mcdoodle

Thanks, the case you quoted was interesting all round, with enjoyably pithy judgments. 'The delineation of science' is something I once tried to write...

Oddly enough, I still think of Feyerabend as pro-science. He began as a scientific realist and his ideas ravelled or unravelled as he reflected on tha...

Any talk of 'a system' disquiets me. I hear a univocalist calling. How are my plural understandings going to harmonise? :)

The 'What' has a metaphysical presupposition in it, for me, about objects and object-ness. Is a single question in itself some sort of presupposition?

Thanks Wayf, I hadn't made the connection with Karen Armstrong's thinking, no.

Rather to my own puzzlement I've become a sort of religious atheist in these, my latter years. I can rarely make sense of 'arguments' for 'deities'. B...

Welcome to the forum Susu. What's preoccupied me lately is the I-you relation. We spend a lot of time on this 'How did I get to be me?' question, and ...

To me value is just what we value, not what we desire. The conflation of the two happens, for instance, in some versions of theories of choice, often ...

I did some writing on 'mood' last year. There are reams of writing on 'mood disorder', but strikingly there is next to nothing on what an ordered or n...

This is not correct. Continence is not a virtue and incontinence (akrasia) is not a vice; they are ways of dealing with one's knowledge and motives. N...

Wayfarer, just to prove I am taking your question seriously as well as riffing on it anarchically... Here's a relevant bit of the Metaphysics, which p...

Virtue ethics can't, I feel, import a rule from a rule-based system and claim, without further ado, that it can be renamed a virtue. The medieval Chri...

It's interesting to me how - though I'm not quarrelling with the objective of your example - in a sense this is an oddly 'mechanical' example. All the...

It was something you wrote about how there can never be too much virtue, Pierre-Normand, but forgive me if I've misread you, I've ended up reading thi...

A note on terms. I do think you confuse the Greek ergon with the Greek telos and that this matters. The ergon is the function of something: a cup cups...

This is one area where, while agreeing with Pierre-Normand on the whole, I would differ with him. Aristotle is famous for thinking there is some sort ...

Yes, there are plenty of other ways, as you then go on to list. In the existentialist way of understanding, there are many inauthentic ways of living,...

Yes. I think there are more grades of coming-to-terms than 'shutting them out', though. Some things matter less once you're out of a situation for ins...

Welllll...I suppose so. If you stay that connected to it, though, maybe the 'victim' won't want to play. I was thinking for instance of having been bu...

I@m reading Levinas at the moment. I think his 'pardon' is generally taken as something very close to forgiveness: Such a philosophy is clear that par...

I am more interested in the idea of a 'jumping-off point' for existential debates, which you mention to another poster. Although you mention existenti...

What I don't grasp in your outlook is, why you think 'explaining the energy state changes in atoms' would somehow not be done through signs. We exchan...

I don't recall every saying or thinking it was a juvenile topic. It does however feel terribly restrictive; every philosophical question loops back in...

Where is apokrisis when we need him? In apo's absence...we look like sign-making creatures to me. How do we get to 'what is truly going on'? Isn't tha...

I think you are positing that science is at present largely unguided. Do you think this is justified? It seems to me already highly guided by governme...

Perhaps it is in the nature of objective claims that they can be true, or false, or some intermediate state. What I say isn't a claim: the subjective ...

Hello, is that the Independent Labour Party? Maybe their time has come :)

Of course the analogy from Tolkien will lead to intelligent design. By their choice of analogy shall ye know them. I'm puzzled that it's 'materialist'...

Well, I think thought and emotion interact, indeed they are just our labels for certain notions of what happens in ourselves. There's quite a lot of g...

People are often saying this stuff. But on the one hand, most of the science I think I know comes from first person testimony by other people. They sa...

What a striking idea. I gather there are 695,662 km² in Texas and a world population of 7 billion. That's 10,000 people per square kilometre. How will...

The purported division of emotions into positive and negative is useful to simplifiers and psychologists who like things about human beings to add up ...

Sung to a well known tune: 'In M and M land, an Uber a-ate me..'

There was a bake-a-gay-cake case in the UK (actually, in Northern Ireland, where the acceptance of homosexuality is less advanced than elsewhere in th...

Tx SX - re Heidegger responses.

In what way is utilitarianism more 'scientific' than other approaches? I was just talking to someone yesterday, oddly enough, who has attempted to mod...

It's a shoutbox. I shouted, in response to your shout. If you want to make a case for something, start a thread. If you want to make a casual rhetoric...

Well, (a) I thought other people who couldn't be arsed to read the essay you referenced might like to know what sort of fellow you were recommending -...

I don't understand, though, whether this is an actual increase in indebtedness per capita, or a change in attitude towards indebtedness. What does the...

I see these are the thoughts of Glubb Pasha, a military man (and brilliant in that field) of a certain old imperial school, meditating on the Decline ...

The felicific calculus would be a fine thing indeed. Here it seems someone has tried for a modern version: in Lander, South Carolina.

People often say this. They can't, however, model it. On the contrary: if the world were predictable, there would be no need to plan.

Well, obviously, if you have written the book that explains how the general law of insults works, please link me to it. (Indeed I'm surprised I haven'...

If the world on the human scale, as you put it, is governed by these natural laws, and you know what these laws are, why don't you have perfect knowle...

Did you edit the Prior Cryer with Dobie Gillis?

I'm going to my regular old-gits philosophy group on Monday. The subject is Cornel West, a writer I've never seen mentioned on this forum. I don't exp...

Part of my summer reading has been Levinas' 'Totality and infinity'. You might care to give him a try if you are interested. Levinas takes the face-to...

Heidegger is pretty straightforward about this issue (there's a sentence I never thought I'd write). It's the difference between ontic and ontological...

Just to note that people might be interested in this long article by the Cockburns - father a journalist, son now an artist living with schizophrenia....