You are viewing the historical archive of The Philosophy Forum.
For current discussions, visit the live forum.
Go to live forum

Pfhorrest

Comments

FYI I've compiled a couple of the clarifications I've made throughout this thread into the OP. I forgot to say thank you for your beginning of a set o...
November 11, 2019 at 20:07
Any kind. Whenever someone says "this should be this way", including "you should do this", what exactly are they saying (I would paraphrase that quest...
November 11, 2019 at 19:47
Thank you for that excellent reply! I mostly agree with your answers so far, and I look forward to the rest of them. :-) I have, and from what I've se...
November 11, 2019 at 18:55
That is a point, but homo sapiens didn't evolve from neanderthals, we were close relatives, that apparently interbred (and so were possibly subspecies...
November 11, 2019 at 18:45
Thank you for introducing me to this. It sounds more or less like how I've always interpreted MWI (which, more on topic, strikes me as very similar to...
November 11, 2019 at 08:57
My problem with Wittgenstein's account (at least as you tell it, corroborated by the bits of him I've seen elsewhere) is that even if the thesis of on...
November 11, 2019 at 07:54
A week at most. Last one I had was three weeks ago, started on a Saturday and gradually wound down by Wednesday or Thursday and was gone completely by...
November 11, 2019 at 07:34
For all of these questions, if I’m asking “what is...” whatever and you think there is no whatever, “nothing” is an acceptable answer. Otherwise I’d h...
November 11, 2019 at 01:00
Yes I’m quite familiar with (and generally aligned with) the linguistic turn generally, and I’m not outright rejecting everything about Wittgenstein (...
November 11, 2019 at 00:23
Because he’s omniscient so he knows all, but he’s a nihilist so there is nothing, ergo he knows nothing. :wink:
November 10, 2019 at 22:08
Sure thing. In brief, they’re experiences of a kind of emotional high, either caused by or causing a feeling of general OK-ness or acceptance, where I...
November 10, 2019 at 21:56
Glad you like the idea. :smile: I look forward to seeing your answers. Cool to have another local on here. :cool: I’m glad reading Wittgenstein was em...
November 10, 2019 at 21:43
I don’t have any professional research on hand to share, but for myself personally I have had sober experiences that match the descriptions I’ve read ...
November 10, 2019 at 17:49
I think perhaps he just means that a paradigm is defined by its unspoken assumptions, which is the way Kuhn coined the term. In which case yeah I pret...
November 10, 2019 at 06:04
I’m sure books could be and have been written on each, but I’m just looking for a brief summary answer on each, not even whole essays like I’m working...
November 10, 2019 at 02:11
Our actions do, the ideas by themselves don’t. You won’t find a number 3 somewhere out in the universe doing things on its own. You will find people d...
November 09, 2019 at 23:12
Would you like to do a summary of Wittgenstein’s answers to these questions for everyone’s edification? I’m not sure I’ve actually read much of him; I...
November 09, 2019 at 22:10
I never said I wasn’t a physicalist. And my view on abstract objects isn’t quite as simple as that (that would be nominalism, whereas my view is mathe...
November 09, 2019 at 17:13
To say that God exists only abstractly and not concretely is only to say that you have some definition of a thing you've named "God" that you can logi...
November 09, 2019 at 01:44
I think you mean to say "polytheism" when you say "pantheism". Pantheism is the belief that the universe itself is identifiable with God. Polytheism i...
November 09, 2019 at 00:06
Yes, the so-called "religious experience" or "mystical experience" is a neurochemical phenomenon that can be induced with drugs, and occurs (without d...
November 08, 2019 at 22:34
If you've seen anything I've commented in other threads, you know that I explicitly deny that religion is defined in terms of God. But theism and athe...
November 08, 2019 at 22:25
Theism/atheism and gnosticisism/agnosticism are orthogonal issues. Theists believe in at least one god Weak atheists don't believe in any gods Strong ...
November 08, 2019 at 19:26
“Degenerate” suggests we’ve gone backward somehow, when if anything we’ve haphazardly come forward slowly over time. There is still room for improveme...
November 08, 2019 at 18:00
Getting kind of tired of hearing this baseless claim that "atheists have no systems" over and over again.
November 08, 2019 at 06:50
"Nothing", together with "something", "everything", and "not everything" (or, if you will, "neverything"), is just part of one of many sets of four De...
November 08, 2019 at 05:53
It's not a matter of plurality or singularity. The point is that there isn't any special kind of thing(s) that has(/have) to exist at any possible wor...
November 08, 2019 at 02:40
Rationality is a tool, one that can be used toward many ends. Those who are trying to be ethical will be more successful if they use that tool well, b...
November 08, 2019 at 02:36
This question implicitly commits a logical error that predicate logic was invented to avoid. Consider the sentence "every mouse fears some cat". You m...
November 08, 2019 at 02:02
On a different topic, I have something else to say about nothing. Why is there something rather than nothing? Well, on a modal realist account, it's t...
November 07, 2019 at 23:52
I can see why you would think that, but that's how modern mathematicians do it. The natural numbers, for instance, meaning the counting numbers {0, 1,...
November 07, 2019 at 23:45
Once again it's important to point out the difference between "faith" as in believing something that isn't conclusively proven from the ground up, and...
November 07, 2019 at 03:28
I think something went wrong with your post. Below "I created this arrangement:" all I see is "dateposted-public" where I suspect was supposed to be s...
November 06, 2019 at 23:35
I'm just affirming the is-ought distinction, though not the cognitivist-noncognitivist implications often carried by it. I don't think that prescripti...
November 06, 2019 at 22:35
No, I'm interested to hear from "weak" or "negative" atheists too; people who simply don't hold a belief in God, rather than holding positive disbelie...
November 06, 2019 at 22:28
Mark, I didn't take you to be having a meltdown. I have meltdowns of my own (that's what I meant about work yesterday), and suspect I might be somewhe...
November 06, 2019 at 22:22
Not to denigrate truth or reality at all, but philosophy is about much more than just that. For starters it is equally much about goodness and moralit...
November 06, 2019 at 21:43
Mark, I hope it's clear from our private conversations that I generally like you, so I hope you take this from a friendly place: it seems to me like y...
November 06, 2019 at 21:35
Would you then argue that Analytic philosophy is an offshoot of Continental philosophy, if everything from Kant onward minus everything from Frege onw...
November 06, 2019 at 18:28
Yes, of course. More than that, I not only don't believe that unicorns or Santa Claus exist, I believe that they don't exist. (Where "believe X" simpl...
November 06, 2019 at 18:07
If I may offer an analogy: If we were going to write a history of the evolution of humans in particular, not the evolution of all life but just the sp...
November 06, 2019 at 17:57
I don't think Terrapin was saying that answering the question about your education was un-humble, but that your reaction to his joke seemed less than ...
November 06, 2019 at 17:48
I don’t think that’s accurate to say that mathematics says things are made of an infinity of zeros, but modern mathematics does construct all its obje...
November 06, 2019 at 16:49
Agnosticism isn’t listed as an option because that’s an answer to a different question. Agnosticism is orthogonal to theism/atheism. Whether or not yo...
November 06, 2019 at 16:22
I'm curious, do poll threads get bumped when people vote in them, or just when people comment in them?
November 06, 2019 at 05:50
Yeah I would like to know that too. Or even who the few people with Masters degrees are.
November 06, 2019 at 05:47
Baby don't hurt me, don't hurt me, no more ...
November 06, 2019 at 02:32
That sounds like more or less what I said. Kant is the most recent common ancestor of both Analytic and Continental philosophers, and is studied exten...
November 05, 2019 at 23:01
Well, I'm attempting to write a work of philosophy bridging things "from the meaning of words to the meaning of life", and to quote the introduction o...
November 05, 2019 at 22:23
I don't understand why is a reply to me? Doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything I was talking about.
November 05, 2019 at 18:36