mcdoodle

Just to be pedantic for a moment. 'Simulation' does not involve a clone, nor an identical copy. Simulated sex, for instance (to lower the tone momenta...

Heidegger is often accused of smothering ideas in an excess of his own language. But I found him sometimes pretty illuminating by use of etymology, th...

Well, I am not one for the hedonistic imperative, but I am all for a sprinkling, at least, of intelligent utopian loons through the human world, they ...

Just to be picky - it's acting on the basis of poor evidence that is harmful. I'm not sure if one acts on the basis of belief or of knowledge, but tha...

Baden, I used to teach scriptwriting in a department using the McKee model. It's like all good writing structures in my opinion: great to learn as lon...

Brilliant BC. I confess I googled Xenophon on the suspicion that you were spreading fake news....Yes, I'm sorry, the very idea :)

I agree with Pierre-Normand, coming at this from a more wayward angle. The metaphor of 'law' is, when you stop to think about it, quite an odd one. It...

It's from a letter Keynes wrote to his future wife Lydia in 1929 when Wittgenstein returned from self-imposed exile to Cambridge philosophy after a 15...

I don't accept that the Investigations are an 'elaboration' of the Tractatus. There are four indexed references to the Tractatus in the PI. They all p...

It seems odd to regard Wittgenstein as 'emblematic of England', since he was Austrian, wrote mostly in German first and only reluctantly became Britis...

I'd like debates. It's been a pleasure of going back to school, to watch bright people focus on their own and each other's ideas, and occasionally to ...

Like Streetlight I didn't get the Tractatus on first reading and still find it a strange summation of a position Witt eventually 'placed' within his r...

There is a fine paper by Herbert Feigl called 'The Mental and the Physical' which dates back to 1957 and you can read it online here. I hasten to add ...

I don't think you've read these books that carefully myself. The very small one by Graham Priest all on its own will put you right, and that's despite...

This is an odd idea. I thought Vietnam, Iraq and now Afghanistan (where only just over half the country is now under the control of the current regime...

I'm a Brit married to an American woman. I can't say she's experienced any hatred here in the UK, unless you count a few bad caricature accents. I con...

In my youth in the 1960's Marcuse was hot among student radicals, and I was one. He seemed to have an update on Marxist alienation that made contempor...

But for me Searle's descriptive language is methodologically dualist. He speaks simultaneously of a hand movement and of a decision, of wanting. In wh...

I'm not a physicalist but I feel I've come to see its claims pretty clearly. The world of the physical is causally closed in one way or another - this...

It's interesting to me that medical scientists - for example - in practice mix 'physical' and 'mental' terms all the time. The accepted definitions of...

I think the Shoutbox should be shrunk to the size of a box, as is befitting, and Robert Lockhart should be allocated at least one in ten posts.

Well 'unthinking mechanism' is a metaphor. It doesn't have a telology. Cultural selection is a secondary metaphor derived from 'natural selection', wh...

I see from Russia Today, which reports uneasily on the change in domestic violence legislation, that 'The Communist Party faction opposed the bill. MP...

I don't know how I would arrive at that bunch of good reasons though. It seems to me I am always likely to meet a bright spark who'll say: 'There are ...

I already take what fundamental laws say seriously. When they are tested they are tested under certain conditions, often in a ceteris paribus situatio...

Well, obviously the title is as it is now, I accept that. And yes, I think 'impersonal mechanism' would be an interesting replacement. Then my answer ...

This doesn't seem to me to be an answer as to why or how the word 'purpose' can have an adequate substitute of one's own choosing. It's an answer to a...

Our parents cause us to exist. To feel one is 'forced into' something is an attitude, not a statement of fact. I think to this extent I am a Stoic; I ...

I disagree. The word 'purpose' is in the title of your thread. The question of the whole in relation to the individual is a different issue, if 'purpo...

I don't understand (hard) determinism because of the question of unknowability. If determinism were true we would have no way of verifying it. We can'...

This is something I've been thinking about so I'm glad of the thread :) In my 60s/early 70s youth I thought Marcuse was greatly 'liberating' and Wittg...

From the human perspective I think Heidegger has it right. We are thrown into life, I find myself suddenly amidst living, hurled here from nowhere and...

I know this was an earlier remark but I've been away, pardon me. This (quote) is of course the view Thrasymachus expresses in Book 1 of the Republic, ...

Welcome, or welcome back :)

Fock you, we say Up 'ere.

I think they're so extra-rational they read like someone who's being paid to rant. But maybe I'm paranoid about such things.

My lack of reply doesn't mean I'm not thinking of this, but that I don't know what to add. I think I have more belief in creative capitalists but othe...

Given ideals, fail. Read more Beckett. Fail better.

A healer is indeed a healer, which is not a scientist. Healers engage in certain rituals, and it is often their empathy rather than their adherence to...

The Establishment has always lied about the size of crowds against them. This seems to me an odd issue on which to make a case or cause. Many lies wer...

But Nietzsche himself seems trapped in ressentiment, shadowed by his own father's convictions, or why would he so have it in for gentle Jesus meek and...

Laws happen in a universe where laws are It. An imaginary universe of ceteris paribus. When a law meets an event outside its purview - a fly lands on ...

I'm a Green leftie and once knew a fair amount about economics. I don't think the future looks at all rosy but I don't think it looks like your vision...

I don't understand how the model works without 'mass consumption'. There have to be people buying the stuff the robots make, supply-side economics onl...

1.216 billion. See, they could do it too.

I don't see how you know when a 'basic institution' has changed especially if you're so vague about what they are. 'The family' for instance is transf...

But of the three options I outlined from Stanford at the outset, they each take a separate view of the issue of individuation, surely? You seem to be ...

Here are a couple of recent pieces from national geographic about elephants, and about whales and dolphins. While there's a certain anthropomorphism i...

People often call worlds like Hamlet's 'fictional' worlds, though I prefer 'imaginative'. In that sense, they can then be instantiated, as theatrical ...

(TS, I appreciate this is a quote from Stanford not from you.) It's interesting, if one starts from this point, to decide how 'abstractions' invented ...