Pneumenon

I think this falls into the same trap I mentioned in the OP. "Is the system more than the sum of its parts?" is like asking "Is any single part someth...

I think we agree here, although our terminologies have minor diifferences. That being said - and this is coming from someone with an analytic backgrou...

D'awww, shucks, Tiff. Thanks!

Well, a language game is a body of practices where words are used in a particular way. That's about it, as far as I can tell.

I've never separated from myself, but I'm talking about myself in this sentence. And you're talking about language in this post, but I don't see anyth...

This was one of the catalysts for the OP. I'm thinking of the tension between "eternal" laws (e.g. math, physics) and events embedded in time. Becomin...

I think that this tendency also lies at the root of the tendency of certain philosophers to espouse elaborate metaphysical theses and then say, "Oh, w...

"Language game" is a term you use while engaging in (the social practice of) philosophy. The kinds of human interaction that constitute philosophy giv...

To clarify a bit: there's a chicken-or-egg thing going on with particulars and their contexts. You don't solve the chicken-or-egg problem to figure ou...

I agree with most of this, but I am somewhat leery of over-emphasizing context. There is never not a context, I grant you. There's also never not indi...

What makes it wrong?

"It is not wrong to perform an act on a p-zombie that would harm a non-zombie by means of causing them to have painful qualia that equate to suffering...

If by "hurt" you mean "injure," then yes, it's possible. If by "hurt" you mean "cause pain to," then no, it's not possible, for that kind of pain at l...

I think that there's an important sense in which the cogito is not inferential. You read Descartes, you follow his arguments closely, and you're suppo...

Okay, so how about hurting them? If that particular sense of "suffering" does not apply to p-zombies, than any moral judgments related to causing peop...

If p-zombies do not experience and thus do not suffer, is it morally permissible to kill them?

If we could agree on the first rule, there would be no need for philosophy club...

I mean that the vast majority of governments in human history have not been democratic. If that observation makes us uncomfortable, perhaps we should ...

It is worthwhile to observe that the vast majority of national governments in human history have not been democratic.

If you mean "Can I have a pure unmediated experience of Being?" then the answer is either "no" or "Drop some acid/Meditate for ten years/go on a visio...

"We can't escape our conceptual schemas." Looks vacuous to me. If you can recognize that a conceptual scheme is different from your own, then you are ...

A lot of it arises for cultural reasons. I remember reading a book called "Witchcraft And Magic Among The Azande" explaining how witchcraft fulfills c...

The is-ought gap stipulates that there can be no valid inference from non-moral claims to moral ones. The "Everything I say is true" argument is only ...

I disagree. "Everything I say is true" only implies the truth of moral claims if the set of things you say includes moral premises.

I enjoyed Dennett's paper, "Two Black Boxes," but whenever I read his stuff on consciousness, I immediately sense that he's trying to hoodwink me. Wha...

Bingo. The value of adding regulations is not that the intelligence agencies will follow them (they won't), but that it gives us an excuse to bust the...

Yeah, this is pretty much what I meant. I think we agree on this.

The question is whether or not something can exist without being perceived.

I wasn't talking about knowledge, though.

Hmmm, you seem to be right. I think I misread Berkeley on this point. He does say, Strictly speaking, Hylas, we don’t see the same object that we feel...

That is true if you are assuming only that all things are perceptible, not necessarily perceived. But Berkeley wants something stronger. He outright s...

I dunno about "external" because that's one of those words that philosophers twist and contort and force into doing all kinds of weird shit. What I wo...

For what it's worth, I was riffing on Berkeley's definition of identity, where he specifies that identity is the absence of perceptible difference. I ...

I think that Hume represents what you might call the "terminus of sense" for empiricism, if you see empiricism and its attendant skepticism as a proce...

True, but replacements are on the way, and will look more and more attractive to investors as oil-based products become more expensive. Bioplastics ar...

I have seen that philosophical problems need not be solved, but rather covered in damp washcloths and bakes at -pi degrees Fahrencelsigraheitade. This...

A valid inductive inference can use rules that would be fallacious in pure deductive logic. The trick is knowing what to use and when.

Sure thing. I don't think that that has any deep ontological implications, although it could be an interesting study in philosophy of mind.

The negation of a state of affairs is not a state of affairs. No causative absences.

Gold! It's true, Hume was using skepticism to push the British Empiricist project as far as it could go. Sellars seems to be dialing the clock back on...

Damn you, I was gonna make that joke!! A Spinozist might reply with "Duck God, Rabbit Nature".

Okay, it's in multiple places. So far, so good. The same event doesn't occur in my brain and in your brain; they're two instances of an event type. No...

The word "strikes" in there refers back to the word "fact" earlier in the sentence, which means that "strikes" is correct because "fact" is singular. ...

Is this a "fact," or just your interpretation? Dismissing this as a mere smartass reply won't work - if you can't get around the simple smartass reply...

Okay. Which one of our brains? Because if it's in more than one brain, we're back to the abstract/concrete dichotomy and you haven't solved anything. ...

Yep. Where's the conceptual abstraction?

In that case, a Picasso painting does not have many locations. Just one. Anyway, nominalism of this kind doesn't work. A type is a "way" in which we t...

First, read this. I'll wait here. Now, tell me: are you talking about the Picasso painting tokens, or the types? The tokens each occupy a single regio...

I have no idea. I was being silly.

And time is in here? :P