Constance

Not so sure about this. Necessity is presuppsitionlessness, something that cannot be denied, and since anything spoken at all can be undone by somethi...

I enjoyed reading introduction, and I think your defend these ideas well. Inspires me to give Bitbol a serious look. But I wonder, when you consider H...

I had to look into this. Contamination, but this would still be a system of deference and difference out of which the "trace" produces the sense of pr...

Just as a reminder, those who speak derisively about Heidegger or Derrida, haven't read them. It just generally goes like that. Fear of the unfamiliar...

Yes, I was waiting for you to say something like this. But the clarification transcendental reflection can give must be cast in terms that stand outsi...

I read it. I see you haven't really read any phenomenology, I mean the way you talk strongly shows this. You have to read Kant first, then Husserl, He...

But then, philosophy proper is not the philosophy of this and that, as in one's philosophy of having a lasting relationship or that of making friends ...

I knew this sounded familiar. It goes back to Pierre Gassendi's argument against self knowledge. He writes, In my reflections as to the reason why it ...

No. Heidegger is VERY accessible. Of course, reading B&T does not give one a phd in continental philosophy, and true, one really should read Kant, at ...

"Ethical phenomenologist avant la lettre" is not clear to me. The father of phenomenology is Husserl, but the grandfather is Kant. Prior to this is I ...

I agree with this priority of the ought of moral responsibility, but I find a disagreement in the analytic priority, meaning that one's ability to emp...

Well, Pieter, I cannot help but notice that your response makes no reference at all to the things I said. Errr, curious.

Ask then, what is it for something to be moral? This takes the matter to moral actualities, and strong examples are the most poignant, so, a question:...

God is obviously not an empirical concept. Of course, there are images of God, but these carry no weight. They are what I call bad metaphysics: in ord...

That about the knife, etc. was only to illustrate that there are two kinds of good and bad, the ethical and the contingent. Martin Buber wrote his I a...

This is where our views will part, not entirely, but significantly. You are not at ease with an archimedean point, but what would this even be? Metaph...

Yes, shared meanings is always desirable, but then, if all meanings were shared, then there would be nothing to debate about, for debate insists of so...

the ability to gainsay at one's leisure sans the gravitas of what only deeper analysis can yield, and is therefore what I would call a casual nihilism...

Yes, and I agree with a lot he says, but it is a lot of references to science and a failed theodicy, and a position like this is simply part of a deni...

Errr, yes, those terms are common in philosophy. I did hazard to think that they would be okay....in a philosophy club. Philosophy certainly is a conv...

Of course, take a flame and hold it under your hand for a moment. Now you know the prima facie injunction against doing this to yourself or anyone els...

One can ignore the conditions of observation as conditions, as constitutive conditions, and empirical science routinely does this, and the claim here ...

But if something is called a law of nature, it is generally assumed that the law issues from observation of natural events, making physics the rigorou...

Would that be a law that abides independently of the act that conceives it? Political experience, or what includes this but is more inclusive and basi...

But you say this apart from understanding what a law of nature is. I can call, say, gravity a "law" of nature, yet there is an analytic of gravity in ...

But Christopher Hitchens is a pop philosopher. What, I wonder, do you find interesting about what he has to say about God?

On the other hand, when one puts the question to the world as to whether what stands before one really is all just a recollection in play, and not, as...

Tell you what. I have some reading to do. I'll get back to you soon when I am free of this.

Hold on a bit. I am reading Derrida's On the Name to give a better response to your question. Not helping, frankly. This particular series of odd writ...

Well, you're talking like Heidegger. And he struggles with finitude, even referring to Meister Eckhart )once only?), and Buddhism, in the Spiegel inte...

I am impressed that you press on with understanding and abiding interest. This notion of the wholly other is an enigma that is hard for me to bring to...

I think talk about language games is deflationary. Hermeneutics is better. I would no more go to an empirical scientist for insights into the nature o...

Just read what I wrote. Should read "thereof" not "thereby". Is there a collapse in the openness of being? If God were to appear before me in all her ...

And again you touch upon the pulse of this problem. What is the nature of the divide in our existence? If one is committed to the final authority of p...

This is difficult, have you read Kant? Not because it is such a complex argument (though it is this when you read it), but because one needs personall...

Just a couple things about Rorty. One is, on the matter of hermeneutics, the reason why he thought Hedegger was among the three most important philoso...

No, no. There is only the idea that an agency replete with all that extraordinary sound and fury of what we are doesn't really signify nothing. Look a...

A vestige of science's physicalism, which kills the soul. Defining the world according to empirical discovery (which usually carries with it a philoso...

Okay, but it is a series of simple ideas. Put complexly, Kant asks, How are synthetic apriori judgments possible? The simple version is this is so obv...

You are full of surprises Frank. I took you for a cynic, a nihilist.

Well, for some it is like this, for other not. For most, it's in between somewhere. But Schopenhauer never knew how well science and entertainment cou...

There certainly IS a causal connection between brain states and states of mind. Only a fool would think otherwise. But here is the rub: In the identit...

Hard for both of us! I don't know if there is a simple way. I've never read anything by these philosophers that could be remotely called simple. But I...

(I should say before reading: It is thinking that has its roots in post, post modern thought, particularly the French neo Husserlian philosophers, and...

Yes, or more generally speaking, deficit. Emotional wounds are deficits, a lack; something is missing, and guilt over what is not that one desires sho...

These are negative. What about wonder, happiness, love, hagen dazs, Debussy,

But a thought is not a thing, nor is an anticipation, a memory, a sensory intuition, a pain or pleasure; caring is not a thing. These constitute our e...

(Sorry about the following, which is quite out there....and I am tempted to erase....but then...) Or those about anything one can think of. But what d...

Like asking what if Christianity were actually true. Nothing woudl change, one would still do one's laundry, cook dinner, go to work, but the whole th...

I say something simple, like, There is a sign post by the road. If anything is free of contradiction in ordinary affairs, I think it would be somethin...