Ciceronianus

I just tried to read The Question Concerning Technology again. Technology is a "revealing." The silver chalice is "indebted" to the silver of which it...

The superstars were of course relatively few. They weren't as quick to bestow stardom as we are now. I'd say that the gladiators referred to be Seneca...

I simply related a claim made by Joseph Margolis, one I tend to doubt myself. There's no need for indignation. I don't think Heidegger sounded like De...

What is the "perceptual apparatus" you speak of? The person? In what sense is a person similar to a hammer, or an apparatus? Regardless, neither the p...

I've mentioned this more than once in this forum, but the philosopher Joseph Margolis supposedly asked Dewey to read Heidegger. He did (I don't know w...

The Need for a Recovery of Philosophy): The problem of knowledge exists because it is assumed that there is a knower in general, who is outside of the...

Then perhaps if Simone Biles had killed herself rather than participate in events she thought she'd fail in, you'd find her less disappointing.

If Heidegger invented the light bulb, I'd use it. It actually has a use, and a beneficial one, apart from its inventor. But I don't read him merely be...

I've read enough of Everyone's Favorite Nazi to satisfy me I'll not benefit from reading him further, and enough Kant as well. As for the others, I fe...

I know you dislike empirical science, or at least its pretensions as alleged by some. You might consider what empirical science has achieved before yo...

I understood the reference. My point was that by Cicero's time, that of the late Roman Republic, about 600 years after the events depicted in the Ilia...

I'd ask you the same question. I suspect my confusion results from my lack of familiarity with the mysteries of phenomenology. I'd apply to an appropr...

You appear to assume that we're somehow apart from the world, and then ask why we seem to be a part of it. I'm not sure how else to construe what you'...

What does this mean, really? Why even speak of the cat "getting into" the brain? You seem to assume the existence of something in the brain, which we ...

Viewing humans as living organisms in an environment (which is what we are, I believe), I can't help but think this is tantamount to asking someone to...

Great books, Great series, Great portrayal of Livia Augusta. Thank you.

No doubt. But the kind of athletic contests favored by the Greeks lost favor with the Romans, certainly by Cicero's time, and were replaced in popular...

How sad. Lacked the courage to do so, perhaps? But come. Why do you believe that a very accomplished gymnast, who has won many medals already, should ...

Dewey as I understand him thought of knowledge as the result of inquiry. He thought it was an error to characterize each of our encounters with the re...

I don't think so. In any ordinary sense, doubt is uncertainty; it involves calling something into question ("doubting" it); hesitating. Descartes was ...

A pity Dr. Seuss didn't think of the Cat in a Vat, I think.

Well, the significant word there is "entertain." As an entertainment or as a matter of whimsy we might wonder if some demon is having a bit of fun wit...

Damnation. I thought it was my cat Sulla pawing at me again. Not that I know he's a cat, of course.

Fooled by the world? Not in a manner which has caused me to doubt that I'm here in it with everything and everyone else.

They not only can do it, they actually do it, quiet shamelessly. Personally, I think those who claim to be skeptics and then act just as if they were ...

Rorty isn't necessarily representative of Pragmatism, as I assume you know. Susan Haack doesn't believe he is one, and I have my doubts as well. Anyon...

I think the relationship between the organism (a human, in this case) and the environment it which it lives is far too close and interrelated to come ...

So that's what Pragmatists think! I was under the impression that Dewey generally wasn't inclined to accept that there's an "out there" and an "in her...

Oh, they've been given far more than their due, I would think. For good or ill, we're part of the world just like everything else--even that little ho...

Ah, "mere survival." Words are significant (unlike survival?). But when we desire something, we're not engaged in problem-solving. You yourself seem t...

The problem would be how to satisfy it, or repress it, or eliminate it, not the desire itself.

Do you think I see the process you described involving light bouncing off the tree and my eyes, my nerves and my brain? If not, and if you claim I don...

Sounds to me more like a desire.

You're not addressing the question "What do you see?" You're addressing an entirely different one: "How do you see?" If I'm looking at a tree and some...

More "who" than "what." John Dewey.

You can't see beyond/through it?

There are times I wish that the formal study of philosophy I was exposed to in college dealt with such questions. I would at least recognize them. I h...

That's so. We know that to be the case. But this doesn't mean that there is in all cases something not only outside the scope of our senses, but somet...

Well, I can, if pressed, come up with reasons for my acceptance of my cat as a cat, just as one can come up with reasons why we know a chair is a chai...

I think that most of our lives, our experiences, are non-reflective. We're not engaged in reasoning most of the time. We don't have to use our reason ...

Our cat sitting on the floor presents no problems to solve, creates no doubts that plague us, no needs to be satisfied, no questions to answer, no rea...

I don't understand, sorry. Is reasoning or scientific inquiry required to understand how I know that what's before me is a cat? I confess I've never b...

Are you going to say something about our senses deceiving us, or being unreliable? If so, then if I say I've known many cats over the years, and know ...

There certainly are limits to human reason, but to claim the real is forever beyond our knowledge seems, to me, excessive, and unjustified.

I can ask what the "cat-in-itself" in this case is supposed to be, and if the only answer given is that it's something different from the cat but cann...

I think all knowledge is provisional, i.e. though based on the best evidence available, subject to revision as new evidence is discovered or obtained....

I don't think we have within us a "thing" which is an experience of a sunset which has a separate existence, cutting us off from the rest of the world...

But they do, you know. They see exactly what they should see--the sunset. The fact that their position may make their view of it somewhat different th...

You also said this, which is what I responded to: My response was that my understanding of the claim being made is that we can't know what's real. If ...

Well, if you can't know the real, which it appears you, Hoffman and others claim, you can't know what is real, can you? The skeptical scientists and p...