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Why? Pythagoras was the mathematical reductionist par excellence. It is not for nothing that the notion that 'everything is number' is chiefly associa...
June 22, 2018 at 09:30
It's not out of the question. That said, one of the ironies of your opposition to the OP is that the anti-Pythagorian thrust of the paper goes hand-in...
June 22, 2018 at 09:04
So much the worse for Western philosophy.
June 22, 2018 at 08:58
The conclusion to be drawn is not that mathematics is useless or somesuch; only that one should engage in mathematics without the (unscientific) assum...
June 22, 2018 at 08:46
One of my great regrets in life is not picking up his The Degrees of Knowledge at a second hand bookshop once. I really want to read him one day. *sig...
June 22, 2018 at 05:45
Chiming in to agree with Luke here. The point of the beetle-box story is not that, if only the beetle really was in the box, that the word would make ...
June 21, 2018 at 14:43
I always thought it was quite clear the Cic had a kind of pathological/sado-masochistic relationship to Heidegger, enjoying quite immensly his bad-fai...
June 21, 2018 at 04:20
There are only 10 books (or 'chapters', if you prefer) in The Republic. It doesn't go to 16 in the copies I'm aware of. What are you referring to? In ...
June 21, 2018 at 02:24
This is a really interesting paper btw. Rosen actually drew a parallel between C-T and Godel as well, some time back: "What we today call Church’s The...
June 20, 2018 at 12:17
It's also worth checking out the work of Robert Rosen, who showed quite definitely that the C-T thesis can hold for physical systems only under very s...
June 20, 2018 at 11:36
RIP Stanley Cavell, one of the brightest, most luminous stars of analytic philosophy.
June 20, 2018 at 05:04
It's not entirely fair to compare dinosaurs - an entire taxonomic order - with humans, a mere species. One fun fact that often goes unrecognized is th...
June 19, 2018 at 08:54
Yeah, this all seems right to me. One way in which I would extend this though, is to attend to Witty's focus on grammar as a constraint with respect t...
June 18, 2018 at 18:15
Eh, I read Witty very differently to you.
June 18, 2018 at 16:45
The philosophers of science, Isabelle Stengers and Bruno Latour, have long been writing about the insufficiency of the Milgram 'experiments' - which t...
June 18, 2018 at 14:10
Ah, I understand 'use' differently from you I think; all the cases of 'pain' I briefly profiled count as 'uses', and none of them are either 'correct'...
June 18, 2018 at 13:10
I think you'll find the POP alot less difficult than it's reputation might suggest. It's certainly far easier reading than Heidegger, and while a ligh...
June 18, 2018 at 12:57
If you want to read Merleau-Ponty on art, I suggest his essay "Eye and Mind", which I think you should be able to find online. It's an absolutely brea...
June 18, 2018 at 11:45
I'm not sure what 'correctly' means in this context. All the uses of 'pain' I sketched could be said to be 'correct' if generalizable ('publicizable')...
June 18, 2018 at 09:50
One thing that might be useful to add to this discussion is the importance of inference-making. I mean one way - perhaps the only way - to 'coordinate...
June 18, 2018 at 08:54
My only worry about this kind of approach is that it defines the relation between science and philosophy negatively: the one is not the other. I think...
June 15, 2018 at 10:29
I'm somewhat familiar with Whitehead, more through secondary readings than any actual engagement with his own work. His vocabulary is forebording thou...
June 14, 2018 at 17:32
I had a discussion about exactly this with Mariner in another thread recently.
June 14, 2018 at 12:39
That's a good point actually, and now that I'm thinking about it, it's not by accident that I'm avoiding 'knowledge' here. As far as it goes, I'm a bi...
June 14, 2018 at 12:11
I don't think I would say 'without concepts' though; I think philosophy is inseparable from - and perhaps defined by - conceptual activity (hence Adon...
June 14, 2018 at 05:44
Actually I think speciation is an excellent model of individuation that ought to be generalized - with the appropriate caveats - where possible. After...
June 13, 2018 at 15:55
Perhaps not necessarily, but in this particular context, it would be an inadequate account of individuation if the question of 'why this individual an...
June 13, 2018 at 14:21
The superior Molyneux. And his fun problem.
June 13, 2018 at 13:35
As in Kierkegaard?
June 13, 2018 at 13:16
When environment alters genetics!: "About 5,000 to 7,000 years ago the number of men having children fell dramatically—possibly by as much as 95 perce...
June 13, 2018 at 13:12
Yes, but then, the question is really: how best to conceive concepts? (Was it you who asked for clarification re: the appended quote from Adorno?; if ...
June 13, 2018 at 12:41
Not really, because it's not perception that's at stake so much as conception. As others have pointed out, 'see' is just being used as a privileged me...
June 13, 2018 at 12:21
There've been few philosophers who have so vehemently rejected the idea of the 'thing-in-itself' as much Nietzsche, so no, it's definitely not. Nietzs...
June 13, 2018 at 07:56
Nietzsche the Buddhist then :halo:
June 12, 2018 at 10:12
One interesting thing I find with the approach in the OP is that the viewpoint of the Nietzschean would-be God is subtractive, not additive: that is, ...
June 12, 2018 at 05:20
That was a cool paper. I'm all aboard the 'difference precedes identity' train so it's good to see a close textual analysis of the varying instances o...
June 12, 2018 at 05:14
This discussion was merged into Donald Trump
June 12, 2018 at 04:51
Yep.
June 12, 2018 at 02:04
Process. Individuation is a process.
June 12, 2018 at 01:58
To speak a little abstractly, one of the problems I have with 'seeing everything' is that 'everything' strikes me as too subsumptive, as though 'every...
June 11, 2018 at 18:07
One idea I've been interested in for a while is that of higher-dimensional langauges: most languages are essentially two-dimensional linear scripts, a...
June 11, 2018 at 08:11
It sounds boring but I think one of the defining marks of a more intelligent species would be a far more complex and interesting grammar (The movie Ar...
June 11, 2018 at 04:48
wtf
June 10, 2018 at 16:04
One of the cool things about the idea of adjacent possible is precisely that it actually has been already taken up in contexts outside the biological:...
June 09, 2018 at 09:01
Nope.
June 09, 2018 at 00:36
Identification <> Individuation.
June 08, 2018 at 10:53
*yawn*
June 08, 2018 at 09:00
Fantasy <> possibility. If you want to modalize fantasy, go ahead, but don't pretend it's philosophy.
June 08, 2018 at 08:05
Clearly it wasn't. In any case the "dreams of possibilities" have nothing to do with possibility as a modality. One can dream all one likes. To confus...
June 08, 2018 at 07:30
If you think we make 'choices' in that manner, sure, but that's extrinsic to the theory of evolution.
June 08, 2018 at 06:28