denying the principle of identity in general. It's just deny...

It's not impossible that it's the final cause, however, because all that "final cause" refers to is the end or "that for the sake of which" something ...

The next step is responding to what follows "so how about" in my second-to-last post to you.

That's a good excuse for flowery, poetic imprecision, yes.

Social situations become metaphorical as opposed to literal slavery when the person making the slavery accusation wants an easy way to gain converts t...

Way to ignore that relations and processes are parts and that no one saying "the whole is the sum of its parts" is saying that relations and processes...

But it isn't the same thing as intention, and "final cause" refers to the "drive nails" part, since that's the end in question, it doesn't refer to th...

With respect to the principle of identity, "A" on the left-hand side of the equality sign isn't referring to something different than A on the right-h...

If you had in mind Planck length or Planck temperature or "the Planck scale," you know what might be a clearer way of communicating that? If you'd wri...

I was looking at the Armstrong book I mentioned to you. It's been ages since I read it, so I forgot most of it--I especially forgot that he starts by ...

You're getting loopy already. What does a "short (enough)" or "hot enough" "scale of 'discovery'" refer to?

Haha--you can't discover that identical properties obtain in different particulars. You'd have to not understand the concept of them being identical p...

Not at all. It rather shows why (a) physics shouldn't be taken as doing philosophy, and sometimes by extension (b) physicsists shouldn't be considered...

I tried just now reading through a bit of "The Logic of Relatives," which is what that quotation is from, but I'd have to spend a lot more time on it,...

You have to read the whole sentence. "They're denying the reality of multiple things having an identical (in the A=A sense) property."

The end or goal isn't an intention. The end or goal is to drive in nails.

I'm just going to cover one thing at a time with you, because otherwise it will be ignored (because for whatever reason, that's how you interact with ...

Well, folks will talk about, say, the universal "spherical" (or "sphericalness") for example, right? They don't talk about the unversals (plural) "sph...

Okay, but forget about those terms for a minute and whether they have technical definitions. The only logical options, at least if we're realists on u...

Again, I wasn't saying anything about "kinds of entities." I was just illustrating the logical relationships. I don't know how we'd illustrate differe...

The diagrams are neutral. That's what realists on universals are claiming. They say that there are universals. The circle above the particulars is the...

Another from Russell. This one is very well-known, but it's a favorite of mine nonetheless: "The point of philosophy is to start with something so sim...

In that second picture, the universal is the big circle above the other two. That's one thing, not multiple things. Hence a "singularity"

It's been a while since I read it, but I remember D.M. Armstrong's Universals: An Opinionated Introduction being good. You can read parts of it for fr...

The shared manner in which they form is just a way of saying that the particulars in question resemble each other in some way(s) (resemblance simply b...

What he's getting at there, though, is that universals are singularities. The story of universals is supposed to be that they're singular entities, ho...

I also believe in free will, I just do not believe that it's immaterial.

Do you believe that everyone else has this wrong, too--for example, the definitions/explanations I quoted re final causes earlier in the thread?

All that typing and there wasn't one thing in your post that was actually support for a claim that final causes refer to intentions rather than ends t...

The problem with that is that I disagree that relations and processes aren't parts. Also, no one saying that a whole is the sum of its parts is saying...

No, the final cause is not the intent to do something. The intent to do something is not the end or goal with respect to the hammer. It seems like you...

But on your view physicalists don't believe that everything is physical. They only believe that concrete particulars are physical. So there doesn't se...

In your view, what's the difference for nonphysicalists, then? I'm a physicalist who doesn't at all deny that there are properties. It's just that pro...

I'm not really familiar with that phrase, so I don't have an intuitive grasp for what it includes versus excludes. What are you referring to there--th...

In my opinion this depends on whether we're talking about the same thing in the counterfactual, and there, the issues are what I cover in this post: h...

So you've been thinking that "physicalism" simply amounts to people who believe that some, but not all, of "what there is" is physical? Contra people ...

LOL

It's not physicalism if it posits there there are things in the world that aren't physical (whatever a particular species of physicalism considers "ph...

Here's that full passage: So again, in the case of a hammer, "Why have we made a hammer?" "To drive in nails." We haven't made a hammer to desire to d...