Pfhorrest

Unfortunately you cannot force someone else to consider only the rational content of your arguments. The best you can do is to try your best to make i...

There are non-rational factors in communication, but it is not necessarily contra rationality to employ them to make your communication more successfu...

If I understand what you're implying correctly, I would say that whoever it is that privatized the "river" (in the fishing metaphor) is the one guilty...

I wouldn't quite say that, but the communication we need is nuanced and sometimes difficult to understand. There are a lot of similar but importantly ...

Definitions of economic class vary and some are more useful than others. By some sources the poverty line is defined at the bottom quintile, so by def...

This is a good idea (that is, as you say, probably being implemented somewhere already), but I would contest that the root cause of poverty is really ...

I didn't say that. I don't think Trump supporters are generally amenable to being philosophized at, so to speak. But philosophers can and have been di...

Philosophers have tackled the relationship of society to truth before. Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies is an old example, and more recent is...

That depends on how the human mind works. It doesn't have to be that way (if there were a God, he could make people to always just feel good all the t...

I just don't understand this making-perfect-the-enemy-of-good attitude. It's like, I'm not exactly excited about either a Democrat or a Republican win...

Ain't nobody got time to read this whole thread, but I'm curious if anyone has brought up the causal closure of physics yet? I.e. that a physical thin...

This really just comes back to the Problem of Evil. If there was a truly good, omnipotent and omniscient God, then he would have already given us worl...

The kind of UBI I've heard proposed, and favor (as a palliative measure, as you say, a step in the right direction but not a panacea), is one that gra...

I've seen this kind of criticism of UBI from the left before, and I don't understand it unless it's just accelerationism. An UBI is not as good as tru...

The short answer is anarchism, which doesn't mean no government, but no state. The anarchic government I envision is modeled after the educational sys...

What is the effective difference between prayer, meditation, and therapeutic journaling? All of them seem in practice a kind of internal dialogue tryi...

I understand that model, I'm just trying to get clear if that's what you endorse yourself, because the things you've said and quotes you've agreed wit...

What about angry mobs of people of a different religion, who hate people of whichever religion you are?

You see the connection between ID and teleology at least right? If the world were intelligently designed then whatever it was designed for would be it...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Liberation_(book)

What makes your pissed off religious mob any better than a government? Both are groups who’ll threaten to kill you if you don’t do what they say.

It is not possible to tell either way whether the universe is amenable to science or not. All we can do is try to do science to it or not, and if we d...

This makes it extra clear that you're talking about the same thing I am talking about as "concrete vs abstract". Concrete things are phenomenal, abstr...

Solipsism is trivial if true. Even if everything you experience and interact with is in some way some other part of yourself, it is still in some way ...

I get the "degrees of reality" thing. I have a similar concept in my own philosophy, though I don't call either direction of the spectrum more or less...

Yeah, that sounds accurate. I'm not sure if you're just confirming you understand the discussion so far correctly, or trying to highlight a problem wi...

That bolded "another" is the problem here. It doesn't have to be another possible world, just some possible world. It can be this one, or another, and...

Yeah you explained that already, a difference between "existence" and "being" or "reality". But I'm saying that the same argument given against "exist...

Yeah sure. All manifest things, all existing things, all real things, all beings. Everything. So if God by definition is not like that, then he’s none...

I just realized that in my reply to csalisbury’s reply to you, which was also meant to address your reply to me, I forgot to emphasize something impor...

Those “marks of all things that exist” are also all equally marks of all beings, and everything real, unless you beg the question of saying there is a...

It means there is some possible world where that happens.

In my philosophy book where I coined those terms ontophilia and ontophobia, I do say that I think ontophilia is the referent of theologically noncogni...

I’m not contesting that humans are having a negative impact on nature or advocating that we just destroy nature to build hones willy-nilly. I love my ...

Their ends have religious and political components. I’m talking about using political action to further the religious components of their ends. And no...

For me, when feeling ontophobic, trying not to does feel like some kind of cowardly retreat from rationally confronting the only meaningful problem in...

I am genuinely confused what you and Whalon mean by “believe” in if not “agree assertions of the existence of”, whether that agreement is based on fai...

More or less correct.

Real.

You got that backwards. I’m not saying they use religion to further their political ends, but that they use politics to further their religious ends. ...

If I may chime in, I believe that Stoic philosophy has a lot in common with a popular prayer asking for “the serenity to accept the things I cannot ch...

As with mind, I think there are two different things to consider when it comes to the will. One of them has to do with determinism or lack thereof, an...

If that's not sarcasm, you should vote in this thread.

This is a bit of a tangent, but seeing something about the movie Avengers Endgame just now make me think of this thread. With the way time travel work...

That's why I brought up that rationality is not the criterion for not killing animals. Ability to suffer is. This seems to be the predominant opinion ...

I'm very close to a survivor of a suicide attempt. In her case, the motive seemed to be what I would characterize as existential ennui. Her life wasn'...

That is fascinating to hear about fish sex and gender, but I don’t see how it relates to rationality, and in any case there are good reasons not to ki...

Metaphysics and epistemology are what you end up doing when you try to justify an argument that you shouldn't do them and should just use science inst...

I am critical of those workplace hierarchies, but they're a different topic than this question of financial independence. If there are other factors k...

Yep. I live a very comfortable life that I could afford on a minimum wage job if it weren't for having to pay rent and save like a mofo in the hopes o...