You are confusing terms of language, or written symbols, with entities that are designated by them. You have essentially reproduced the confused argum...
I was specifically addressing OP's understanding and presentation of the argument, and contrasting it with Aquinas's. I agree with you and others that...
The explanandum of a cosmological argument is not the sum of the physical features of the first cause. For that, cosmological arguments are usually co...
It's unfair to the original argument, because presented in the way @"Samuel Lacrampe" did, it fails miserably. His version of the argument simply says...
I don't know which examples of cosmological arguments you have in mind, but the ones I am familiar with mainly trade on the one feature of the first c...
I should also clarify that modern formal logic is not quite the same thing as traditional Aristotelian logic - not just because it can have different ...
Yes and no. "Yes" in the sense that, just as with geometry, we now know of more than one logic. "No" in the sense that we did not find other geometrie...
Again, you are only considering a narrow neighborhood of Homo sapiens when judging what is necessary to fulfill a broad requirement. This is a myopic ...
Yeah, I have no definite opinion on this myself. Was there always a potential niche for a land-dwelling, mid-size generalist with highly developed cog...
Two things. First, your mistake here is that you are considering a tiny counterfactual neighborhood of human evolutionary history. It is unreasonable ...
I am sorry, I haven't been closely following this entire exchange, but this just sounds like a wordy way of saying that the correct way of thinking is...
Removing the lounge from the front page is fine, I think. This way the forum appears less chatty. Incidentally, this is just the sort of thread that b...
I've been reading some more on the topic. An extensive review of fine-tuning for life in fundamental physics and cosmology is given by the young cosmo...
Speaking of Bohemians, I like this piece from Ma Vlast by Smetana, and particularly this old mono recording by Rafael Kubelik with the CSO. https://ww...
It seems to me that there is nothing deeper to this argument than your rather idiosyncratic language. Usually, to say that I "reject" a proposition do...
Yes, after I posted this I thought about it a bit more and realized that this wasn't actually making sense. I think I understand where Collins is comi...
I've been reading Robin Collins's extended treatment of the FTA in his 2009 The teleological argument: An exploration of the fine-tuning of the univer...
No, not even close. The only point that you've managed to make in this discussion, and which you keep repeating over and over, as if it wasn't stupidl...
It should be kept in mind that historically, "multiverses" in cosmology were not proposed as a solution to the fine-tuning problem. For example, the k...
And it's the right way to think of probabilities, in my opinion - at least in this context. After all, we are interested in beliefs (such as God belie...
Teleological arguments deal with counterfactual possibilities. Empirically, fundamental constants are just what they are (most of the time) - that is ...
It does, I think. It's been a while since I read his exposition of the argument; the latest, most complete version, according to him (which I haven't ...
And therein lies a problem: there is no uniform probability distribution on an infinitely wide interval. But if not uniform, then what? If a uniform d...
Yes, I am aware of Robin Collins's argument. Maybe we'll get to him, but I was rather hoping to engage proponents of FTA directly. I could talk about ...
You are equivocating on two meanings of "chance"; depending on the meaning, the "chance/design" dichotomy is either obviously true or obviously false,...
Why? Can you explain your reasoning? This is one of the things I would like to clear up in this discussion. Is this fine-tuning surprising? Is it unex...
Yes, when considering the probability of fine-tuning we clearly cannot appeal either to observed statistics (we just have one sample), nor to theory (...
Depending on the level of modeling and level of detail, there may be other "fine-tuned" numbers - some are briefly discussed in the SEP article refere...
Fair enough, but my point still stands, since @"StreetlightX" insists that the rot of Plato's political and social ideology and the historical context...
Why should I? And who are you quoting? Just a bit earlier you were telling us how all Platonists, even modern Platonists-about-this-or-that, were all ...
When you take, say, Bigelow and Pargetter's arguments for structural universals and demonstrate convincingly how they have a maleficent apology of the...
I do, and apparently so do other philosophers who took up the idea. I am not buying this primordial taint line. Or perhaps Plato's attitude towards wo...
Again, I have no interest in defending Plato's own views (I am, frankly, not all that interested in what his views were, although I do have some idea ...
Well now, I am not a Platonist by any stretch, but this is unfair. The most obvious Platonic take on humanity would be that some individuals are close...
I don't really see a problem here. A time-reversible, deterministic system (which is the context in which the principle of least action is operative) ...
Scientific and other analytic explanations tend to be reductionist, in the sense that they fit phenomena or concepts into some theoretical framework. ...
This. It's irritating how much time in philosophy is spent looking backwards, trying to give an "Aristotelian" or "Kantian" or whatever gloss to every...
In natural language, as opposed to formal logic, when we say "it's either this or that" we usually imply that all presented alternatives are live poss...
To right-wingers supporting the power takes priority over conscientious reflection - that is what makes them right-wingers. That is why 90% Republican...
Did you actually read the article? The article is written at a very basic layman level and with lots of journalistic flourish, but there are links to ...
Thank you for your patient explanations. It will take me more work to completely follow your Hilbert system derivation, but I trust that it is sound. ...
By meta-language I mean the implicit convention, under which, among other things, the strings x and y are interpreted as the names of variables. The m...
Why are they not identical? It is a commonly accepted rule of the meta-language, i.e. the formal or semi-formal language that is used to write logical...
Syntactically equivalent, as opposed to logically equivalent - thank you, that is what I was getting at. The premise and the conclusion in the OP prob...
The fact that notation has no bearing on meaning doesn't seem like something you would need to prove, no? Postulate maybe, but not as an axiom but as ...
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