Pantagruel

This question presupposes that you can actually define what is the material world. Once upon a time we could have answered "matter" and effected a con...

It seems as though you are stuck in a materialist metaphysic? I'm just reading some Mannheim, who notes that "The error of materialism consists merely...

That's not very polite. I utilized two of the most venerable philosophical dictums as the major and minor premises of a syllogism. So, the content was...

Naturally, the past is not contemporaneous with the present. The past did exist, when it was the present. And it didn't "stop existing," it became the...

I think I refuted your second premise and your defense was "the point is debatable".

So this was also fundamentally my position. As soon as you descend (ascend?) to meta-analysis you are no longer doing anything that deserves to be cha...

Isn't this just a prosaic way of saying "nothing really matters"?

If I thought that I wouldn't have made the comment.

This is not true. The past is a previous state of the present. When a physical object moves through space, its current position and trajectory can be ...

Nice. Thanks for taking the time. :up:

If you really want to understand something, you need to understand what it is not, and where it came from. The first two philosophy books I ever read ...

It certainly does, since the book was written while existentialism was essentially in the process of self-definition by Sartre. As I said, a good way ...

If you want to start building a background then Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy would be my suggestion. In order to understand existe...

:lol:

Well, in the reverse, that there could be a 'reverse turning test'. The Turing Test targets chatbots, but the reverse Turing Test doesn't target all '...

Since you put this in the philosophy forum as opposed to the lounge I'm going to point out this is a faulty generalization. Just because 'bots cannot ...

One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society by Herbert Marcuse

Only from a normative perspective.

No, I never made that claim anywhere. I said that ex nihilo nihil fit doesn't explicitly refer to consciousness, nor should it, that isn't it's role i...

They are both generalizations. This, that. Something, nothing. Your categorization seems spurious to me Isaac.

Well, a premise contains what it contains, so saying that ex nihilo nihil fit doesn't refer to consciousness is like say quid pro quo doesn't tell you...

Actually the final premise was cogito ergo sum. So far from excluding consciousness, it was (is) integral to the argument.

What did I exclude?

If ordinary dialogue does not reflect ordinary content then I don't know what else would. This sounds like a discontinuity between means and ends. Any...

It only makes sense that an inquiry into the nature of ordinary language usage should be an application of the principles of ordinary language. In any...

This is exactly what I am talking about.

This is why I initially quoted Collingwood: The business of language is to express or explain; if language cannot explain itself, nothing else can exp...

Right, it is genuine. There must be both "poor" and "good" ordinary usages. You can't do such an analysis without some kind of normative dimension.

So you use complex analysis to discover ordinary usage? Kind of like using a microscope to view an elephant?

Could there be an experience of the brain dying? I guess that is the question.

So, making them less ordinary?

The kind of things that "happen" to consciousness are experiences. In fact, everything that "happens" to consciousness is an experience by definition....

Exactly my point. If you characterize something as "ordinary language" and then you modify that meaning to abandon one of its fundamental characterist...

Nietzsche's style could certainly be characterized as more ordinary language than those philosophers for whom it is a methodology.....

So what is ordinary then? If there is a universe of discourse with a vocabulary of, say, 100,000 words. There is probably a core vocabulary of, say, 5...

I guess you could ask yourself, does ordinary mean typical? Or exemplary? Perhaps Nietzsche was not typical. Could he be exemplary?

Hmm. I thought OLP was all about what words actually mean in everyday use. As opposed to artificially constructed types of contexts which create the p...

Both Collingwood and Habermas agree on the ultimate importance of ordinary language versus technical. Collingwood says that "technical terms" are not ...

Essays on the Sociology of Knowledge by Karl Mannheim Looking forward to these. Structures of Thinking was a tour de force

Exactly. And that is why you need to comprehend the use of technology within the scope of society as an organic whole. It is all about interdependence...

I would say, attempting to restrict someone whose actions are not restricting anyone else. On the other hand, if someone's actions do negatively const...

But Is that really so? People throughout history have climbed the ladder of culture. An individual does not have to comprehend culture in its entirety...

Yes, the anthropological perspective is a little bit...messy I guess you would say. It is like philosophy wrapped up in flesh and blood, simultaneousl...

Interesting. There is an additional question as to the instrumentality of knowledge in general. Machines somehow transform and inject human knowledge ...

I think practically everything that happens tends to increase the divide between the wealthy and the poor, Jack. That's the trend that we have to star...

I think that a significant part of the de-stabilization in our world (that precipitates unfortunate responses from individuals) comes from unregulated...

I have always maintained that the only conspiracies are conspiracies of human greed and conspiracies of human stupidity.

It does.

Strictly from the primitive ontological statements I infer/intuit the continuity of consciousness with some kind of historical consciousness that prec...

And yet, today, as computer technology describes, the "brain-in-a-vat" hypothesis (which is what Descartes' deceptive demon amounts to) is more plausi...