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Marchesk

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Sure, but then you have the problem of how the .333 repeats forever. It can't already exist on the pain of Platonism, nor can it be generated by a rul...
May 17, 2020 at 06:17
We can do that, but does that work for construction? You're saying imagine a number bigger than any number the rule can construct.
May 17, 2020 at 06:13
But there's no such thing as a constructed sequence that doesn't end.
May 17, 2020 at 05:28
Aliens we could potentially unite against in a military fight. A disease is a different matter. Interesting though that in the War of the Worlds it wa...
May 17, 2020 at 05:26
Wouldn't that require time to be discrete?
May 17, 2020 at 04:39
However, since nobody is constructing the sequence ad infinitum, it can't be said to go on forever. So the question becomes how a constructionist can ...
May 17, 2020 at 04:35
If that were true, it would have happened already, since this isn't the first pandemic.
May 17, 2020 at 04:33
That too. Did you know France demanded that Haiti pay them 150 million francs for Haiti's successful revolution as compensation? How is a small countr...
May 16, 2020 at 21:51
It would be difficult without force to do so, as history shows. But you would need to convince them that the slaves were human just as much as the sla...
May 16, 2020 at 21:14
The Gospel of Judas portrays Judas as the only one understanding the teachings of Jesus, and by betraying him, Judas was freeing Jesus from the flesh ...
May 16, 2020 at 21:04
The majority view is the view that prevailed later on. It's not the one the earliest Christians held, most likely.
May 16, 2020 at 20:38
Social arrangements can and have denied people rights, which doesn't make sense if it's just a shorthand. At best, you get a relativism between social...
May 16, 2020 at 06:13
That can be used to justify slavery or any form of oppression. The issue is that the needs and wants of the people who make them up are not necessaril...
May 16, 2020 at 06:04
Maybe Jesus and the Jewish sect he belonged to believed Yahweh was the son of El Elyon. Judaism wasn't a monolith back then as there were different se...
May 16, 2020 at 05:51
No, but luckily Trump is held in check by other branches of government and the Constitution. Despite all his bluster, he can only do so much. And one ...
May 15, 2020 at 22:08
Sounds fantastic, but can this be afforded? $50K times the number of adults in the US (rounded down to 200 million) is 10 trillion dollars. The second...
May 15, 2020 at 21:54
One could argue the various communist countries have attempted this approach, and have noticeably failed on the freedom front. I'm skeptical that free...
May 15, 2020 at 21:16
Sounds like doublespeak without specifying what sort of exercise and coordination, and why it's necessary. Any group in power is going to be exercisin...
May 15, 2020 at 20:48
That's true, but Paul wrote as if Jesus was a real person in the 50s AD, and he mentions meeting with Peter and James, Jesus's brother. Mythicists arg...
May 06, 2020 at 17:15
Reminds of that interesting NY Times article a few years back about how philosophers in general have failed to take the latter Wittgenstein's argument...
April 17, 2020 at 10:30
That's true. My question is have there been substantial philosophical debates settled by demonstrating that the issue was a misuse of language? Certai...
April 17, 2020 at 10:13
@"Luke",@"Snakes Alive",@"jkg20" Let's take an example from a real life incident that remains a mystery. The Dyatlov Pass is where nine Russian ski-hi...
April 17, 2020 at 10:07
Cognitive closure is one possibility that McGinn has put forward for difficult philosophical problems. But it's not a very popular position, because i...
April 17, 2020 at 09:57
But popular debates usually have a long history with people coming at them from many different angles. We could go back and say, well Chalmers messed ...
April 17, 2020 at 09:51
If it were just the two of them creating a new thread on here, sure. But it's been an ongoing debate among many philosophers for several decades now. ...
April 17, 2020 at 09:38
Alright, that sounds reasonable. But let's take the hard problem debate. It's not known whether science can resolve it. Philosophers like Chalmers arg...
April 17, 2020 at 09:27
Sure, in a sense you're right. But in another, this is missing the point, because debates are usually about things and not the words themselves. Or at...
April 17, 2020 at 09:23
I think it's worth being able to explore the questions raised. Humans are prone to wax philosophical anyway. But maybe finding resolution is a matter ...
April 17, 2020 at 09:13
We also have to use our bodies. Does that make the world dependent on our hands, eyes, brains? Then again, this is philosophy and Berkeley thought thi...
April 17, 2020 at 09:10
If we're going to debate anything, we have to use language. That doesn't mean the thing being debated is dependent on language. Analyzing the language...
April 17, 2020 at 08:53
My notion is that it a consensus can be reached by professional philosophers. Ongoing debate tells me a consensus has not been reached regarding many ...
April 17, 2020 at 08:52
You don't need correspondence for realism to be the case. Deflation is another option. But setting aside the question of realism, ancient cosmology ha...
April 17, 2020 at 08:47
The point is that debating meanings does not resolve debates such as realism/idealism, because the nature of the world does not depend on our language...
April 16, 2020 at 06:29
But it wasn't. Their cosmology was wrong.
April 16, 2020 at 06:27
I haven't seen that it's been very successful in resolving philosophical issues.
April 16, 2020 at 06:26
It is meaningful when you take into account the cosmology of the ancients who believed in those deities compared to cosmology today. Yahweh literally ...
April 15, 2020 at 08:39
I'm not interested in substituting discussions of philosophical issues for debating semantics. If that's what philosophy amounted to, then it would be...
April 15, 2020 at 08:36
We wouldn't because they don't exist and aren't consistent with our universe, but the kind of world we live in is no simple matter to figure out. That...
April 14, 2020 at 21:05
But It has to play a role because we talk about our subjective experiences. It would be absurd to relate my dream to you if my dream played no role in...
April 14, 2020 at 17:33
It was for centuries when monotheistic religions dominated culture, but now that people are free to argue against God's existence, and there are lots ...
April 14, 2020 at 02:33
This is a good point, but the problems still exist even if you reframe the debate, as you mentioned in parentheses. It doesn't make the fundamental is...
April 13, 2020 at 23:49
It's too bad The Great Whatever and Landru Guide Us no longer post here as they were two of the premier defenders of idealism and would have had somet...
April 13, 2020 at 23:43
The obvious rejoinder to this is dreams. Our own dreams are the equivalent to a beetle in a box as nobody else can experience a dream we have. And yet...
April 13, 2020 at 23:30
Their universality, if they have a mind-independent existence. I'm pretty sure numbers being real would entail that nominalism is false. Maybe there a...
March 31, 2020 at 05:41
So there's an infinite inflation where a finite part had a temporary slowdown? I'm not very satisfied with that idea. I'm not even sure what it could ...
March 28, 2020 at 05:46
But you can just change the wording to ask, "Why does anything exist"? Which doesn't need to reference some ontological nothing.
March 22, 2020 at 13:11
Rearranging words to answer a question either shows the answer to be trivially true or it isn't a meaningful answer. It's just a word game. Compare th...
March 22, 2020 at 03:45
But why?
March 22, 2020 at 03:41
That's just semantics though. We don't need to talk about nothing existing. The question is why anything exists.
March 22, 2020 at 03:40
Then the question becomes why does the innate potential for reality exist? Why are there possible worlds?
March 22, 2020 at 03:40