Fooloso4

As a pragmatist I would think you would be concerned with what works. Let's, as you suggest: It either exists or does not exist, or, given your aversi...

One thing I find interesting is the support of the "west coast Straussians", academic political philosophers, conservatives and followers of the late ...

Are you making a connection between them or are they two separate subject matters that interest you?

The Latin for construct is 'construo'. Facere means more generally to act or do, and by extension to make or construct. Regardless of the etymology th...

According to Newsweek he lawyer claimed the suit was dropped because of "numerous threats" against her. It seems likely there was also money changing ...

Apparently he likes the beauty queens who compete in Miss Teen USA. In his own words: Some of these "incredible looking women" were as young as 14 and...

I don't think the point is subtle at all. This is simply not true. Physicists use light. The geological time scale is based on prior events of earth's...

I saw this when I found the other passage. I wonder how far he intends for us to push the analogy. The tool requires the hand to manipulate it. If the...

I agree with this, but I also maintain that the world is as it is independent of our knowledge of it. We do not know the world as it is but as it is f...

Yes, it can be but that does not mean that one desires to know in order to control her life. It may be the case that one sacrifices control of one's l...

Tell me what the paleontologist expects to predict and control. Seems a little late for that. There are some who desire to know in the same way that o...

I am reminded of Arthur Koestler's definition: "the systematic abuse of a terminology specially invented for that purpose."

Well, it does seem to be particular to humans but I don't buy this stuff about predict and control as it pertains to all endeavours to know.

It is really quite simple. You have not provided an explanation (2) for the existence of God, you simply assert that God is self-explaining (1). You a...

Thanks. I suppose that what reminded you of this is the idea that things are not in the mind in the sense that the actual physical object is in the mi...

What reason do you have to doubt the abundance of evidence of life before man? Do you doubt the fossil record? Radiocarbon dating? Do you think the di...

If you accept facts then I assume you accept the fact that the world existed prior to man. But if you accept Forms then those facts are just images. A...

Can you provide a reference?

Yes, that is self-evident. The object is what the analysis is about. The analysis is subjective in so far as (a) there can be no analysis without a su...

Aquinas did not write in ancient Greece The point is you are using the term in two fundamentally different ways - (1) fact(s) that are not dependent (...

Before going to college I did not know in what ways I would benefit from it. I could not have made a prudent decision based on my lack of knowledge.

Are there entities that are not part of a system of human interaction? Are entities mind dependent? Is the mind interacting with itself or with entiti...

You might think it genius but as you said in the OP, thinking something does not make it exist. So too, for the same reason, one cannot define somethi...

The interaction of what?

Could there be any interaction within these systems if these entities were human constructs?

Sure, but I do not know how beneficial or harmful it is with those who have not already decided to vote for him. But then again, we do love spectacle.

Is there anything other than human constructs?

It is not a question of where concepts originate. You are right that biological understanding of languaging as 'behaviour' needs no such 'axioms', tha...

I agree with Freedland that it is not enough just to laugh at him, but there are benefits to laughing at him. On the one hand it is cathartic, on the ...

One way in which I have defined philosophy is as what the philosophers do. From here we begin to read a select group of philosophers and discuss what ...

Describing is a kind of doing, but it is not the doing of what is described. Our ability to conceptualize has led some to believe that everything we d...

The existence of the earth prior to man and what we imagine or picture or form ideas of what that was like is not the same.

Your description is conceptual, but the description is not the doing.

I don't see it that way. It is not that the irony or humor is hidden but that it is just not seen. For us, though, it helps to have certain things bro...

I think it may rather be the case that theories of time are the constructs and time as we experience it and what occurs in time - getting older, for e...

Plato is said to have slept with a copy of the works of the comic poet/playwright Aristophanes under his pillow. Aristophanes was serious and funny. T...

What is self-explaining (meaning 1) but cannot be explained (meaning 2) is a conjuring act. What is self-explaining but by which you cannot explain an...

Drop the labels and maybe we can make some headway. Labeling someone a "naive realist" and then attaching naive realism instead of what someone actual...

You use the term explanation to mean: You avoid Aristotle's causal language but do not side-step the problem. What distinction do you make between the...

I think it quite amusing when someone who is evidently uninformed mocks someone else who is trying to sort things out. They make fools of themselves. ...

Then your "proof" would be superfluous. And yet the only explanations I have ever come across are failed human explanations, including yours. Your app...

This is where you should have started and ended. Positing an unexplained God as an explanation of what cannot be explained is conjuring.

But it does. The desire to be wise includes the wisdom of how to live well.

I do not think that Wittgenstein's hinge propositions are intuitions. They are what stands firm and around which other things are taken to be known. T...

While I do not think it is particularly helpful to define philosophy since the assumptions, goals, and practices differ widely, if pressed, I would su...

The Historical Jesus in Context, edited by Amy-Jill Levine.

When my son was very young he was fascinated with dinosaurs. There was nothing pragmatic in his desire to hear about dinosaurs, to see pictures of the...

The only thing that is nonsense is this claim. The desire to know for the sake of knowing without regard to utility has motivated man for as long as m...

But our distance intervenes. I suspect that no matter how close we get, or rather, no matter how close we think we get, there will still be a great de...

As do I. I was just pointing to further challenges that face us when reading in translation. Even advanced knowledge of a language may not be sufficie...