Gary M Washburn

Nuh-uh! The more pertinent indeterminism is syntax. Syntax is not intrinsically valid a priori without quantifiers. And number is not real at all. It ...

Thank you for taking a different view of Plato. I'd have to dig back into the text, but at the beginning of Laws, he reiterates the view often stated ...

Not sure of spelling, but try wiki-ing Cathcar.

? Contrariety. When all is said and done the contrary term is the engine of the real. A careful reading would inform you that I said this and carefull...

I think somewhere on this thread it was asserted, by someone other than myself, that reason is reductive. Is that reduction Ockham's Razor, or more li...

Absolutely not! Because valid reasoning requires a commitment to the continuity of terms. So, if your terms change, then not only are you a solipsist,...

The solipsist must hate himself if he thinks that all the critical responses to his views are happening in his own head. So, Tris, you have my sympath...

Solipsism? Or stubbornness? If you know any words at all you are not alone.As I said earlier, and I hate repeating myself, people who grow up among st...

Why the hell does everyone want to believe the lasting is more real than the fleeting? Person is passing. And only when a person is passed away do we ...

Does "cloudhood" include what forms in a cloud chamber? I wonder how many meteorologists would know what is meant by that word, unless, of course, the...

I recommend QED (Quantum Electrodynamics, by Richard Feynman). The ordinary experience of light and Newtonian optics are not incompatible. But a quant...

So which is it? If the question is whether ideas are real, is the difference between ordinary experience, poetic trope, and technical definition reall...

If the idea is itself a member of the category it names those members cannot be used to explicate the idea. If it is not a member of its category it c...

There are myriad tissues, each of cells of different character, and, arguably, of which each and every cell is importantly differentiated from all the...

Is reason a Ponzi scheme? Hierarchical? Or perhaps you're confusing identity with the identical? Which, of course, are opposites. One Steve and one Al...

Well, the expletive suggests a recognition of the essential role emotional terms, and so emotions, play in the life of reason and even abstraction.

What you get from Alice is a chance to alter what you are convinced rain is and "rain" means. As I said before, it is absurd to suppose we each arrive...

Without asking Alice, the discussion is vacuous. Isn't this discussion about how to divest ourselves of responsibility to ask? To listen? And isn't th...

There are many autonomic systems in the body, all of which have overriding authorities, not by the mind, necessarily, but in response to needs and cha...

If Alice is thinking anything it is not ours to know, only what she reports of it. How could anyone miss that? It's as if the very possibility of dece...

There is something in the difference between the real and the ideal circle that has a strange effect on us. These days, with sophisticated technology,...

Sorry if my outburst seems not to the point. It's as if the literature since him has been reading Aristotle, or the 'Platonists' of the Christian era,...

Slavery was abolished, it is said, in the wake of the Civil War (the Proclamation some say did so was tenuous at best, and the Thirteenth Amendment pa...

What Hegel was trying to intimate to us is that time itself is personal. The only act is the discipline motivated change. Change, that is, that alters...

JF, As On-Mi says, in the movie Cloud Atlas, "I am not genomed to alter reality!" But then she goes on to do just that. You're thinking statically. St...

Greg, But how do you weave a coherent pathway between iconography and iconoclasm? Nothing is eternal, nothing is sacred. Any imagined form is bound to...

Greg, Have you never hogged the good chair? It's a wonderful fact that humanity is the only creature to go about the world with it's own padding upon ...

By "prime matter" is probably meant "the will of god". The lower case might give a clue what I think of that!

JF, Thanks for that. Care to have it developed?

If the mechanical model of the universe, and of mind, is not quite as valid as we tend to presume it to be, then how would this manifest itself in our...

This should read:

Well, I hope I'm not putting a damper on the discussion. Please remember that for Plato there was no established codified set of rational rules or pri...

Gregory, Take a look at "The Analyst" by George Berkeley. He accuses mathematicians of making just that error in the invention of the calculus. First,...

A note on Polus: Socrates quite explicitly states the discussion of the state is just a trope for the character of the individual reasoner, in "letter...

There is something we today have a great deal of difficulty getting our head around in the Greek idea of, well..., ideas. Is 'one' same or different? ...

Gregory, Potentiality presumes wanting to be. Isn't it fatuous to want to be anything if we don't know what being means? Socrates was pretty emphatic ...

In his Laws, Plato's lead character seems to rationalize the design of the state into numerical proportions. On and on he goes, while his interlocutor...

Xtrix, You may not credit this, but I actually greatly appreciate your disinterest. What is a phenomenon? Does Heidegger use the term “phenomenology” ...

Xtrix, Unsurprisingly, you did not respond to my question. Uniqueness cannot exist in a Heideggerian world. Does an anomaly mean anything at all? Not ...

Asif, Heidegger thought he had cracked the enigma of induction. The problem of how we achieve or receive completed thoughts and terms when mind operat...

Xtrix, Not off topic at all. Just not within the limits you arbitrarily set. Agency is the issue. And love is the discipline needed to find the answer...

Xtrix, There is nothing I equate "Being" with because that would be to predicate upon the form of predication. Neither can the form or idea of predica...

i wrote the following thinking this thread was done, so if it seems anachronous now, I'm sorry, but I wrote it out and it still seems cogent to me: Xt...

Xtrix, You're right, to Heidegger time is worthless. He is a classic proponent of inhumanism. His idea of “authenticity”: “anticipatory resoluteness”,...

In the Christian myth, the material world is a corruption of the divine plan, and it is our responsibility to repent of this, to accept guilt for it, ...

Xtrix, A year and a half! Wow! I may have written more than you've read. I might not be any more impressed if you said a decade and a half. But, keep ...

Should read: The act of deciding who and what "Being" is (somehow forgotten or hidden from us) is because we are trying to hold onto it.

Reason is said to be extension from an antecedent term. If this is incoherent, all of Anglo-American philosophy since Frege is incoherent. Are you una...

I do wish I could get the world to take another look at Plato. One of the great virtues of Plato is that he deliberately avoided the reader getting ca...

I can argue as long as you want, but not in terms you demand. You might as well offer the slave all the work he can manage, so long as he does it unde...