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I was thinking about this too, and especially the curious idea - let me know if you agree - that even positive injunctions in the law are, in a way, s...
March 10, 2018 at 09:21
Eh, enough with the pseudo-psychology. Anyway, I complained that you made an unsubstantiated claim, when all the established evidence shows otherwise....
March 10, 2018 at 09:18
Eh, I've always liked Neitzsche' quip that thinking is not something that anyone does but is that which befalls them. I have no claim to mastery over ...
March 10, 2018 at 09:06
Not at all.
March 10, 2018 at 09:01
One thing to keep in mind, when talking about things like career preferences, is also how those preferences were cultivated in the first place. If it ...
March 10, 2018 at 08:53
Most of what I think and say is not my own! Almost all of what I know in philosophy or elsewhere is what I've cobbled together from others, and I cert...
March 10, 2018 at 08:43
But these aren't my ideas about aesthetics. These are other people's ideas, supported by a bunch of evidence. I'm realying them to you. My gosh, if yo...
March 10, 2018 at 08:23
I cited a whole book! What more do you want?? How about Michael Ryan's A Taste for the Beautiful? That's two books.
March 10, 2018 at 08:17
Yes, the appeal to actual real life scientists sounds like an "I". Uh-huh. I gave you citations - a link to an article even - feel free to educate you...
March 10, 2018 at 08:13
To the contrary, the issue is not anthropomorphism but a vast underestimation of animals on your part. There is an answer to your question because the...
March 10, 2018 at 08:06
True, true, but it's important to be precise: if we admit both senses, to the degree that nature is not 'well-regulated' in the 2nd sense ('efficient'...
March 10, 2018 at 06:53
Thank you for reading what I've actually written, rather than childishly fantasizing about projected 'ideologies' and 'political agendas'. In this con...
March 10, 2018 at 06:13
You have, if nothing else - perhaps and especially because nothing else - a vivid imagination.
March 10, 2018 at 04:30
Can be, but usually aren't, unless you're in Stalinist Russia. It's pretty simple: do IR laws cover each and every aspect of what happens between empl...
March 10, 2018 at 04:07
To be fair, I don't think the use of legal terminology in philosophy or science is a priori suspect, only that, when and where it it used, it is used ...
March 10, 2018 at 03:14
No, it doesn't - it's a completely empty set of words used by simpletons and dimwtis, so much so that one can predict exactly when and where it gets w...
March 10, 2018 at 02:13
Pomo neo-Marxist socialist politically correct er... some other empty epithets, I imagine.
March 10, 2018 at 01:55
If getting the world right implies a political agenda, then sure, guilty as charged, accepted with glee.
March 10, 2018 at 01:30
Yes and no. As in, you're right about the language thing, but the stakes are higher than just 'being careful with language'. Holding to a certain view...
March 09, 2018 at 23:58
Judith Butler's "Can One Live a Good Life in a Bad Life" (RP176) is unmissable, and Jason Moore's "Nature in the Limits to Capital" (RP193) is great t...
March 09, 2018 at 11:30
Ahh, awesome! RP has hosted some of my favourite articles, glad to see they're doing well enough to go open access.
March 09, 2018 at 09:32
Heh, the quote caps off a chapter where alot of it is explained - hence why it seems so condensed - but the gist of it is setting itself against repre...
March 09, 2018 at 09:12
I posted part of this in the Quote Cabinet the other day, but since you asked!: "Art is the opening up of the universe to becoming-other ... is the wa...
March 09, 2018 at 07:31
There is emotion, and then there's talk about gun laws after a massacre as 'mallet to starfish'.
March 08, 2018 at 15:51
No, a murderer took a gun to 35 of our citizens who were shot dead in real life. It was brutal and viscous, and there was nothing delicate about it. I...
March 08, 2018 at 15:19
Yay Women! Rorschach test: /uploads/resized/files/c5/m8ig1dft5gvlt1xm.jpg
March 08, 2018 at 10:50
The problem of induction is another problem altogether and largely irrelevant to this discussion.
March 08, 2018 at 07:06
I agree, which is why philosophers like Cartwright and physicists like Davis have argued that we either need to drop the reference to laws altogether,...
March 08, 2018 at 06:18
I used natural selection in my OP as an example of universal 'biological law' - all of biology is subject to it - which nonetheless does not shape all...
March 08, 2018 at 05:29
Not at all. What I'm saying amounts to: pay attention to how we use language, and specifically the varying or non-univocal motivations behinds those u...
March 08, 2018 at 04:35
A word on truth: I've been somewhat carried away by the discussion on truth even through the OP wasn't about the truth of the fundamendal laws as such...
March 08, 2018 at 03:22
I disagree. Scientific modelling is a very specific process in which a system of inferences available in a formal system (the model) can be made to/ou...
March 07, 2018 at 17:08
I largely agree with this, as does Cartwright, for whom fundamental laws are indeed useful as explanatory tools, with the caveat that their explanator...
March 07, 2018 at 16:31
Yeah, it's a careful line to tread. Cartwright's position - which makes alot of sense to me, is anti-realism about laws, but realism about (scientific...
March 07, 2018 at 10:52
But it is not the scientific way of understanding nature. That's the point. You'd like it to be the 'scientific way' of understanding nature, because ...
March 07, 2018 at 10:34
But the point is they don't, except in highly idealised situations, 'do so in a regular way that can be quantified'. Your statement is literally untru...
March 07, 2018 at 10:32
Heh, I was waiting for this rejoinder, but didn't want to drop an even bigger quote than I did, because this is exactly what she addresses in the sect...
March 07, 2018 at 10:27
There's not really much to disagree - or agree - with though. "Tells us something important". Sure, Ok, as far as a vague 'something important' goes.
March 07, 2018 at 10:11
The curious thing about the laws is that they are almost entirely undescriptive. In fact, one of the most interesting things that Cartwirght demonstra...
March 07, 2018 at 09:48
It could be an example of such an misunderstanding: the question after all is an empirical one - is there evidence to show that happiness evolved into...
March 07, 2018 at 08:56
Is there way to impose a 5 or 10 minute no-post delay for users posting new threads? It would help alot with spam bots without impacting regular users...
March 07, 2018 at 03:23
Like everyone else unfortunately. I suspect it was a bot operating on a macro, but I can't be sure.
March 07, 2018 at 03:20
Nothing to see here.
March 07, 2018 at 03:07
*sigh*. Circumscribe: draw a circle around (scribe a circle?), clear a space for, without yet filling in that space. Via negativa: the way of the nega...
March 07, 2018 at 02:36
I've read the first two chapters of that Scarry book (out of four) and they - along with Alphonso Lingis's "Carrion Body, Carrion Utterance" - set me ...
March 07, 2018 at 02:03
Exactly this. There's nothing worse for a philosophy discussion than 'fisking'. It saps the life out of conceptual development and blunts to the point...
March 06, 2018 at 16:54
So it's circumscription of conceptual space? Via negativa?
March 06, 2018 at 13:15
Hah, I like it. There's actually quite a long philosophical lineage of reflection (hah) on the 'being' of the image in the mirror, one that culminated...
March 06, 2018 at 11:39
Why the dogs??? :( We had to put my Corgi down last year and it was just about the saddest thing I've ever had to do. They're family, and it sucks. Bu...
March 06, 2018 at 10:41
:rofl: :sweat:
March 05, 2018 at 17:48