mcdoodle

Blimey Tiff, I was a student in the 1960's. Then we really knew how to walk out of things. And parental disapproval would have made us feel even more ...

Oddly enough, though, between two people, there often are such words. I go walking with a mate every Tuesday and he gets a text at some point during t...

It's hard to claim that UU is a historical reality, and yet claim that liberalism is contentless. Contentful liberalism is a historical reality. The i...

I'm surprised apo hasn't popped in. The word 'cow' and the cartoon are recognisably signs. For ontology-addicts signs have an ontology of their own, n...

I've been reading philosophy, most of it analytic, fairly intensively for a few years now. The supposed difference in readability between analytic and...

My personal answer to that is no, but if you think there is something in the science which needs addressing, why not say what it is? Part of why I enj...

I'm a Green. Libertarian though not in the American way. I don't think my politics fit the available choices.

I've been doing a module at undergrad level on 'philosophy of emotions'. Broadly, theory suggests - physical response to some object, an idea which de...

It seems to me that all diagnosis is based on dialogue. The concept of 'diagnosis' is dialogue-based: it assumes that a medical professional can event...

Bad luck. And the very best wishes. Like BC, at some point in my early 60s I gave up the struggle - even though it was financially disadvantageous - t...

To me the way you have put this demonstrates the very opposite of your claim. It's a piece of rhetoric, in which you place 'science' and rationality o...

I've never believed in holy authority. So formulating the question of ethics as 'What are we allowed?' doesn't naturally occur to me. Such a question ...

In my view some people who desire to dominate other people are not aware of this desire, as an example. Indeed they often believe or at least state th...

If we raise a poker for instance, in a way that another might interpret as threatening. :)

Sam is seguing from a reading of 'On Certainty' to his own understanding. 'On Certainty' is not a long book, it helps to read the source material to f...

Well, it is anti-populist, anti-Volk, pro-Jewish, pan-European and anti-nationalist. It's still not my cup of tea though:)

It's very hard to distinguish what's going on. There is quite a big increase in reporting of hate crimes in the last year, see the Indy. But since the...

There's a recent-ish paper by PMS Hacker in which he argues that the language-game approach is anthropology, ethnology - it's trying to understand wha...

I'm a convinced atheist. One thing I like to mutter about is the assumption often made that a single 'God' with a capital G is what atheists don't bel...

There's free movement of labour in the EU, you don't need a visa. There's also free movement of capital, of course, which is another thing entirely. T...

Or, in the darker spirit:

I do think the Investigations is worth a read. If you're finding 'language games' not that distinct from 'propositional meaning' then something is get...

I don't see why we're going to do that. I believe I understand 'language games' as a concept, and I understand it so partly because of other remarks b...

Well, it's just an opinion. But other people think it too... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2017/02/08/mervyn-king-mps-attitude-made-brexit-inevi...

The UK is alien-hostile in a different way that's hard to put your finger on. There was a deeply racist period in the 1960's when Enoch Powell, a Clas...

'The end is where we start from', Eliot says in 'Little Gidding', the last of the Four Quartets, where the despondency of the hollow men has given way...

I think market forces are both marvellous things and thoroughly immoral, but I don't understand your argument to this end at all. Maybe 'desire' is a ...

Thanks Ernest I think the op is well put.

Footnote: this was co-written with Thomas Luckmann, a German who was also interested, like you I think Wayfarer, in religion :) I'm afraid I've never ...

I didn't mean to sound obscure. I only meant that 'visual field content' sounds scientific, and thus requires a certain level of precision. To be very...

If realism were the case, some language games presumably would be privileged over others. That would explain why people talk about illusions, for exam...

I take it to be part of the very idea of language games to rule out transcendence in language. There only is one language game or another. Each has ru...

I agree with aletheist, every step here is tricky if you want to be picky and non-literary. I am reading David Wiggins on sameness and substance at th...

It's odd how when you drive a car through a narrow space, you squeeze your shoulders closer to compress yourself. Wittgenstein had a question about fe...

What do you think Dawkins was countering? His was hardly a work of philosophy let alone of ethics. The modern world is full of apologias for selfishne...

Sam, I am glad to see you here. Your notes on Wittgenstein are very valuable, as is your quiet, deliberate voice. There is a copy of the 1929 Lecture ...

Do any of the options (including the 'growing block') make any difference to how we act? They seem to me like unsolvable word games.

Here's a 1907 version by E Fairfax Taylor: the fuller quote is even more apposite, but perhaps that's what you meant subtly to imply and I've only reg...

Of course I may be bored by the heat and people lying around the pool all day and find there's good wifi :) Much of this depends for me on what one th...

I'm about to go on holiday, for a little contemplation, so I can't go into all your questions. What I still can't pick out of what you're asking is ho...

I didn't even know people watched porn with other people. Whatever happened to solitary pleasures?

This is partly my advancing years, I know, but I do find myself sometimes having had a desire, and satisfied it. Here I am, say, in the kitchen, and t...

Well, to be fair to Aristotle, I think he does think contemplative wisdom just *is* right thinking, though its nature is obscure: my recent tutor sugg...

I didn't say it had 'nothing to do with actuality', no. The wisest way to act in actuality is with the best possible knowledge, related to context. I ...

I agree with you here andrew, but I'd just add that one odd thing about 'consciousness studies' is how blind some natural-science-minded philosophers ...

Q, my last term's student paper was on this :) The thing is, I surveyed what I thought of as five possible positions on placebos, from the ultra-physi...

Yes, in fact I'm deep into the secondary literature because I'm hoping to write a student paper on the relationship of affordance and 'familiarity'. I...

It may be that physics hasn't yet been defined correctly, of course. A Chomsky paper from the 90's called 'Language and Nature' argues that earlier si...

There's a rather dogmatic, but nevertheless to me greatly enjoyable, series of blogs by Bill Black outlining problems with Gary Becker's approach to r...

I do feel minimalist or 'deflationary' about this truth business. We are what we do, so wisdom for me is something to do with right action. After rece...