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Why would certainty be a condition of enjoyment? A bizarre connection,
November 20, 2018 at 12:17
Just to be clear, I'm not really trying to set up a distinction between philosophy and ordinary life ('changing a tire'). I'm interested rather in a d...
November 20, 2018 at 11:39
In a way I do think holism is 'inescapable'; much though, in the same way that the fridge light is inescapable: its not on when you look, its on becau...
November 20, 2018 at 02:15
I've read some of Sheehan's work on Heidegger before and I found all very good. The emphasis on 'meaningfulness' was always - I'd like to think - how ...
November 20, 2018 at 01:14
I've always had a profound distaste for this kind of 'mysterian' conception of philosophy - if I can call it that - which treats philosophy as though ...
November 19, 2018 at 13:28
It is always better to be precisely what the object of study demands and nothing less. Clarity is a pleasant bonus in the pursuit of that.
November 17, 2018 at 16:08
You misunderstand. Nothing about what is said implies that the observation influences the motions. The change can, and usually does, take place on the...
November 16, 2018 at 13:04
Exactly. All names are entirely arbitrary, even those so-called understood as one's 'real name'. The line between reality and fiction does not run bet...
November 16, 2018 at 10:58
I don't doubt this at all. I just question the necessity of routing philosophy through the swamp of theology to get at the same insights. Deleuze has ...
November 16, 2018 at 09:53
Its such a lazy argument. Over a long enough time-span, any bullshit scenario I make up is more likely to be the case because time. Time, therefore, i...
November 16, 2018 at 03:15
Heh, I guess it is a pretty elliptical piece of writing, one that does more to circle around its object(s) in various ways than approach them directly...
November 16, 2018 at 01:24
I didn't say this either!
November 16, 2018 at 00:10
I don't know why you start dragging in words that were not even mentioned in my post. You do this often, and it's really quite annoying.
November 16, 2018 at 00:07
A few things. First, I didn't say that there is no distinction between imaginary and actual. All I would say is that language is indifferent to any su...
November 16, 2018 at 00:05
I'm not denying that some names have a 'direct' reference. Of course some names do. The question is over the nature of this directness. And the point ...
November 15, 2018 at 23:45
The trick is to recognize that all names - even the most seemingly concrete, 'real' instances of them, like Abe Lincoln or Amelia Earhart - 'refer' in...
November 15, 2018 at 11:15
There have been interesting attempts to claim incarnation from a materialist perspective - Zizek and Virno come to mind - but I generally find the who...
November 15, 2018 at 09:52
On Certainty is fantastic. Every time I came back to it, I'm blown away. The sensitivity with which Witty approaches language is just unmatched in it.
November 15, 2018 at 07:03
Hah, I actually never got round to reading GG, even though I thoroughly enjoyed Braver's A Thing of This World. Heard plenty of good things about it t...
November 15, 2018 at 06:13
That was a really good read, but like alot of articles on identity politics, it doesn't seem to get to the heart of the matter, which is that identity...
November 12, 2018 at 07:37
Yeah, part of what I'd like to argue is that this kind of approach to things simply is idealism par excellence, and an insidious one at that, insofar ...
November 11, 2018 at 01:55
But what would be the point of that? I mean, in the case of chess, sure, you set up a bunch of more or less arbitrary rules with the goal to make a fu...
November 09, 2018 at 07:03
Oh look. Another instance of The Worst Argument in the World.
November 08, 2018 at 16:19
I think there's a misunderstanding here: I'm not against 'big picture claims' (Gould is wonderful, as is Darwin!), and I invoked Weinberg and Dawkins ...
November 08, 2018 at 04:50
Walter Ong - Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word Giorgio Agamben - What is an Apparatus? And Other Essays Fernando Zalamea - Syntheti...
November 08, 2018 at 01:19
Hi, The post wasn't deleted but got caught as a false positive in the spam filter. It's been restored!
November 07, 2018 at 17:19
No, the OP was not about information, which it barely spoke about - very perceptive of you.
November 06, 2018 at 05:22
It's not my job to address connections that you're making and not explicating. 'In the realm of information'; 'hint at a kind of theory of information...
November 06, 2018 at 04:46
I spoke of neither emergence nor information - I haven't used the former word even once in this thread so far, and the latter only appeared once in th...
November 06, 2018 at 04:08
I'm not the one who expects tautology to be taken seriously as a point of discussion.
November 06, 2018 at 03:59
This is just warmed over mysterian trash. Not worth engaging.
November 06, 2018 at 03:51
Critique? It's barely more than a blunt assertion with no grounds provided to give it even the semblance of substance. As it stands it's basically one...
November 06, 2018 at 03:26
We'll see. This would be very silly though.
November 06, 2018 at 02:59
I doubt Cat would make the naive and boorish mistake of identifying abstraction with idealism - especially since he seems to reject the latter term as...
November 06, 2018 at 02:44
While I'd like to think that yes, materialism does entail more mature, more elaborate theorizing than the various idealisms which it arrays itself aga...
November 06, 2018 at 01:42
Yeah, this would definately be another instance of what I'm referring to. This is not a bad way to put it, although I might quibble a bit with 'percep...
November 05, 2018 at 08:34
Some, sure. But it makes little sense to say philosophy belongs, or ought to belong to that subclass. The rules of chess are more or less utterly cont...
November 05, 2018 at 01:59
This is all well and good, but rules are immanent to use, and it's not a case of 'group consensus' which determimes them, as if from above and without...
November 05, 2018 at 01:31
Arbitrariness by consensus is still arbitrariness.
November 05, 2018 at 00:56
In: Bannings  — view comment
So much the worse for philosophy and philosophers if we have to entertain that shit out a shallow sense of intellectual 'openess'. Millions didn't die...
November 04, 2018 at 16:04
Hmm, this is not quite what I had in mind. A biological example maybe: genes were once thought to be something like blueprints from living organisms. ...
November 04, 2018 at 15:39
I didn't say they were. I said attempts to give them substance in the absence of any conceptual motivation would make them so. The OP is one such atte...
November 04, 2018 at 07:13
Again, the question is what any of this has to do with subject and object. I'm not saying no answer can be given. I'm just saying that one needs a spe...
November 04, 2018 at 05:46
I don't doubt any of that. I'm just saying that these problems were not articulated in terms of subject and object. Any translation of ancient Greek w...
November 04, 2018 at 05:29
The subjective/objective distinction didn't even exist until the 18th century or so, so even if one were to try and employ it to address 'the distinct...
November 04, 2018 at 05:01
Yes, but in a way far removed from this kind of arbitrariness. And 'warding off epistemological concerns' is meaningless. What concerns? And why are y...
November 04, 2018 at 04:40
Why? Without some conceptual motivation to which the distinction responds to, it's just an arbitrary excercise. Kant, Scotus, and Poinsot all had a se...
November 04, 2018 at 04:19
I will never not take joy in pointing out that 'objective' used to mean exactly the opposite, and that for the Scholastics, that which was objective w...
November 04, 2018 at 01:08
Not given, I think: Bronia helped Marie get an education, but it's not mentioned whether or it was Bronia's financial contribution that helped Marie (...
November 02, 2018 at 06:50
Originally posted by @"Iwanttostopphilosophizingbutikant": "The evidential problem of Evil can be understood as the following argument: In many sad ev...
November 01, 2018 at 05:08