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Echarmion

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On the face of it, this is a contradiction of terms. The transcendent is what is beyond all possible experience, I.e. it transcends the empirical. Mat...
February 16, 2019 at 06:39
If you are counting to infinity it does. Counting to infinity is impossible because you can never reach infinity. And no, replacing one argument with ...
February 15, 2019 at 22:23
I think you did not question yourself enough. You refused to restate your points or expand on them. You also assumed any criticism or request for clar...
February 15, 2019 at 18:55
I know. I am essentially just doing an exercise in rhetoric. This is not proper logic. If A and B is impossible, but B is possible, it does not follow...
February 15, 2019 at 18:43
Existing is not "doing something". I did address it, you just keep ignoring parts of my posts. Existing is not the same as existing and counting to in...
February 15, 2019 at 16:56
So you keep saying, but you have yet to make an actual argument. What is the difference between conceiving and logically conceiving? Why is existing f...
February 15, 2019 at 15:29
You're ignoring half my posts. I wonder why. You have repeated your claim 4 times. Anyways here is an argument: It is possible that things can exist w...
February 15, 2019 at 13:51
Isn't that better described as validity? It does, I agree. I just wanted to point out that "burden of proof" is not general for every debate. It has a...
February 15, 2019 at 13:27
Please present a logical argument as to why things need to "come into being" in order to exist. I don't know that I was born, for example, from my per...
February 15, 2019 at 12:37
Unless energy is conserved. In that case, creation just infinitely repeats itself, and we would never notice. Sure, but that's not a "no evidence" sit...
February 15, 2019 at 12:14
Well they exist in the natural habitat of laws, books. And now also on the internet. :wink: Sure, but I think it's also obvious that, e.g. laws aren't...
February 15, 2019 at 12:01
The history of philosophy is not a straight line though. There is no equivalent to the scientific method that just builds on previous observations for...
February 15, 2019 at 11:03
Yes, as evidenced by the many mistakes people, including very smart people, have made in the history of philosophy. Human minds are not perfect reason...
February 15, 2019 at 08:46
Kant was very meticulous with his wording, to the point where to properly understand his work, you need to write your own dictionary as reference. Cha...
February 15, 2019 at 08:28
Yes, which shows that categories, like gender, are always somewhat arbitrary constructions. So you say. But it seems to me that there are rather large...
February 15, 2019 at 07:18
If the definition isn't really relevant, it's usually best to use one that is actually commonly used, like from wikipedia. And do these "people on the...
February 14, 2019 at 20:58
Those are two different things though. Hate speech is a specific category of speech that is considered unprotected in some countries but protected in ...
February 14, 2019 at 19:10
Sure, all categories are ultimately constructed. But whether or not I am a human with 10 toes does not carry many consequences, being considered male ...
February 14, 2019 at 18:29
Claiming that gender is a social construct doesn't imply that individual gender identity is not based at least partially on biological factors. It jus...
February 14, 2019 at 17:03
An interesting way to conceptualize the problem. I like your approach. It's certainly true that the discussion between capitalism and socialism, or pe...
February 14, 2019 at 07:07
Is it? Or have you just changed the goal posts from Democrat voting behavior to the much more nebulous concept of "rhetoric"? Anyways, let's drop the ...
February 14, 2019 at 06:47
That's not how probability works though. You cannot arrive at conclusions about probabilities if all information you have about an event is that it oc...
February 14, 2019 at 05:32
There are at least two different perspectives on this question. From the position of society at large, education serves to give everyone a somewhat so...
February 14, 2019 at 05:26
It seems, then, that existence is not a predicate at all, given that unlike predicates, it does not provide any information about the object to which ...
February 13, 2019 at 20:28
It certainly could be. There are already a number of threads on this, some of them on the front page. It would help if you gave some perspective to yo...
February 13, 2019 at 15:38
It is difficult to hold a belief and not have that belief influence your actions in some way. Not everyone accepts that faith has some unique epistemi...
February 13, 2019 at 14:29
Let me try to summarize your apparent argument here: "The Democrats voted for border security measures before. The wall is a border security measure. ...
February 13, 2019 at 07:12
I think this thread is a clever way to refute the ontological argument. Turning it around shows very nicely that "existence" simply is not an attribut...
February 13, 2019 at 05:30
Rocks don't exist though. They're just a certain configuration of atoms. Which also don't exist, because they're a certain configuration of protons, n...
February 12, 2019 at 21:16
That seems to be in direct contradiction to the definition you provided in your OP: We need to decide whether or not existence is "that which can be o...
February 11, 2019 at 19:44
People can be in power without forming a "class" or a specific "elite" group. Which is difficult and has very rarely been achieved. I was merely comme...
February 11, 2019 at 19:32
The exact motivational value of billionaires is dubious. Few adults entertain such fictions, and you can be rich and/or famous without being a billion...
February 11, 2019 at 16:36
Ok, this is convincing. We need tools in addition to just observation (or falsification through observation) in order to formulate general theories. T...
February 11, 2019 at 07:09
I think you're missing the forest for the trees a bit here. You cannot take a mathematical model that is developed for a 4 dimensional space, drop one...
February 10, 2019 at 13:35
Couldn't one argue that it's not necessary for the "veil of ignorance" to be perfectly applied? One could instead consider the veil a form of argument...
February 10, 2019 at 10:39
So your argument is that because the movement of all objects can be expressed as a vector in a 4 dimensional space that always has the same length, th...
February 09, 2019 at 20:51
So far as we know, things moving at the speed of light don't experience anything, since they aren't sentient. And the "speed of light", is, as the nam...
February 09, 2019 at 18:53
And how many photons have you talked to? It's quite immaterial whether or not the photon "experiences" time. Because all we know about photons, we kno...
February 09, 2019 at 18:13
And this "time-like thing", would it then be finite or infinite? Replacing time with not-time doesn't solve any problem with the argument, at most it ...
February 09, 2019 at 17:08
Cause and effect are themselves part of time though. They are a certain representation of events in time. So outside of time, there are neither causes...
February 09, 2019 at 16:50
But I didn't talk about an infinity of objects "existing in principle", did I? I think you're mixing physics and metaphysics (and arguably so do the p...
February 09, 2019 at 12:58
I think it would be more apt to say that this forum is not insulated from the culture war mentality that has spread around the internet.
February 09, 2019 at 12:44
Yeah but now we're making fairly random assumptions, are we not? What if time is merely a human perception of a world that really is timeless? In that...
February 09, 2019 at 12:43
This is a philosophy forum, is it not? You're welcome to give us your take on "toxic femininity" that is so sorely lacking from public discourse. Yeah...
February 09, 2019 at 07:25
I don't argue that meaning is just linguistic, but you're essentially using "meaning" as a catch-all term for every form of processing, which seems un...
February 09, 2019 at 07:06
3 only follows from 1 and 2 if the matter that is being created is also infinite. If it "decays" in some way the conclusion isn't necessary. Why could...
February 09, 2019 at 06:21
That's not convincing to me. The sound of a string of letters might invoke some reaction, but that is not "interpretation" of a "word". I am not inter...
February 09, 2019 at 05:52
In: Brexit  — view comment
I guess the UK government does not know how representative democracy functions? It begs the question, if the instruction was so clear, why doesn't any...
February 08, 2019 at 18:59
I would call that more "association". The word "apple" means something to you because you have physical experience of apples. Eventually, words refer ...
February 08, 2019 at 18:51
I don't quite understand what you're trying to tell me. Perhaps it's lost in translation I do get the general gist here, the categorical imperative lo...
February 08, 2019 at 17:32