mcdoodle

I'm not a mathematician, but I've been doing some re-reading/study of P.I. over the summer and thinking a lot about Wittgenstein. My interest is in ph...

Isn't it horrid? Who would think that anyone would accuse those nice Apple people that all my designer friends love of being tax-avoiding oligopolists...

Yes it gave me a good smile :)

I presume you know these articles by Marcia Angell from a few years ago: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2011/06/23/epidemic-mental-illness-why/ The o...

I'm the universe & I'm ok I'm me all night & I'm I all day...

I agree. It even spreads into sports reporting, which is ruined by continual opinionating :) How can I work out how the game really went? With a cavea...

You're going to have to be a bit less pithy for me to understand you. What Bernard Williams meant by 'radical contingency' in (the history of) ethics,...

I think the first scientist I saw on tv was Fred Hoyle, arguing against the Big Bang, when I was a child. The Big Bang is a theory that has risen to p...

People are writing as if the burkini here some kind of religious costume. It's just a thing an Australian Muslim woman invented, and makes a little mo...

I think good knowledge and understanding of major works of art makes the world more intelligible and this has nothing to do with science. Pardon me if...

There does seem to me a clear difference between ethical and artistic judgement. If you don't like music I like - if you don't even call it music - wh...

To interject...there is a paper by Michael Weisberg called Water is not H20. I liked it. Distilled water, maybe, although I gather chemists would pref...

'Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.'

'The world' is intelligible enough for me. I must say, Picasso and Graham Greene made it so for me, initially, rather than scientists. They remain a g...

Tchaikovsky v Coltrane - I'm prepared to call it a tie.

Napoleon seriously considered Lyon as his capital. Merde.

I was blinded by listening to Steely Dan at the time. Dammit, Tolstoy Tolstoy Tolstoy.

I imagine my ancestors a good deal lately. I imagine the mothers singing to their babies as my mother sang to me. Thus she passed on to me our history...

This notion that bachelors being unmarried is analytic - it drives me crazy. These are just words that pass. It tests nothing.

I believe the art of orca and clever songbirds would be more interesting. They are fellow beings. Emily is a machine-phenomenon who has experienced on...

When I stayed in St Petersburg a few years ago, the landlady said she wasn't racist, she just thought people from the same latitude got along together...

Goverments make rules and some people will use the word 'moral' about most if not all of these rules. You have to wear a seatbelt and it's for your ow...

There are more and less rational ways of building concentration camps, executing people and selling insurance. Reason and morality are not good bedfel...

'I am lying' is something I've heard someone say. They smiled wryly. How can we deal with people who utter paradoxes yet succceed in making sense? It'...

No, I don't think Thompson argues explicitly from the inside out. I said the opposite. My suggestion is that he's trying to find an analytic-style ans...

If a lost group of neanderthals emerged from the forests of Siberia, how would we react? Are they Homo sapiens neanderthalensis or homo neanderthalens...

I sense a triad. Enter a Piercian, for all I know a familiar under a pseudonym?

I think the only things to do are to fund the Red Cross/Crescent and Medecins sans Frontieres, and to accept that intervention in a faraway conflict t...

And I like those old Magee things too. R M Hare. A J Ayer.

Good idea. But there is already Philosophy Tube in this niche, and he's drawn subs of $1400 a month. Maybe we could link up. Anyone know him?

I wholeheartedly agree. There is though certainly a place for compassion in the op's Aristotelian-sounding ethics. Both Aristotle and Epicurus emphasi...

I daresay structuredness of one kind or another is usually helpful in an education. I was referring to very specific evidence that children with a con...

When I was a child I found early on that both my parents had a thing about Jews. They seemed oddly unaware that I had friends at school who were Jewis...

Well, I think he referenced Darwin in an odd way, because Darwin traces a different analogy. Plus I'm thinking a lot about the philosophy of language ...

On a neuroscientific level, there's a lot of evidence now about brain plasticity and the effects of music. Children with a musical education develop w...

Like Sapientia, ideas about gods don't form any part of what interests me about philosophy, although I have found myself arguing strongly - as an athe...

One difficulty I'd like to clear out of the way is the analogy Thompson draws between his approach to 'life forms' and a linguist's approach to langua...

I agree with this. The Plato/Aristotle picture does not have a pleasure/pain spectrum. Nor does our ordinary language. Pleasure, for instance, can be ...

It's interesting to me that modern commentators don't know what to with the emphasis on philia in Aristotle's ethics, also central to Epicurus. I like...

I heard that too. I'm a lowly grad student but at levels far above me in academe there's a lot of talk of powers, capacities and dispositions. Nancy C...

I'm up for a read, 'How moral agents became ghosts' could be the Macintyre option.

Of course studies in animal behaviour have turned out to vary a lot in their conclusions depending on the presuppositions of the human enquirers. Stud...

Being green and Green I think we should aim for steady state economics now, i.e. stability over the business cycle, without growth. Anything more is n...

Thanks. Konstan is the author of the current Stanford entry on Epicurus but doesn't touch on pain much there. I'll look out the book next time I'm bac...

Two other factors that it took me a while to grasp are (a) neutral alleles - there are many elements that are simply neutral for fitness, and (b) gene...

I'm afraid this thread passed me by a couple of months ago, but my old gits' philosophy group has just been talking first about the Stoics and then ab...

Perhaps we will talk of this in another thread. I do think science has a lot of interesting things to tell us about ourselves. I don't know why anyone...

Well, I will give up coming back to this thread now, I don't engage in this kind of exchange. I'm reading a little book of essays by Nicholas Bachtin,...

I don't understand the word 'Hence' here. All these genres or ways of acting seem to me attempts to come to terms with human experience, not to hide f...

Well I think of it as applying the category 'naturalism' to all, I mean all sorts of philosophical discussions, including those where it either is ina...