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mcdoodle

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I can't say I enjoy these debates when this tone arrives in them. I certainly didn't mean to be rude, so I'm sorry if I was, but please don't be rude ...
August 05, 2016 at 17:35
Watch out for the shadow of your mother in what you do :) Hey, Tiff, good luck when you take the existential leap. Me I'm too old for all that now, so...
August 04, 2016 at 18:14
You imply that beyond methodological naturalism lies only 'the more indeterministic spiritual side of things'. But what about the arts, politics, ethi...
August 04, 2016 at 18:09
I don't think I disagree with anything you wrote in your post, although I would say 'what it appears to be doing to thinkers of a certain place and er...
August 04, 2016 at 18:01
I don't think you did say that. But if that's what you meant, then fair enough, that's what you meant. But I think you show a non-historian's excess c...
August 04, 2016 at 17:59
(a) I don't see how my view says 'lucky accident, hey'. My view, to which you were replying, refers to a dialectic between how human understanding wor...
August 03, 2016 at 17:23
I think 'refraction' would be my preferred metaphor. I do think this whole discussion has a tendency to confuse the philosophy of science with philoso...
August 03, 2016 at 17:14
:) Got to agree there
August 03, 2016 at 17:06
I don't believe I proposed that at all. I'm just opposed to the opposite naturalistic thesis: that our present-day categories reflect the way the worl...
August 01, 2016 at 12:26
It's worth noting that 'cause' is a translation of 'aition', plural 'aitia'. Some argue that this is closer in meaning to 'explanation', so Aristotle ...
August 01, 2016 at 12:13
Humans arrived at a form of hierarchy for excellent reasons. Hierarchical organisation of understanding makes sense. The particular present-day hierar...
July 31, 2016 at 17:43
These are metaphysical debates. I don't think that 'reality is organised hierarchically' nor that there are ideal teacups or sparrows. Here your langu...
July 30, 2016 at 20:50
As I understand it, it's rather like (no coincidence) Heidegger's distinction between 'present-at-hand' and 'ready-to-hand'. Matter has potential, dyn...
July 29, 2016 at 20:48
This last year reading Davidson's essay 'mental events' about inter alia his 'anomalous monism' has made me think about these questions differently. I...
July 29, 2016 at 17:36
Well, I realise as you raise this question that I'm strongly influenced by having studied Aristotle just lately, with a side-order of Plato. Aristotle...
July 29, 2016 at 10:53
Many people do interpret Plato's forms, as explained by Plato, as entities. But I agree that the encyclopaedia entry is surprisingly wrong: modern phi...
July 29, 2016 at 10:37
Well, I was thinking of those vengeful Greek deities as role-models for the undivine. I think they did egg Medea and Orestes on, for instance. I don't...
July 28, 2016 at 20:21
Well I'm actually back in Academe doing an analytic-based course. It's an interesting exercise trying to squeeze what I think into an analytic-shaped ...
July 28, 2016 at 20:16
Let's hear it also for the ancient Greek dramatists. How shall we ever end cycles of revenge fuelled by beliefs in angry vengeful gods? Ah: impartial ...
July 28, 2016 at 07:43
Like you I've taken to philosophy. I find it absorbing. People have thought hard about things, and it's all about thought. I'm not interested in truth...
July 28, 2016 at 07:33
In: Identity  — view comment
Thanks for this, I'm afraid I was previously ignorant of the whole theory. I like the whole concept that each person's psychology might be built up fr...
July 26, 2016 at 16:54
In: Identity  — view comment
I saw that. If I close my eyes I still see the real world of that movie crumbling, revealing itself to be a set. I assume this may happen at the momen...
July 26, 2016 at 16:50
I don't know where 'permissibility' came from. Not from me. No permits here. I don't always do my very best because that's the way I do things, someti...
July 24, 2016 at 21:40
And yet it does resemble the wave of anarchist terrorism in the late 19th century. There were real conspiracies who committed atrocities and killings;...
July 23, 2016 at 16:28
Cabrera also has his own statement online: http://philosopherjuliocabrera.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/negative-ethics.html Regularly I am faced with the qu...
July 23, 2016 at 15:40
In: Identity  — view comment
Actually this relates to something I've been mooching about and pondering: 'the familiar'. This is my keyboard that I spilt grapefruit juice on, my vi...
July 22, 2016 at 18:44
I am a leftie Green. I believe Mr Corbyn agrees with more of my party's platform than he does of Labour's. In my part of the world, decimated by indus...
July 22, 2016 at 16:11
In: Identity  — view comment
That certainly seems to apply in dementia: one's self-identity floats away, sometimes with traumatic interruptions en route. 'You are not my child,' s...
July 22, 2016 at 10:34
This is the opposite of what Plato says. He stands at the beginning of an entirely different tradition, that 'belief' and 'knowledge' are of different...
July 22, 2016 at 10:14
Interesting how these metonyms of place or indeed of entire peoples come to stand for a government. I used to get brassed off by the way the country's...
July 20, 2016 at 15:59
My brother had that song on a 78, back in the 1950's, that also included songs from High Society. One of my favourite politically dodgy things to do i...
July 20, 2016 at 08:49
There are many other countries with many other cultures that grapple with the same issues, and indeed, have been more accepting than the puritanical W...
July 14, 2016 at 11:17
The i, (https://inews.co.uk/) to which I've moved from the Guardian, did a rundown of the biasses in reporting on the referendum. The Guardian was I t...
July 14, 2016 at 11:01
We are animals to which, some things matter. To arrive at a notion that nothing really matters (I hear a dying Freddie Mercury singing) is to have fai...
July 11, 2016 at 22:32
Click and drag your mouse across the text you want to quote, and release. Then it will magically appear in the comment box ready for you to type aroun...
July 07, 2016 at 08:08
According to Nature, there's a good Wittgensteinian preliminary answer to this: that 'reproducibility' is a mistakenly catch-all term, which actually ...
July 05, 2016 at 19:56
Well, indeed, the world is going to hell in a capitalist handcart, but if you take such a broad brush line, then you will find no small steps meaningf...
July 02, 2016 at 16:05
I live near Oldham, I have an Oldham postcode, in a post-industrial town that now is mostly a commuter town, with one big factory and a few small othe...
July 02, 2016 at 12:16
Society is not, for me, the sort of entity that sends, conveys or implies messages. But then, I'm cursed somehow by the Sartre I probably misunderstoo...
July 02, 2016 at 11:50
When the voices of children, are heard on the green And whisprings are in the dale: The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, My face turns green an...
July 02, 2016 at 11:32
I wonder if, as in other contexts, the answer depends on the presuppositions of both the judger and the judged. Blinkered goodness and decency is unli...
July 01, 2016 at 15:35
You can always join the Greens. I'm a member and even stand for local election, albeit unsuccessfully. 'So far', some say :)
July 01, 2016 at 15:28
I agree that that's part of the problem. As I said in another post, I voted Leave for quite different reasons from the anti-migrant line that the main...
June 29, 2016 at 17:38
Spooky. I'm startled by a (related) middle-class liberal reaction that there is something illegitimate about the 'leave' vote, and that the EU and Eur...
June 29, 2016 at 11:23
It's another axiom of philosophy of language: the listener usually wants to make some sort of sense of what the speaker is uttering, and that may invo...
June 28, 2016 at 19:57
Here's a charming article by some hopeful psychologists who think we may be able to counter misinformation: http://psi.sagepub.com/content/13/3/106 It...
June 27, 2016 at 22:00
Lies and misinformation are part of any lively democratic campaign. It seems to me there are all sorts of ways in which opponents of a democratic resu...
June 26, 2016 at 17:29
I have wondered, looking back, about this issue. In the 1960's LBJ, a backstairs wheeler-dealer and warmonger, nevertheless fought for and successfull...
June 26, 2016 at 17:04
All this rhetoric has nothing to do with philosophy, though your remarks about this topic have undermined my interest in anything philosophical you mi...
June 24, 2016 at 09:38
A small Yorkshire First movement hasn't gained much traction: I speak from Yorkshire, as a Yorkshireman, though I am on the border with Lancashire, so...
June 24, 2016 at 09:36