mcdoodle

For me the theory of evolution is about populations, not individuals, and so all this theorising about the relationship between egoism and evolution i...

Trump that, I say :) Perhaps the Derrida readers could subsequently move on to 'White Mythology', on the wearing away of coinage into metaphor, which,...

This is the very specific form of libertarianism popular now in the USA, not libertarianism as it has been generally understood. Proudhon was an adher...

Thanks Andrew. I feel that, given that we never know the consequences of actions before they happen, actually consequentialists are forming judgments ...

I was surprised that you accused apo of abstraction, since to me one very substantial difficulty is that 'the population Asymmetry' is a giant abstrac...

A virtue ethics, such as an Aristotelian view, may well be pragmatic and be equally available to realists or anti-realists. I don't see the need for '...

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself, And what I assume you shall assume, For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. I loafe and invite my ...

Thanks, BC. I appreciate that no-one with a royal family to revere like us Brits can really argue that to worship your founding fathers is any more ir...

My point was that BC said and you concurred that 'sometimes' we are uncertain of consequences when acting. I'm interested in your account of the times...

Auden, for instance. 'Lay your sleeping head, my love, / Human on my faithless arm...' Full poem: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/lullaby-0

I'm not a consequentialist. I'm interested to know what are the circumstances in which anyone knows for certain what the consequences of a certain act...

A question from someone not from the USA: why do purported remarks by the founding fathers have a quasi-religious importance to so many Americans? Thi...

In my own country the State is taking less of a role in decreeing how people conduct themselves sexually. I think that's all to the good. What has the...

I'm not sure anyone has a mind, this issue has been bothering me lately. But I often know what other people are thinking even when they don't speak, o...

I hope I'm not too much of a wet blanket; I agree at heart with what you're saying. I think perhaps I am a little overwhelmed by disappointment at the...

Thanks for outlining the thesis, Moliere. My own response to how things are as I age has been to shift to a perspective which I know is a minority vie...

It's odd how translations of Aristotle and Plato often refer to 'God', and this does the same: 'I have become a god' would be right too, wouldn't it? ...

I do heartily agree with John and Marty that you're misunderstanding the Heidegger enterprise here, and in danger of turning the Dasein set of notions...

This is a bit away from Heidegger, but I just wanted to comment. 'I did not go for a walk today' is one of those self-certainties, I'm not clear any t...

My citation of Douglas Adams was meant to add a veneer of wryness to my remarks. Still, I think some animals are more cultural than you imagine, and e...

It doesn't greatly impact my own views, in that I think of our animal-ness as a continuum with the rest of the animal kingdom. But many people hold th...

There is a converse, though: that people's claims about philosophy of mind maybe be covert claims about metaphysical naturalism. I am an ardent advoca...

I don't see this. A symphony: that can be present to us as a whole. A drama. A novel. The ways of remembering and anticipating presented to us in nove...

When I first visited the old forum determinism/freewill was the topic that fascinated me most. The greater clarity that the habit of philosophical deb...

I'm not much of a one for the moment. At any given time (sic) I feel short-term memory and near-future-models in play, as well as longer-term hopes an...

Here is an earlier manifesto by the two of them: http://criticallegalthinking.com/2013/05/14/accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/ I'm...

Well - as they say when they're fretting about an excluded middle - I did, and I didn't. :)

I like the provocations of Derrida. Limited Inc is great fun at the expense of Austin/Searle that goes, I was going to say 'too far' but I don't mean ...

I usually avoid ethical chats because for me, people often feel that expressing an opinion to other people is some sort of ethical act - when mostly i...

I love Aristotle's optimism about the truth even though I don't share it. I wish I felt this way. But I read Vance Packard's 'The hidden persuaders' a...

I don't like the phrase 'fine art', it belongs to a way of enjoying art that strikes me as snobby. There are many forms of art that make the world mor...

My obsession: what's the relation between all our talking, and the way events happen in, to and around us?

I'm doing some work in philosophy of language so the implications for semantics of what we think about 'truth' have been bothering me. I've been readi...

I was interested in the recent case of a woman getting married. Her father was dead, so she asked, to act as the man who 'gives her away', the man who...

Sorry I've been away on holiday, I hope I may interject this late on. I'm coming from an Aristotelian angle, where belief in itself doesn't count as m...

I'm going with Lawlor's 'Voice and...' and I chose that thinking that that was the recommended version.

He came to see the Tractatus writer as playing one among many possible language games. That's the simplified version of how I read it. That doesn't st...

I've written a lot of radio plays. You write the 'Sound Effects'. Even a mysterious noise has a way of being described, being describable. Or does it?...

I am snagged on the basics. 'Analogue' began as a mathematical term itself, about sameness of ratio or proportion. It's become a loose term, particula...

I was reading about how songbirds probably originated in Australia, from the evolutionary point of view. For songbirds, I guess that meaning began wit...

Well, the Cartwright view is more limited. She takes 'capacities' as real, as inhering in nature, but laws as how we describe the enactments of such c...

Here you are eliding between 'Iranians', 'the Iranians' and 'the Iranian regime'. I'm telling you how it reads to me, as if you are boiling over with ...

We came up with this word 'meaning' so I'm sure we can still find something useful to do with it, inherent or not.

I do think that if you deal in a laundry list like this that trails over into 'the Iranians etc' you are not discriminating carefully. I live among Mu...

I'm just looking at Monte Faito which a friend recommended to me as an alternative hill walk. In fact I tried to copy a link to a Google map in here b...

I'm amazed you already know what a box is, and that it's the sort of thing something would be in. How did you come to know that? :)

I'll be in Sorrento on Friday, so I'll let you desk-bound folk savour the virtuality :)

My feeling is that language is something that happens between people in many different language-communities (including soliloquy). We bring various ca...

Thank you, it does. I tried hard to see what Meillassoux was getting at, but my resistance to the 'absolute' is such that I never managed it. Nancy Ca...

One way a placebo effect might help a mental distress problem would be self-organisation. If one can follow a regime of timed pill-taking, one can rec...