The Great Whatever

Funny argument. It's almost certainly fallacious due to a deep misunderstanding about the nature of probability, but I could easily see this as a theo...

>:O No, I think the skins are thicker here.

There's a difference between indispensability and quality. Kant is indispensable to the tradition, because you can't read a lot of philosophy without ...

Well, I thought 'overrated' meant large margin between praise/attention paid to versus worth. You can pick Kant because of the sheer amount of attenti...

What kind of required logic courses were you taking for a philosophy BA that were as hard as calculus?

Alright, but I think even if you're math-phobic having to do a little logic shouldn't be a dealbreaker. Is it pointless? I dunno, I wouldn't want to g...

There's a fantasy series on this theme, and the main character is named after the disciple – The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. It's pretty good.

Man, these poor philosophy majors would never survive in a math department, let's be real...first-order logic is not going to kill you.

Sorry, I wish I had more advice. I'm trying to get into academia, but I managed to get into a Ph.D. program with a stipend, so I don't have to worry a...

The noumenon is just Lockean substance (Locke even calls it the I-know-not-which).

My vote goes to Kant. He's generally credited for innovations that aren't his, and he was fundamentally a reactionary force against the subtler and mo...

I'm just being a bit histrionic for rhetorical purposes, because I think people are histrionic in the opposite direction when it comes to OLP. I don't...

Wittgenstein's intellectual life was utterly dominated by England. Russell was his only real influence, the rest was personal dream & mysticism (that ...

Wittgenstein is sort of like the Last Man for me - he represents the end of an era in philosophy collapsing under its own decadence, impotence, incuri...

Are you one of them?! :O

Unfortunately not, but maybe you'll learn someday!

Then I guess you're too dumb to have this conversation. I don't really want to play this game.

I'm not responding until you stop pretending to be stupid. If you actually are that stupid, then there's also no point in responding, right?

Please don't be dense.

http://i.imgur.com/ag6UUcJ.png

Why not do it in audio?

Are a foot and a rock distinct? What is the bridge? Isn't this a problem for physicalists?

That's not the impression I got from reading Descartes: he emphasizes how extension and thought are distinct essences. Yet distinct things can interac...

Not at all - for example, the mental and physical are both temporal. Descartes says the mind and body are far more closely intertwined than ship and c...

Yes. Well, that's obviously false. Feet and stones have different natures, yet a foot can kick a stone.

It is not any more clear than how a material and 'ideal' thing can interact (although 'ideal' is a poor descriptor for the mental in Descartes' view)....

http://i.imgur.com/JZaDGiv.png No kidding.

http://i.imgur.com/AeCKutS.png http://i.imgur.com/y1flByk.png http://i.imgur.com/JAGplFP.png

I remember learning about this paradox and thinking it was kind of cool. My first response was: is there a problem? It might be that seeing a green ap...

Who actually believes in causation, anyone? Fucking plebs.

I'm struggling to see what relevance this post has to the question.

Consider: the question of how something material and something non-material can possibly interact seems to presuppose that it is clear how two materia...

Nothing that Hume said on the issue has ever been addressed seriously, as far as I'm aware. For that matter, neither has anything Descartes said. For ...

When I was little, I thought of it as 'the gray.' Kind of an understanding I guess, but disillusionment. Unlike other experiences, it only goes in one...

Man, Pence is loving the ride.

There is no 'interaction problem.' As Hume noted, even the problem of motion of bodies in different points of space is rationally inexplicable. There ...

I don't see any reason to believe (2). Also, the mind is temporal.

Alright, I disagree. Desiring to destroy living things for fun is a bad quality.

Yeah, I think there's a case for plants having inherent worth, and destroying them for no reason is wrong. At the very least having a desire to destro...

The point is that the conjoined twin case is constructed to be more difficult by presenting a situation in which two individuals form out of the same ...

The body that the twins share. What else would I be referring to? The whole point of gerrymandering this example is to create complications for the pr...

Conjoined twins are mutually dependent and both have a claim to the original body.

Sorry, I just don't share this intuition. The analogy seems obvious, and apparently at least Tiff thought so as well. Do you want me to explicitly exp...

I agree. But then, most people's position on abortion is already nuanced in some way along those lines. The previous defense would just justify the po...

I don't think a position that makes decisions in clear cases must extend in a principled way to unclear cases. In other words, how the twin case is ha...

I'm not saying killing animals is okay, or that it's not normal to empathize with them. I am saying that if you feel as disturbed by animals getting k...

Go for it.

Yeah, I'm wary of using sci-fi scenarios for moral arguments, but the idea is that the right to bodily autonomy is more fundamental than the right to ...

Yes, but humans are more like you, and the sentiment to preserve people is stronger. Perhaps that isn't true for you, which I would find spectacular; ...

No, I think that if a grown person somehow found a way into your body, even through no fault of their own, and became parasitic on it, many people wou...