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It's like saying: wow, look at all these various languages that have nouns! Guess Nouns must be Platonic Entities. It's reasoning made for and by idio...
October 11, 2018 at 10:07
I'm loathe to talk about subjectivities in terms of 'experiences', which reeks of a mentalistic vocabulary that I'd prefer to be expunged if at all po...
October 11, 2018 at 10:04
And? The unarticulated premise here is that this mutual recognition entails 'independence'. But this is clearly nonsense. That people recognize words ...
October 11, 2018 at 09:53
Yeah, that was the passage I had in mind when Janus mentioned it. That, and, loosely connected, Voltaire's critique of Leibniz's best-of-all-possible-...
October 11, 2018 at 08:51
Yep. All you end up getting are these miserable negative non-specifications that are more than happy to specify what Platonic entities are not, all th...
October 11, 2018 at 08:32
Thanks! It's really very introductory, and in fact so-called 'critical theory' and 'cultural theory' is full of this stuff: 'what kind of subjectivity...
October 11, 2018 at 08:15
I think this is a great question, and I think it's important to show that, if most of what could-be-math is junk, then we've come across that junk bef...
October 11, 2018 at 07:38
https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/10/bogus-homeopathy-data-published-in-top-journal-sparks-outcry-facepalms/ "Editors at a respected scientific jou...
October 11, 2018 at 04:40
But no one but you is talking about 'real'. There's something very insidious about the idea that unless something is eternal and timeless it can't be ...
October 10, 2018 at 15:52
Uninteresting in the sense that it does not even count as mathematics; not 'uninteresting, but still mathematics'. Rovelli's other example, of linear ...
October 10, 2018 at 15:49
Very cool. I'll definitely check out his stuff.
October 10, 2018 at 13:05
Just quickly, on this - Do you know if this is something that is in Daniel Everett's discussion of the Piraha language? I ask because I think there's ...
October 10, 2018 at 12:26
Mm, I'm of a know-thy-enemy type as well. You fight cancer by studying it rigorously and prodding it incessantly. The Sophist remains one of my favori...
October 10, 2018 at 08:14
Surely, if one squints hard enough one can see Plato in anything - which is not necessarily a bad thing (Deleuze: "The task of modern philosophy has b...
October 10, 2018 at 07:53
There's a famous essay by Arendt ("Tradition and the Modern Age"), where she characterizes our age as one that has effected a series of 'turning-opera...
October 10, 2018 at 07:13
No. Explanation isn't a lego-house where you stack bits on other bits. Things are more complex than this. Without going into it, the point is simply t...
October 10, 2018 at 06:34
Depends on how you understand the range of 'explanation'. If you think science exhausts the claim to explanation, then this strikes me as a reductive ...
October 10, 2018 at 06:23
It is literally what you quoted and said 'this is what science does'. So you don't even know what you're quoting, that's not my problem.
October 10, 2018 at 06:12
This is all irrelevant. The question is about subsumption under abstraction. This is just fluff.
October 10, 2018 at 06:08
How do they? You made the claim.
October 10, 2018 at 05:58
No, they do not.
October 10, 2018 at 05:57
In lieu of an effort on my part, this blog post gets the general gist of it right, I think: "Wittgenstein inverts the antiquated western metaphysical ...
October 10, 2018 at 05:18
I was just thinking earlier that I can think of few philosophers who were quite as diametrically opposed to Plato than Wittgenstein. And if one thinks...
October 10, 2018 at 04:47
Off a cliff, preferably. Along with the rest of Greek philosophy. But those labels I think obfuscate more than they clarify. As Banno relates, asking ...
October 10, 2018 at 03:19
Forget minds. Minds are overrated and largely uninteresting. Think in terms of behaviour, action, practice. Math is a practice.
October 10, 2018 at 03:11
I mean that the question is inappropriate, and that you're not paying close enough attention to the context of the use of 'here' in your statement. Th...
October 10, 2018 at 02:28
If you have to ask, you need to get a better grasp on the English language.
October 10, 2018 at 02:03
I don't think this would be the right way to put it: in a strong sense, the subjectivities we inhabit are constitutive of who we are as people: your a...
October 09, 2018 at 15:17
Agree, but then, it's not functioning as a proposition, a bearer of truth.
October 09, 2018 at 06:29
:up: "A thing is identical with itself."-There is no finer example of a useless proposition, which is yet connected with a certain play of the imagina...
October 09, 2018 at 06:17
Yup. Science journals get all sorts of rubbish published in them all the time. And for anyone without an ideological axe to grind, the issue is a soci...
October 08, 2018 at 15:53
They won't get it from science because free will is a conceptual knot. It will be dismantled by conceptual means. Or possibly political ones. And besi...
October 08, 2018 at 15:34
Yeah and it's all shit.
October 08, 2018 at 15:09
The confusion of freedom with free-will is one of the greatest philosophical tragedies ever staged. It has as much to do with freedom as foreclosure h...
October 08, 2018 at 15:09
You don't need any half-assed concept of 'free will' to defend this view. You just need a half decent understanding of how society works. Dan Dennett ...
October 08, 2018 at 15:01
There are no convincing arguments for or against God's existence; there is no arguing the case for a malformed question. The effort itself is abortive...
October 08, 2018 at 07:32
Heh, this was the very first thing they taught us in undergrad linguistics: the dictionary is descriptive and not prescriptive: it tells you how words...
October 08, 2018 at 07:29
/uploads/resized/files/wq/u7dxhhgqxg612vk1.png http://www.laboriacuboniks.net/
October 05, 2018 at 12:29
He's not the Messiah! He's a very naughty boy!
October 05, 2018 at 12:00
Mark Twain, on 'The Awful German Language': "It is not well to dwell too much on the separable verbs. One is sure to lose his temper early; and if he ...
October 05, 2018 at 11:58
Baden's being modest. The long term plan is to have the forum become one giant super thread where we don't even have opening posts any more. For effic...
October 04, 2018 at 22:35
Hmm, I think you've misread, or I was not clear enough in my exposition (or a bit of both): it's not that names were of pure objects to begin with; qu...
October 03, 2018 at 14:30
I think a useful way to think about Gods is in terms of mediation; Gods express the desire for immediation or of the immediate - of doing things witho...
October 03, 2018 at 08:46
So? People are insufferable fanatics. As if this is not all the more reason to marginalize and ostracize these monomaniacs - your description being an...
October 03, 2018 at 03:00
A general rule of thumb: if the publications you read don't frequently address questions of economic justice and power imbalances, and don't employ cl...
October 03, 2018 at 02:49
The justiceish system?
October 02, 2018 at 16:13
In: Bannings  — view comment
@"Marcus de Brun" was banned (a few days ago now, I forgot to note it here) for posting a whole series of pompous rants about 'censorship' of his post...
October 02, 2018 at 09:42
There's a world in which Aristotle, after having written his Physics, instead of writing the Metaphysics (after-Physics) instead wrote a companion vol...
October 02, 2018 at 09:20
Dunno why this seems so hard to grasp.
October 02, 2018 at 05:42