Pneumenon

You won't succeed in understanding the contemporary Right using the categorical schemes favored by Leftist theorists. The contemporary Right is defini...

And yet, we're not gonna stop doing metaphysics. The metaphysical tradition continues, and will do so as long as subjects are curious about their own ...

Theism, in this sense, would be the belief that the ground of being knows itself. It would follow, if you have any kind of soteriology, that one is li...

Thanks, Wayfarer and SLX. Both textual references gave me something to chew on. To reiterate in a slightly different way: you know that you have an in...

Your answer was the best. Many thanks.

My initial response to this is to step back and say that humans have not learned to control their technology yet. As with the economy, I apprehend a m...

A few possible counters: Believing a disjunctive statement is not the same as beliefs about the disjuncts. Knowledge that (g), (h), and (i) are entail...

Can I get an example of something that is unitary?

Yes. This is very close to, or the same as, a view that I've often held implicitly, so thanks for fleshing it out. This is also the reason that Mr. Ir...

That's all democracy is anyway.

Part of the purpose of assuming it's good is to investigate whether or not it's good. If you assume that democracy is good, and derive a contradiction...

The ones that involve logical contradictions. That's how philosophers generally understand "absurdity."

No.

I'm reminded of Mencken's other swipe at American democracy: the "worship of jackals by jackasses."

"What if I go to the store tomorrow?" is an absurd question, then (except it's not). Seriously, man, re-read what you just wrote. If what you say is t...

I disagree. "If -2,3 was a positive whole number" is an absurdity because (-2,3) is an ordered pair, which is, by definition, not a positive whole num...

Not even if it's democratically voted for?

Well, you just said that the only way to avoid a self-defeating democracy was to limit people's voting, which is undemocratic. If people can't abolish...

So the only way not to allow for a self-defeating democracy is to be undemocratic. It's almost as if democracy is self-negating or something!

How undemocratic.

So democracy, too, is a myth. Far from being evil, it just doesn't exist!

More importantly, though... If the constitution cannot be amended by the will of the people, then it ain't democratic.

Check and mate. :D

I see! So it is not the case that the will of the people, or the majority vote, is always the democratic choice; we have to place restrictions on what...

I dunno. Get in a time machine and ask the Germans in the 1930s why they did that.

Gotcha. So if the population of a country decides that they want to vote out democracy, there is no democratic way to constrain them?

Gotcha. Glad to hear all that, by the way. So you have a from-a-distance appraisal of democracy, but you are not politically involved enough to care. ...

Okay, cool! So how does it work out using your hierarchy of values?

Thanks, SLX. I actually considered just PMing you this question, but I figured I'd let everyone else weigh in, too.

Fitch's paradox is about unknown truths, not unknown statements. He wants to show that, if all truths are knowable, then all truths are known.

Hmmm, okay. Let me try something a little different: you have to differentiate being to get different entities so it's not all a big metaphysical lava...

Why would you want to explain it to someone who doesn't get the gist? Because you want them to get the gist? In that case, I would just use examples. ...

There is a Metallica song called "Frayed Ends of Sanity," and one of the lines goes like this: "TWISTING UNDER SKITZ-OH-FRENYAAA!!" For some reason, I...

What are you talking about? I'm a ray of fuckin' sunshine. You clearly haven't read my work closely enough. In all seriousness, though, philosophy is ...

I'll ascribe another one you haven't expressed: you know that you typed those words. My, aren't I presumptuous?

I mean, if your position is that you have no idea whether or not my pressing these keys has something to do with letters appearing on the screen, then...

This is the kind of thing that only pops up in a philosophical discussion. If I asked you why the letters appeared, youd reply, "Because you push the ...

Irrelevant. My pushing the keys causes the letters to appear, and we both know this. Even if you think this is all a silly game, you could at least hu...

Okay, so the following sentence is false: "The letter appears on this screen because I pushed a key."? Come on, man. Even philosophical prevarication ...

The later Wittgenstein wouldn't have seen any point in having this discussion. And yet, here we are. Anyway, we do know, in some cases, what we mean b...

I think that definitions are overrated; as such, our way of approaching causality need not include one. Formal definitions, that capture every single ...

The only way to show that something is intuitive is to look at it and see if your intuition likes it. That's what "intuitive" means. That being said, ...

I'll take a swing at it. Not an argument I'd use, but you could say this: cows are cows because they have certain features. The sum of those features ...

Passive disbelief in P is merely lacking belief in P. This kind of disbelief can be unconscious. Until you read this sentence, you were not conscious ...

Good point! If I'm interested in why something is the way it is, then I'm not going to be satisfied with an explanation of what it is. I show you a br...

I'm sorry, I'm not sure what to say. "What" and "why" are two different English words. That's all.

I'm not sure how to take this. You don't understand the difference between saying what something is and saying why it's that way?

I haven't heard any convincing arguments for it. The ones I hear can easily be flipped around: "Everything your body does boils down to the interactio...

Explanation is only different from causation when you are explaining what something is. When you're explaining why something is a certain way, the lin...

Good stuff, SX. I am, overall, suspicious of much discussion about causation held over the past few hundred years because it seems to take for granted...