The Great Whatever

One year closer to the end of the world. Cross fingers.

This again...

I don't know, SX. To say that suffering is a minor issue, while claiming that a set of academic issues circumscribed by a tradition of philosophy roug...

The kind of mastery attributed to the sage in my tradition is one of lack of superstition, adaptability, and enjoyment. Most thinking about the past a...

No -- time doesn't rack up either. We live within a moment.

I don't think it's about a mean, either. I really don't see anything inherently wrong with indulgence that classical virtue ethicists would be appalle...

Not if it's something that doesn't make sense to maximize. You can maximize the profits of a business because there's some quantitative measurement of...

Because 'X is good' does not imply 'X should be maximized.'

The difference is, with the low pleasures, hunger will always be there to spice the food. Appreciation of music is a sort of frivolity by comparison, ...

No, that simply doesn't follow, since the position says nothing about maximization, and doesn't even say whether the notion is coherent.

It is. In some ways it might be the most complete and sublime of 'earthly' pleasures, since when it sets in it has an all-encompassing character, some...

I don't think the point of ethics is to provide a self-help guide for specific ways you should live your life. The classical hedonists made very diffe...

And in answer you give another sentence: it means, 'I disapprove of X.' But what does that mean? Recall that you chastised the moral realist for tryin...

This makes no sense. We have to have a common understood language, yes. We call this language English. That same language that lets us understand what...

What are the truth conditions of "X approves of Y?" How are those any less mysterious than the truth conditions of the sentence this is supposedly tra...

But then you just have the problem of, when do you know someone approves of something? Certainly the non-realist makes no more sense here than the rea...

I don't see how the truth conditions of moral statements are any more problematic than those of any other kind of claim. If that's a problem for the r...

A correction here: the kind of hedonism I defend doesn't say that the maximization of pleasure or the minimization of pain are good, because this assu...

I would like to suggest that people do what they do because they are habituated in certain ways and have certain predispositions they don't understand...

I think this is not a realistic view of human psychology, but okay. The wider point is that you can't derive a 'do' from a 'should.' People do what th...

Thanks, I would appreciate it if you would paint that on walls and make me famous.

I don't think it's necessary. These are my own Cyrenaic biases showing, but I think a good praxis can be one that doesn't make any use of abstract goa...

I don't think these are important questions. What matters is what you are going to do, not what you should do, since even if you resolve the latter, y...

Hedonism, as I view it, is a position on what is good, not on what you should or should not do.

Sure it can. It just means life is complicated. But it will not help that complication ot confuse yourself about what is good and bad, or to invent st...

No. It follows that often pleasure can cause or be associated with bad things.

Yes I am. 'Pleasure' is a non-technical term whose meaning is established independently of philosophical investigations. It is called pleasurable, and...

If pleasures bring pain with them, then they are not bad insofar as they are pleasant, but insofar as pain is bad. Thus it is still the pain which is ...

Sure, it is. Pain is intrinsically bad. What do you mean by, attributes value to? If you mean that someone must feel the pain, then of course, otherwi...

I don't see how you can claim this unless you think pleasure is either always good or always not good. After all, the features of it relevant to its g...

But insofar as pleasure is good, there is no extrinsic reason for its being good. It is not 'good because of...' and nothing can be added to it other ...

Because if you could, all problems would be trivial, and in effect there would be no problems, since you could just decide that they were not problems...

One way to test whether something is intrinsically good or bad, rather than merely relative to something, is to do the 'so what?' test. The question i...

What do you mean by 'preferences?' One thing you might mean are pleasures and pains, which doesn't help. Another thing you might mean is what people, ...

Again, I don't know what he's talking about and don't think engaging in the discussion would be fruitful. What it has to do with existence being a pro...

The reason rape is bad is that it is traumatic and highly painful, both during and for a long period of time afterward. I never said our preferences a...

I'm not saying you're blind to the obvious, I'm saying that the above defense of Stoicism seemed to operate on the premise that what is good in some s...

I do not think what is good depends on what you think is good, or what philosophy you ascribe to. In other words, I do not see hedonism as a kind of a...

I don't know what you're talking about, so I'm not going to respond.

You seem to be confused. You see, this annoys the authors you read, and from which you gleaned this opinion. If it annoyed you, you would have to have...

No, that's not what I'm claiming. I was claiming that while I know what it means to conceive of an object, I don't know what it means to conceive of '...

Generally, Stoicism is interested in extirpating the passions, and sees pleasure as an indifferent. I can't get on board with that, insofar as I am a ...

OK, I wasn't being sarcastic, but whatever.

A hallucination of a tiger is a real hallucination; it is by definition not a real tiger. What makes it not a real tiger is that it does not experient...

I'm not sure what it means to conceive of the possibility of an object. I'm trying to do it and I don't know what it is.

This is not true. Even if all things are experiential, one can draw a distinction between things imagined and real things, by the differences in their...

Yeah. Don't think too hard, I guess.

SX, let's say we assume a distinction between concepts and objects. Is your claim now that, 'I conceive of something no one is conceiving of' Is not a...

How does it lead to a contradiction only if you assume they're not distinct? 'It is possible to conceive of something no one is conceiving' is a fucki...

I do not understand any part of it, i.e. the point you are making or its purpose in the train of dialogue.