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SophistiCat

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Unstructured sets don't have such relational properties. And even if they are structured, they can be structured differently from yours, as evidenced ...
April 12, 2021 at 07:59
"Darwin's doubt" is a nickname that Alvin Plantinga gave to the idea that you sketched in your post (in his book "Warrant and Proper Function"), altho...
April 11, 2021 at 16:51
You can only talk about how moral beliefs are interconnected with and depend upon other beliefs after you put them into a theoretical framework. But w...
April 11, 2021 at 15:51
And how can you argue that some moral beliefs are broader and more fundamental than others? How can you even argue that there is such a hierarchy of m...
April 09, 2021 at 07:48
Not entirely undermined. I said that one could try to argue that retributive punishment is conducive to the reduction of suffering, but it wouldn't be...
April 07, 2021 at 07:51
Actually, it is trivially false that all commonly held moral beliefs can be construed as being aimed at minimizing suffering. (I am including the "com...
April 06, 2021 at 15:27
In: Podcasts  — view comment
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/497/philosophy-podcasts
March 29, 2021 at 20:25
That's nice, but for this to be of interest to anyone other than you, you need to present a coherent argument against moral relativism. And before tha...
March 29, 2021 at 20:16
There is no mistake in what you said (other than some questionable choice of words). The mistake is in your misplaced expectation of certainty. Scienc...
March 26, 2021 at 21:50
But if no one believes in this purely hypothetical "moral relativism," then (I keep coming back to this question) what is the point of railing against...
March 26, 2021 at 20:37
And who would those people be? I mean, who would be the people who actually believe all the stuff you say they believe? Your mistake, I think, is in a...
March 26, 2021 at 17:38
Not if you adhere to at least a very modest type of physicalism: supervenience physicalism. I don't understand what you mean by physical laws breaking...
March 26, 2021 at 17:05
Well, you lost all physicalists right here (and a good deal of others who wouldn't even describe themselves as physicalists). That's another way of pu...
March 26, 2021 at 14:50
And you are saying that Dennett both believes that God is possible and denies the same? Show me, I am not taking your word for it. And in any case, as...
March 26, 2021 at 12:56
Contrary of what? So you are just making shit up. This is a worthless OP.
March 26, 2021 at 12:33
I haven't heard of it. Though like I said, I am not familiar with Dennett's argument, this doesn't sound remotely like your 5-word summary of it.
March 26, 2021 at 12:01
Previously stated - where? You are right that it's hard to imagine someone actually holding all the outrageous beliefs that you attribute to "true mor...
March 25, 2021 at 22:11
It's a very legitimate question that has received plenty of attention from mathematicians (who invented the concept) and philosophers. Have a read: In...
March 24, 2021 at 20:39
Now why would I not want Her to exist? :pray: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/Egyptian_-_Statuette_of_a_Standing_Bastet_-_Wa...
March 23, 2021 at 20:43
Only if we are talking about social belonging, and even then it's true only of some groups, some of the time, but not all groups all of the time. But ...
March 21, 2021 at 21:00
I am not sure about that. Race boundaries aren't so clear-cut (which is why there is no true race science, only pseudo-science); ethnic boundaries - e...
March 20, 2021 at 18:14
Why do you believe that "it probably really did happen this way" if you also think that it's "impossible" and that it's all a "mystery?" Who are the m...
March 20, 2021 at 17:45
Still not answering the question. Yes, countries are not races and nationalism is not the same as racism, but we knew that already. The question is: w...
March 20, 2021 at 15:49
Aw, you have such a cute coat of arms!
March 19, 2021 at 15:32
Well, you are just reiterating the received wisdom that @"unenlightened" is questioning. And the question is normative, not anthropological. Racism is...
March 19, 2021 at 14:17
I don't really get the point of the poll. On the one hand, "ethical hedonism" is mentioned at the start, which refers to a metaethical position that I...
March 19, 2021 at 13:50
That's an odd way of defining determinism: it is more like a conclusion or an intermediate result. Determinism in this context is usually assumed to b...
March 18, 2021 at 09:19
I went to some pains to explain why. No, it doesn't. Our best cosmology hasn't delivered a verdict on whether the past is infinite, and it likely neve...
March 16, 2021 at 20:27
If you agreed with what you quoted, you wouldn't have excluded (1) for the reason that you gave: That's what I've been objecting to, because it's mani...
March 15, 2021 at 20:09
Even if it was funny the first time, after countless repetitions it no longer is. I don't understand why the mods allow this sort of thing here.
March 14, 2021 at 19:42
What the fuck? How many of these copycat antinatalist topics are you going to start? There is no philosophical content here. This is ideological spam.
March 14, 2021 at 17:28
And yet here we are, measuring time all the time (as it were) with no regard to any such existential beginning. So this can't be true. All we need to ...
March 14, 2021 at 17:11
I guess by this you just mean that the past is infinite. The objection doesn't make a lot of sense. We choose the starting points for our measurements...
March 14, 2021 at 12:48
To describe gravity is to make it more intelligible - to understand it. In describing it we acquire an understanding of some of the whys and the hows....
March 12, 2021 at 17:54
Is there a difference between understanding and describing? We describe something in order to make it intelligible.
March 12, 2021 at 08:04
It's a bad argument, because it blithely presumes probabilities in the absence of any context. It's cargo cult math.
March 11, 2021 at 08:04
So, we must presume that the question makes sense, because otherwise we couldn't find a satisfactory answer to the question. Well, yeah. One can't fin...
March 11, 2021 at 08:00
The very premise of this exercise is utterly clueless. Physics equations don't prove, much less disprove the assumptions that were built into them. LO...
March 08, 2021 at 22:55
One quibble here: What is reasonable for one to believe depends (uncontroversially) on one's epistemic situation. For example, it is reasonable for yo...
March 08, 2021 at 12:06
This is one of those bad old philosophical questions that should be dissolved with analysis. There is neither right nor wrong answer, because the ques...
March 06, 2021 at 17:09
In cold water?
March 06, 2021 at 11:31
Yeah, people ought to tag their responses with tags like "derail," "derail, but worth reading," "crap post in every respect, don't bother reading," et...
March 06, 2021 at 11:26
Collision is a notoriously messy scenario - both physically and mathematically. Better to think of a ball in Newton's cradle at its highest point: at ...
March 06, 2021 at 09:29
Replying to one sentence taken out of context (only to repeat what you already said several times) is pointless and misleading. If you are not interes...
March 05, 2021 at 14:46
No, that's not the OP argument, that's just one of your favorite refrains. The OP denies that reason can be explained in terms of naturalism. He says ...
March 05, 2021 at 10:54
I guess you didn't read anything after this sentence.
March 05, 2021 at 08:32
That's not at all obvious. You can't conclude anything from a paradox. As you yourself just acknowledged, you have undermined your own reasoning. Any ...
March 04, 2021 at 20:45
In: Free will  — view comment
I can point you to a comprehensive SEP survey of compatibilism. There was so much to cover there that a supplement was made just for the most recent d...
March 02, 2021 at 08:07
In: Free will  — view comment
Why not learn more about compatibilist arguments then? Your position is what is sometimes referred to as classical incompatibilism - classical because...
March 02, 2021 at 07:41
These random factoids are quite irrelevant to what I said.
February 24, 2021 at 06:27