The importance of Kripke's intervention though (imo) has to do with the way in which he tackles questions of modality - that is, necessity and conting...
Whether you're speaking literally or figuratively here is irrelevant though. As is the talk of 'visualizing'. It's a question of formal identity condi...
If I may, one way to think about this is to consider what allows you to speak of two worlds with different Obamas in the first place. Kripke's point i...
Mmm, I should have qualified - the last refuge within the sciences themselves. Although to be fair, this too overstates the case somewhat. Abiogenesis...
I think it's important not to confuse or conflate science with naturalism. If the former refers to a series of methodologically constrained practises ...
Frankly, the 'interminable debates' on quantum theory - itself a tiny sliver of the unquantifiable success of naturalist approaches to nature - has go...
But this is just wrong - both at the level of facts and definitions. The whole point of naturalism is to abjure transcendent explanations such that th...
Daniel W. Smith - Essays on Deleuze May or may not be my last Deleuze reading for a while, unless I decide to pursue a Logic of Sense reading project,...
Interestingly though, the claim that God is Being has tended to hew worryingly close to atheism itself, insofar as the difference in kind from God to ...
A universal Turing machine just is a system that evolves through state space. Or better, it simulates (computes) by means of its sequential progressio...
No, I'm not asking that (I have no idea where you even pulled that from?), and no, I don't simply 'prefer' the term state-space, insofar as state spac...
I don't understand what you mean by a 'computational entity'. And while 'logical space' has a close analog in the notion of state-space, which can be ...
Again, computability doesn't mean just 'can be replicated inside a computer', which is a vague and imprecise statement. Computers do their computation...
Yeah, you need to explain what it means for something to be computable. Generally, this has a very specific meaning, to do with being able to model pr...
Eh, I got ahead of myself in talking about knowledge here. The thing to note is that perception is one manner - and definitely not the only manner - i...
One needs to be very, very careful to distinguish between perception and existence. To say that the world looks or feels or smells the way it does bec...
But even in idealist ontologies, Being is almost never denied to the non-living: the Being of the fire or the hat or the society might be 'mind-like' ...
By all means, speak about philosophy, but don't make things up about it. If you're going to say that ontology "arises in relation to first-person pers...
'Thing' is a word that barely belongs in the philosophical lexicon (with the exception perhaps of Heidegger's analysis of the term), so I don't know w...
Because anyone with a modicum of philosophical education doesn't equate Being with things that are alive. Cf. Aristotle: "Substance is thought to belo...
Yes, and one you get past primary school grammar lessons, you can read, say, the list of primary questions that the wiki has on the subject, practical...
I don't know why you keep pushing this line which is simply historically and factually incorrect. Read the Parmenides, or Aristotle's Metaphysics: in ...
Depends what you mean by ontology - I suspect I mean it differently from you: as I understand it, an ontology (roughly) is an account of what is: to a...
It's not just defining one's terms though, as if it were a preliminary exercise to the main event: if properly conducted, realism or anti-realism will...
Literally questions about what it is one is talking about when one takes a side either way. If you say: 'all is thought' or 'you can't get outside of ...
Yeah, its one of my favourite scientific experiments: the perceptual world is a significant world. This was basically the founding insight of phenomen...
These are awesome questions, but there's alot of presuppositions behind them need to be unpacked, and in some cases, perhaps reworked altogether. As a...
Sure, and tellingly, their views tended to be considered rather fringe, to the extent that they challenged not simply 'the external world', but philos...
Ironically, I reckon the largest impetus that fuels such debates is nothing less than the spirit of modernity itself, with it's concern over epistemic...
Because literally nothing of philosophical consequence follows if you take a position one way or the other. The whole barren debate turns upon the ont...
Part of the problem is that neither realism nor idealism ought to be 'starting points': these positions ought to follow (or 'fall out from') from othe...
Pretty much the only way to go about this. The OP's options for response all pretty much begin with 'The world is...' - but forget the world: we can b...
Yeah, exactly: the idea is to recognize the incredibly precarious nature of thought - there is no guarantee that thought will take place: it is only e...
I'm afraid my Quine is limited to a couple of essays here and there, and not on this subject. Would be interested in any particular readings you'd hav...
What's interesting though is that the reflection on the necessity of thought directly and explicitly excludes any consideration of teaching and learni...
Yes, thinking of things in terms of forgetting is quite a useful way to approach things too. If we move to valorize learning instead of knowledge, for...
Sure, but the Platonic understanding of knowledge still bears it's rather considerable influence over epistemology today. Whether it be knowledge of t...
Also, William Connolly has a great discussion on the above quote on flux, especially with respect to the sciences, where he directly makes the connect...
And ‘islands of stability’ is not a bad way to put it. Here is TSZ: "If timbers span the water, if footbridges and railings leap over the river, then ...
I think this is more or less exactly the move Nietzsche makes: truth and falsity becomes forces in Nietzsche, they are expressions of 'will-to-power'....
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