Dfpolis

I don't have a problem with anything you said, but what I'm saying is that we know things in terms of how they relate to us, and while that is not exh...

If you only wish to take shots at my thread management, and not actually discuss your objections, I can't help you.

I introduced it as a concept, not as a reality. I could have said the same thing if I were an atheist. It is not part of my present argument that ther...

I do not wish to go off on that tangent in this thread. Here, one can take it as an ideal standard for human cognition I am rejecting.

Think of Descartes telling us about his methodological doubt. He begins by telling us that he was in his chamber. He knew, therefore, that he was in h...

I read it as two table concepts. It is a conditional conclusion, and in no way foundational. The condition is, "If one follows the rules of chess, ......

No, it does not. It reflects on our surprise when something we thought we knew teaches us something unexpected. From this we learn to be humble and no...

It is an epistemological fact that must be considered in our metaphysical reflections. No, that is not my argument. I am following Aristotle in De Ani...

I look forward to your further reflections.

Thank you. I do not think that knowledge is either a normative concept or a species of belief. If knowledge were a form of belief, we would necessaril...

I agree. The example is from Sir Arthur Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, who reflected on the table of common sense vs. the table of scien...

Not that I recall. It just came to me as I was writing my response.

I don't think knowledge needs to be exhaustive. Still, if we demand that what we know correspond to reality, then, if we think a table is solid, and l...

No. The fact that it is relational does not make it subjectively dependent. Whether or not you like it, cancer cells in people deprive them of good he...

Good and evil are relational. It is the relation between what is and what is adequate that makes things good or bad. There is nothing bad about cancer...

Not quite. We can understand, scientifically, the purposes of many things, aka teleology. We know that if you have a defective heart, your blood will ...

I substantially agree with what you said, because I think that humans can grasp teleology, and so what "should" be. We may have some differences as to...

This makes no sense. Cancer is a physical evil because it, itself, is a privation of health. First, we're not designed to live on carcinogens. If we w...

I never implied that it was. So? The evil is still a privation -- the lack of a perfection in a human being. I did not say that it was evil because it...

No, it is neither "poetry" nor a metaphor. It is a literal claim. If you took pleasure in harm to others, you would lack the disposition to empathize ...

When we look at examples of evil, we always see a privation of some perfection -- of good health, of justice, of compassion, of rights, etc. So, while...

Yes, it is literally evil -- a privation of good health. Evil is not a thing, but the absence of a good that should be present. Human acts are good or...

There are physical evils, e.g. cancer and birth defects. Tires can be bad, and so can meat. None of these bad things have any moral character. They ar...

Thank you for your measured response. I think it is absolutely certain that there is an uncaused cause which has all the philosophical attributes of G...

Yes, like instead of responding to what the theist actually says, the atheist spins a demeaning fantasy.

First, the identity is that "the builder building the house" names the identically same event as "the house being built by the builder." The only diff...

The good or evil of subjects is a moral category. The good of things and acts is a metaphysical concept. There is no moral value to a good tire or a b...

Morality reflects the agent's intentionality, not directly the good or evil (privation of good) of acts. A choice is moral if the agent intends to do ...

As Aristotle observes in the Posterior Analytics ii, 12, 95a14-24, there are two kinds of efficient causality, which have subsequently been called "es...

Yours is the question St. Augustine pondered in The City of God. He wrote of people choosing to be citizens if the City of God (those who are committe...

While I agree with most of what you say, I think this conclusion is unjustified. Acts can be objectively good and evil, even though we can't know the ...

Will is not reason, but will and reason are interrelated. Reason knows, and will commits in light of what is known. Knowing does not compel commitment...

If God knows X does Y because X freely chooses to do Y, this is re-phrasing the principle of identity. This says nothing about what causes Y -- simple...

Are you asking me? I mostly posted my own reflections. On Plantinga, you can Google "evolutionary argument against naturalism (EAAN)". I agree with th...

While I agree that at best the fine-tuning argument only shows that a powerful mind created the universe, and not an omniscient mind, your four step a...

This is anthropomorphizing a physical process. "Species" are abstractions. While species concepts have a foundation in reality, they do not exist in n...

Every act of knowing is both subjective and objective. There is no knowing without both a knowing subject, and a known object. So, the idea of purely ...

I think that there are objectively good and evil acts, but that does not mean that "there is some moral evaluation of that event in that context that ...

We can prove things by abstracting from, rather than generalizing upon, experiential data. In the Hume-Mill model of induction, if all we see is black...

Exactly. The hypothetico-deductive method cannot prove anything to be true, although falsification can prove a hypothesis false. What it can do is sho...

We must begin by noting that to believe a fact is to be committed to its truth -- not to know it as something we have experienced for ourselves. Since...

The signals in the brain indicate that the state of our rods and cone has changed. So, in your view, no dynamics links neural signals and visual perce...

That is the usual case. However, you may wish to read W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (1960) to have more data to reflect upon. I agree that con...

Normally, no one. DNA does not work by being a sign, but mechanically. Hence, it needs no interpretation or interpreter. It is a "program" in an analo...

Please do so. I agree that neural processes are physical. Whether or not mental states arise from them depends on whether or not we attend to them. Th...

No, programs implement the intentions of their programmers. They themselves are signs requiring human interpreters to actually signify.

Aside from the fact that this claim is wholly unsupported by data, there is no reason to suppose simulating physical (simulation) operations can gener...

My issue is that the same signals indicate I am seeing an apple as indicate I am seeing (my retinal state is being modified by) and apple. So how do w...

I have no idea what this means. "Virtual" usually means "potential." Clearly, my actual intentions are not longer potential. This is begging the quest...

Yes, it does. How does this allow us to distinguish data on the sensor state from data on the sensed?