The Great Whatever

Vagueness doesn't entail arbitrariness. It might, on a certain view of vagueness, entail an arbitrariness around certain borderline cases. But even th...

If there's a moral sentiment to preserve things like you and to be around things like you, I would be skeptical of the claim that we must step back fr...

'Nothing' is a generalized quantifier, a function from properties to truth values, true just in case said property is true of no individual.

Vague concepts are not arbitrary; they are vague. And whatever personhood is, it is clearly not arbitrary, and I don't think anyone actually believes ...

What I mean is just that someone could make the cut based off of rationality, but hold that the sort of creature was important, not the sort-of-creatu...

I think the issue is just one of personhood, not of legality. It may be that a fetus is a person in some sense, but that murder of a person in some ca...

I dunno, the objection seems to presuppose some sort of actualism, which while possible isn't obvious. That is, most people think it's wrong to kill b...

I don't think one needs a reason to prefer humans. We're humans, we care about our own kind.

How sad do you have to be to think duckrabbit is insightful?

Given that you're now literally reinterpreting what Sellars writes on the assumption he is making typos... Because as he says, there he's talking abou...

That's a pleonastic 'it,' it doesn't refer. It's like saying 'It was the rain that worried me,' which is the same as 'the rain worried me.' 'It' isn't...

Yeah, my bad, I misread. Fine, but I'm just pointing out he's your mirror image. The issues in the OP don't really matter to me, I just thought the de...

I think it's wrong generally to disavow traditions you're ignorant of, which you did before I brought up the topic. I'm not saying you have to study i...

If I understand correctly, the first formula expresses a contradiction, since F will always satisfy the existential. I get that you're trying to rule ...

Surely you see the irony in dismissing someone for disregarding something that doesn't agree with a pre-fabricated POV, and then doing the same to for...

And in case it wasn't clear from the above post, I think a lot of criticisms made of continentals by analytic philosophers, even leading ones, are app...

How can you know it's your enemy if you don't know it? I'm not really a fan of Sider or Lewis as metaphysicians myself, but Lewis' contributions to lo...

If his points were good, or had thought put into them, wouldn't they show some distinctive mark of his having thought about them? But literally everyt...

I don't think SX's fare is of little consequence per se, it's just highly hermetic and theory-/tradition-internal. And while I can understand your des...

Because I make accurate observations about people like A.C. Grayling who make public fools of themselves. You should induce something about the high q...

Because then you would be right about things, if you listened to me and believed whatever I said.

Because I'm right about everything.

Yes.

I'm convinced a career in philosophy doesn't make you any better at thinking. Any time a philosopher opines on anything to the public, I cringe.

I have sympathies with this view, and something like this metaphysical picture was the one I came to naturally early in my teens, before I ever knew w...

Can't an experience be foundational without being able to be known that they are in every (or even most) instances? But yeah, I think this is orthogon...

We don't; but then, epistemologists usually don't frame the question this way, but rather in terms of 'Do we know?' or 'how do we know?' Some sort of ...

No, just wondering how SX wants to make use of it.

Yep, I've got it. So the question is the extent to which having a value for one argument for each level is comparable to knowing the original function...

The point is that you only need to know the value at some point for the multiple integrations, not the function itself.

I think, for the series, you must know the value of the function at some point, not the function itself. But then you have to know the derivative valu...

I don't understand Taylor series, but I'd still be curious to know what's to be said about the simple linear example. Doesn't a derivative of '3' dete...

So, to illustrate, suppose you had 4x^3 + 3x^2 + 2x + 1 to describe motion, distance v. time. Your derivatives for the velocity, acceleration, and jer...

I'm a little lost here, but the claim that you can generate a polynomial function from its differential is wrong. For example, f(x) = 3x + 1 and f(x) ...

I don't recall my calculus well, but so far as I know, the derivative still uses the function-argument schema, and I'm not sure what you were trying t...

Alright, sure. I guess it's not clear to me what's at stake or what you want, but I can sympathize with thinking outside of an established framework. ...

I don't know, why? I think it's a coherent position to say that there are no non-veridical experiences, even if there are veridical ones. We might dra...

This is possible, but I'm not sure what it buys you. For example, one can 'Montague-lift' an individual, to turn it into what's called a 'generalized ...

Mmm. I think we're done.

Interpretation can't happen until reading comprehension is complete. A 'criticism' that misreads a paper on the most basic level is not even a critici...

Again, I think this is a matter of reading comprehension, not interpretation, which is important to a reading group. There's no argument to be had: Se...

In first-order logics, properties are in fact just treated as relations: they're just relations of a specific arity (1). What I am trying to see is ho...

Well, regarding the first point of disagreement, I've provided what I think is pretty damning textual evidence against you. To repeat, this: Cannot be...

Alright, man, but I think this is less an issue of interpretation and more of reading comprehension. That is, I think you're misreading the paper on a...

Again, in that section he's speaking in the voice of the sense datum theorist, and hasn't reached the conclusion (of the sense datum theorist) yet, wh...

Again, I don't think Sellars thinks that; I think he's speaking in the voice of the sense datum theorist. And in fairness to the sense datum theorist ...

Yeah, that sounds about right. I think you could make a case for delusion, linguistic incompetence, etc. creeping in even at this level, to get non-ve...

As I read this passage Sellars is speaking in the voice of the sense datum theorist, and has not yet reached the sense data punch line, viz. that the ...

That can't be right, though, because the sense datum theorist doesn't claim that all things of the form 'I had experience X' have no duality between v...

No, he's saying that if sensation itself does not constitute knowledge, then it's appropriate to ask in what sense sensation grounds knowledge. He ack...