Aaron R

I was using the term “meaningless distraction” to refer to something else. I agree that boredom (and ultimately depression) result when a person engag...

This is where I get tripped up. Suppose we have two people, one of whom makes all of their decisions "emotionally", and one who makes all of their dec...

I already addressed this.

Through meaningful engagement with the world - namely, the voluntary identification and pursuit of goals derived from one's highest ideals (and the in...

That’s a great quote. While I agree with Schopenhauer that boredom is a fundamental aspect of life, it seems to me that he is elevating it to the very...

I think that you're right that boredom sits at the heart of the human condition. I'm less convinced that this is a pessimistic insight. Boredom drives...

Right, and I didn't say otherwise. What I said is that a true premise doesn't become false just because it's part of an invalid argument. Correct. We ...

No, it doesn't. But feel free to demonstrate how if you disagree.

No it isn't, any more than a true premise is made false by its inclusion in an invalid argument. Correct. We take what's true and leave the rest.

It's precisely the issue because it leaves open the possibility that even a moral degenerate could expound profound philosophical insights despite the...

Presumably it would have been his use of the scientific method that justified his discovery. Beyond that, I'm not sure what methods you have in mind. ...

I don't see where you said this, but it's moot if we're in agreement. I'm assuming that you wouldn't ignore a scientific discovery because it was made...

On the contrary. We should be incredibly curious about what the Nazis had to say, if for no other reason than to understand one's own enemy. This is s...

I likewise doubt that religion will ever become obsolete, at least for the vast majority of us. We'd have to eradicate ignorance, prejudice, poverty, ...

You mean the one-sided discussion you're having with yourself? Oh shucks, what a loss!

The vast majority of people, it turns out. Anyone who's witnessed a schoolyard bully terrorize an entire playground knows this.

That is true, although I think it's important to recognize that the Catholic church still very explicitly insists that its dogmas be accepted on the b...

It's amazing that someone who writes all the cryptic claptrap you write can't understand a couple relatively straightforward comments. Oh well. Have a...

No, I meant it literally. You're proposing a dichotomy where none exists. Yeah, I know. You really think philosophy and politics are completely orthog...

this is a false dichotomy. What you have called "communal systems of irrational control" govern all human activities including both science and philos...

It's also worth noting that "religions" often form around the philosophies of various thinkers. One may be a Thomist, a Kantian, a Hegelian, a Marxist...

Yes, I’d say that’s a fair (if simplistic) way of framing the distinction. Religions typically insist on the acceptance of a set of dogmas among its a...

Well, moral relativism could still be true even if no one believed it. Not necessarily. A moral relativist may be conservative by nature, and may have...

I think the question is poorly posed because it does not take into the account the extent to which mathematics is grounded in human sensory-motor sche...

This is not accurate. Physicalism refers to a spectrum of positions, but it is most commonly formulated as a commitment to the claim that everything t...

I believe that Aquinas would say that individual things achieve their uniqueness through efficient causation, which also finds it's ultimate grounding...

We are only talking about the mode of final causality here. I was not saying that God's knowledge is restricted to knowledge of universal essences, I ...

Except that is not what Aquinas is doing. He has a metaphysics, and he's deducing a conclusion from it. There's no doubt that he's looking for ways to...

I do not agree. Assuming, of course, that Aquinas has successfully argued his point, then there must exist an infinite mind that acts as the final cau...

I agree with your professor in one respect and disagree in another. There's clearly more to life than just reason. There's pleasure, affection, hope, ...

No, I don't know of anywhere that Aquinas argues these points explicitly.

I believe that Aquinas would say that final cause interacts with the inanimate thing through the form as essence. In other words, essences within the ...

For Aquinas, it is both. Aquinas understands final cause as the "cause of causes". This means that formal cause cannot operate independently of final ...

How is "action in accord with being" different from what Thomas is claiming? In one sense, it's true that a rock simply is, but a rock is also always ...

I agree with you. The reason I expressed it as I did was to clarify the fact that these outcomes are not understood by Thomas to be the purposes or go...

Hi ZhouBoTong, I realize this question was directed at Metaphysician Undiscovered, but I'll jump in as well to see if I can help clarify. To say that ...

I think Aquinas would reply the in the case of firemen heading towards a non-existent fire, the content of their belief in the existence of the fire p...

I think Aquinas would say that if inanimate things did not act towards ends, then the we would observe pure chaos. But we don’t, so things must act to...

Agreed. This is my interpretation of what Aquinas is claiming.

I wouldn't say that Sellars was trying to "definitively" justify anything. I think he was trying to illuminate and untangle the conceptual confusions ...

You had suggested back on page two that we might dissolve the notion that perceptual error had occurred by shifting the form of our explanation from "...

Sure thing. I don't disagree with what you wrote above, so maybe there was just a misunderstanding prior?

It's not about being "sure", or even correct. It's about the structure of the concepts that we deploy in order to explain our (purported) perceptual m...

The concept of perceptual error is probably generalized out of the recurrent experience of having our expectations or desires unfulfilled. The formula...

Ah. That makes more sense. So we've generalized an explanation of the form "seems y because is x, in circumstance z" that helps us understand/cope wit...

At that point the whole scenario slips into incoherence. Doesn't that seem like a problem?

That's an interesting analysis, although in ascribing a motive as you have behind the postulation of a noumenal realm I'm doubtful of the universality...

Of course it has epistemological consequences - it totally inverts the Cartesian approach to knowledge. Instead of employing methodical doubt, retreat...

That's not Sellars's claim. His claim is that the concept of "seems" is parasitic on the concept of "is". We can't understand what it means to affirm ...

I think you're heading down the right track. There's two separate but related lines of questioning at play here. First there is the question of whethe...