mcdoodle

I think my philosophical journey, starting as it does late in life, partly involves trying to marry the language I'm accustomed to and the language(s)...

I agree with this insight, and it's not just 'physics' that might make us other factors matter. Perhaps the idea of possible worlds is indeed the locu...

Thanks MU. My first worry with your proposal is that it's multiplying my problems not simplifying them. It certainly works against my intuitions, whic...

I won't bark at you then :)

Apo, I would enjoy debating things with you more if you gave some sign of being the slightest bit interested in learning from other people here. I'm a...

And yet I see people who looked just like me, in 1914, eagerly joining their mates to go off and help that nice Lord Kitchener. And in faraway countri...

I keep saying, I'm not fingering science as the problem, I'm only trying to propose a limit to the purview of the scientific view. All cultures have h...

I've sometimes thought there must be something unmanly in me, that I don't fancy scaling the Eiger, nor marching as to war, or off to, war.

I don't know if AaronR comes by at all, he put me straight about Sellars a couple of years ago.

Metaphors reappear in new guises as fashion and technology change. A sceptic like me is unlikely to be won over but won't ever be seduced by the New A...

I am interested and game.

Thanks, Un, I agree about the interesting zones of inquiry. 'Social science' in general, as with your example of psychology, seems necessarily limited...

Welcome, Maw :)

It seems to me you think I'm attacking you when I'm not. You're a believer in metaphysical naturalism, and your naturalism is of an unusually complex ...

Talk is in a sense more complex than writing. Writing can convey more and more complex ideas but talk is in itself like Bateson's play but with the va...

My remark about Continentals was brief and light-hearted, though with a serious intent: that some of them have found a philosophical language in which...

Thanks db, I am interested in this too, though from a different point of view: why it is that so much analytic philosophy seems to me, a latecomer to ...

I confess to finding this thread depressing. Even if the science might be wrong (MU), the majority of scientists think they've got it right, and it se...

I agree, rip John Berger. Someone who took his own path all the way.

I've been thinking about the meaning of Wittgenstein's 'Only something supernatural can express the Supernatural.' (There is an essay online by Cecili...

Perhaps we should hesitate before being so sure we can divide beliefs between the natural and supernatural. Are they alternatives? Or might they belon...

Here's to a eudaimonic new year.

Happy New Year!

It's a shame Sanders didn't push on, hard to know what would have happened with him in the mix.

The analytic in me would like to suggest that there is no way of knowing whether the variety of experiences encompassed under this single description ...

One odd thing about 'Ralph believes there is a spy' is that the primary propositional attitude is that of the unnamed maker of the sentence, and yet t...

Oddly enough, although in the New Scientist, that was rather a 'gut instinct' article, strong on experts, short on detailed evidence. I did vote Brexi...

Hey I was in Liverpool too :) Perhaps we passed and didn't know each other for who we are. I went to the Liverpool Tate and saw Tracey Emin's bed, whi...

Your question was about 'access'. I have access to these things and then make a judgment; I recognise them as other to me, things I could not have inv...

Actually your old friend Nagel is sometimes 'accused' or credited with a belief in some sort of neutral monism. Have a look at the Stanford entry. I a...

I 'have access to' the works of Shakespeare, Picasso and J S Bach. These were not works by me, they are all by a far greater mind than mine. For me hu...

Humans making patterns for other humans to enjoy, be enthralled by, take intellectual pleasure in. I'm unconvinced that for artists to be motivated by...

I too have suffered from bouts of depression, and have many friends who have too. I'm mostly glad when people try to help, at least in retrospect, eve...

There are quite a lot of Chinese people in the UK these days. They seem pretty cheerful and self-assured to me. Maybe they feel history is on their si...

Well, I think this is where you part company with the existentialist point of view. Or certainly my interpretation of it, which is a bit shop-worn :) ...

It's a while since I've read him, since I'm in an analytic phase..Foucault would begin with power, as a relation (indeed it's interesting that your op...

I'd not encountered it before, thanks Jorn. The guy has a web page here : https://faculty.unlv.edu/jwood/ And there is a book published last year: htt...

One runs the local railway station. The sign behind the ticket-seller reads 'HAPPY Christmas from Garfield and his staff' and when I bought a ticket o...

Well, to invoke 'common sense' seems quite a weird thing to do,in the context of many worlds and the quantum universe. Some of the anti-many-worlds vi...

I don't think there is a means of such 'overcoming', if you embrace the view, for you commit to the priority, as it were, of the absurd.. The Sartreia...

The Carroll / Seben derivation does seem to hinge on just a different purported version of 'rationality' to Wallace's derivation via decision theory, ...

Well, it's a good greeting in itself. Got the Blues for Christmas. Witt's 'Culture and Value' came from Santa today. It's surprising how, in these not...

No, cats have veto power :)

Well, even someone saying 'Is everything futile?' has its own self-refuting consequence, when it causes you to bring it to the debating table, doesn't...

This Sartre quote lies around on the Internet out of context. I don't think it means what, isolated, it appears to say. Perhaps it reinforces what you...

Experientially it feels right to me that the whole is at least other than the sum of the parts. If you ever make music you will recognise this. I sing...

Actually in that section of the Metaphysics Aristotle argues that the abstract has an essential unity: 'all things which have no matter are without qu...

My partner in life met a little puppy today, on its way to a new Christmas home. The woman-owner said 'There's still another in the litter.' I have wa...

Wittgenstein in the Tractatus writes:

'Swing low sweet chariot' is well-known as a song sung by escaping slaves, but this is an elegant lyric supposedly devsed by Harriet Tubman to guide e...