Marchesk

LOL! Only because the nations who commit collateral damage control the international courts. Which goes to the point that the legal definition of murd...

Agreed, but if you're on death row, it's usually for a crime that you're not getting out of jail to go have a job anyway. These are the kind of crimes...

I draw the line at torture. Putting them to death would be like putting a dog with rabies down. Torturing for revenge degrades us, although I understa...

Some people aren't deterred by fear. There was one rapist who couldn't understand why rape was wrong because the idea of being raped didn't bother him...

The obvious retort is that it deters those who are put to death. But it's not about deterrent. It's whether some crimes are so heinous and some indivi...

However, there are some individuals I would make an exception for, such as serial killers. I don't care if they are helpless and powerless before the ...

Yeah, compared to the eyes of a Mantis Shrimp, ours aren't so great. But then again, the Mantis Shrimp wastes it's incredible visual capabilities on a...

I thought you were talking about death when you said: If not, then you're saying those of us who suffer will be better off later on in life then those...

And they'll still be just as dead as everyone else. How will they be better off for having suffered? Because someone might write a sympathetic history...

Yeah, I have a few complaints. But it could be worse.

Popping implies a process of going from being to non-being (which entails time) when God takes a break on the 7th day of the week. All that observing ...

Depends on what the definition of it is.

It is what it isn't.

Until the goat eats it.

Only in a transcendental sense.

I want to believe: http://lh3.ggpht.com/_5XvBYfxU_dM/SqhggIty9aI/AAAAAAAACKU/QcmNF1dyqvk/X-files%20-%20The%20Truth%20Is%20Out%20There%5B2%5D.png?imgma...

Okay, but what does my belief have to do with possibility and truth?

P is false if and only if P is possibly true. New theory of falsity.

I think there's a possible world where that's true.

Depends on whether the past exists.

Science may have held this absolute presupposition, but modern physics forced scientists to reevaluate it, at least for the very small. Not sure wheth...

As all things are.

Uhhhhh, well, I took quoting to mean something else. So not true, exactly.

Well, dictionary.com says: "3rd person singular present indicative of be." Which brings in objectivity, time, existence and being all in one sentence.

LOL, that was a darkly funny comment. Kind of James Gunn-like there.

So P is true iff P AND the absolute presupposition P rests upon? Simon Blackburn is a guest on the latest Partially Examined Life talking about deflat...

Depends on what the definition of "is" is.

Which isn't saying anything. Water is water. Okay, but what makes water be like water and not like glass? Well, turns out ordinary matter has a chemic...

Not really. Science has been able to answer some questions that used to be metaphysical. But there are plenty of questions that we don't know how to i...

Except, Democritus was on to something, we're still debating some of those things, like the mind/body problem (consciousness in particular). Witty did...

Even so, the current cancerous ones had parallels in ancient philosophy. They're not an entirely new outgrowth of something from the middle ages. And ...

[ I don't thinks this quite works. My dreams and fantasies exist known to me, but they're subjective. So is being me. I can tell other people about my...

Isn't that the truth!

The problems are political, and every news organization in existence is already obsessed with the man. Trump doesn't have much to do with philosophy, ...

It is, unless one accepts possible worlds into one's ontology.

How is it that a Donald Trump post is the most commented on in a philosophy forum? That's disheartening.

But asserting the "The cat is on the mat" does not make it true. I could be lying or I could be mistaken. What makes it true or false is whether the c...

That's what I'm thinking.

I really, really hate that. However, usually I hear about that stuff from conservative sources that I don't trust very much. Often times, things are t...

That's the thing. Nobody can be trusted in that role anymore than anyone can be trusted with unshared power.

So we need to protect the voting public by censoring people? That sounds anti-democratic. And how do we determine who and when to censor? Because I ca...

From a US perspective, putting someone in prison for disagreeing about how a historical even went down sounds like using force to silence someone's sp...

So basically there is no overall "thing" that makes statements true, only particular conditions being met, which very for each statement. Truth is jus...

Right, but how does that work? If I want to know whether a specific cat is on a specific mat, then what makes the cat is on the mat true or false unde...

What is a deflationist trying to accomplish or say? By comparison, a proponent of the Correspondence Theory of Truth is trying to account for statemen...

Right. It's the going out and looking which is important. But it's only giving a logical definition for truth. It's not specifying the actual conditio...

Or maybe the big flaw in democracy is that it's a vote maximizing system, as Eliezer Yudkowski suggested.

To quote the great Shania Twain: "Man, I feel like a woman!"

Right, so no disagreement there. What is truth? If truth is just (always, for all statements) a logical relation, then there is a separate question to...

I see. That sounds right. But "What is truth" is asking something else. It's asking what makes a statement true or false, not the proper usage of the ...