Cuthbert

"...and the role of the concept of fairness (truth)" Fairness and truth are different things. Truth is a matter of saying of what is the case that it ...

I thought "delete me or ban me" was the same rhetorical construction as "You can slander my name all over the place, but don't step on my blue suede s...

No, the first recognisably philosophical argument in Greek is by Parmenides, 6th Cent BC. He tied a big knot round the problem that took a lot of thin...

Before the 1960's it did not occur to men to dream about having sex with beautiful, compliant women. Hefner created and popularised this new area of i...

Reality, Existence, Being, World and Actuality. Reality is when your card is rejected for lack of funds. Existence is what said funds lack. Being is a...

Yes, that is why I think it's a useful reference for this discussion. If we want to know what reality is then let's consider what is fake, illusory, f...

Thank you. I say we need Austin's Sense and Sensibilia to make a start on this job. ".... Austin examines the word ‘real’ and contrasts the ordinary m...

OK, point taken. You can't tolerate any old rubbish. But I wonder if there are passages of Kant or Heidegger that might not make that particular styli...

I think the OP is fine. It's raising the question whether pessimism is more realistic than optimism. It makes sense. And if you take care of the sense...

I think it is my brain that makes decisions in the same way that it is my hands that hold a cup and my foot that kicks a ball. But my foot only ever k...

Damn. I was wondering why I couldn't just swipe left on the posts I don't like. And there didn't seem to be a strong story line in any of it. Thanks f...

Good points. The theory depends upon actors being rational and well-informed. We are not rational when addicted and as you say we are all irrational t...

I would say, not quite accurate. You have put forward a particular ethical theory. Ethics in philosophy is the study of such theories and there are ma...

"...people, in general, don't even know what they themselves want" "...isn't the problem now to create a calculus that would be able to determine what...

Ok, it's not solipsism. Now: "There is a reality independent of my perceptions,.." and "Snakes and trains, like the particles of physics, have no obje...

Just as there are no snakes, so there is no Donald Hoffman with objective observer-independent features. There is only my Donald Hoffman and your Dona...

"Period" means "No more discussion". Starting a thread means "Let's have a discussion". It's an apparent case of a speech-act (in this case, starting ...

Yes, I think you're right. The Opening Post criticism of Gettier is that he conflates entailment of propositions with entailment of beliefs about prop...

Michael: I can believe that the post office is open, that it's Sunday and that the post office is always closed on Sundays. So I'm confused and irrati...

I'm not so sure about that, Michael. I would have to hold inconsistent beliefs but I reckon that is not too unusual a condition to be in.

I think it's an example of two games going on at once. 1 thought they were all playing 'tag'. 2 was actually playing 'get 4', a quite different game. ...

"I think if something causes a lot of unnecessary pain that thing is immoral." That's interesting. I can easily avoid the pain of paying money to Tesc...

"According to the law of identity, if A=B then what is true of A is true of B and vice versa." That's worth thinking about. Suppose Jim is a burglar w...

Ach, no, not just another first world problem. A big problem. Get off the internet and get face to face help from someone you trust. And if you trust ...

You have had that education and you haven't been brainwashed - witness, your post. So why do think anyone else has been brainwashed? Maybe because you...

Four questions about the capital that we are going to redistribute. (1) Who does it belong to currently? (2) How are we going to get it off them? (3) ...

Now don't be sore. It's only food for thought.

You complained that the statement ' "Correspondence" is not the same as correspondence' makes no sense. I explained that it does makes sense, what sen...

I'm one thousandth of a sparkly sequin. And that's way better than being a speck of dust. That's why I act all la-di-da on these forums.

True. I can't explain how a single word has two senses without first explaining one sense and then explaining the other. So, for example, 'leg' can be...

Yes, it is indeed the same word. The scare quotes indicate that the same word is being used in two different senses, of which one is perverse or confu...

You can call anything you like whatever you like. But that is different from explaining it in terms that are to be understood. Scare quotes are a sign...

Austin wrote, “In philosophy, there are many mistakes that it is no disgrace to make: to make a first-water, ground-floor mistake, so far from being e...

'Philosophy is stupid' is a philosophy of its own. I wouldn't say that it was stupid but perhaps not yet fully thought through. It's more an exam ques...

And saying correspondence is not "correspondence" makes no sense whatsoever. It means you can call anything you like "correspondence" but that does no...

"...false premises produce false conclusions." All posts by MU are less than 100 words This is a post by MU Therefore this post is less than 100 words...

Ok, but you could say a thin man not being in a doorway has nothing to do with a fat man not being there. Or, if they do have something to do with eac...

Ok. And are they both the same fact as this: Julius Caesar was not born in 2015. If not, why not? If so, we are surely tending towards all facts being...

One problem with facts is how to tell when one fact is the same as another. There's no fat man in my doorway. There's no thin man in my doorway, eithe...

Yes, we can make up any old shit and it is all explanation of a kind. We can explain the origin of a flower by reference to a nymph who misbehaved. Bu...

Going back briefly to the beginning: "His analysis is that there has to be some things for which there is no explanation that explain the things that ...

What do we suppose Socrates knows that he doesn't know, which the others think they know, but don't? We don't need to speculate or suppose - we are to...

I think the reference is to the Apology: " ...I went to one who had the reputation of wisdom, and observed to him - his name I need not mention; he wa...

I don't think Lewis's trilemma works. He's trying to show that Jesus can't have been merely a great man, wise prophet, wonderful teacher etc. Some of ...

How do you define free will? To better explain what I'm looking for, here are example questions. One way of explaining it is to imagine yourself typin...

Slope of diminishing returns - yes, but still some returns and a variable slope. I think what I'm getting at is that there are not, on the one hand, '...

Corbyn is hated because he is envied. He is just like you were when you were a young socialist. Now you are old and disillusioned and no longer a soci...

I'm fully persuaded that we should give to charity and also believe that if nobody gave to charity then life would be worse for us all. But still the ...

I'm not so sure. If I buy the t-shirt for £2.50 and give nothing to charity then I'm winning. It costs me to give £7.50 to charity. A cost is a loss a...

Singer's argument is that our first moral duty is to maximise welfare. If we are rich we can do this by giving to the poor. Therefore we are obliged t...