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Pierre-Normand

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Do you take this to be an objection to the Leibnizian conception of freedom, specifically, or to compatibilist accounts of free will generally? I myse...
September 13, 2016 at 12:30
I didn't disagree. I said your characterization was a bit too thin. Logical possibility isn't equivalent to opportunity for action in general, but it ...
September 13, 2016 at 11:38
Yes, that's right. I think Mongrel's characterization of Leibniz's view may be a bit too thin. Leibniz viewed human freedom as autonomy. Some agent A ...
September 13, 2016 at 03:21
Yes, for sure. This is simply a consequence of the relativity of simultaneity. But the issue of the simultaneity of spatially distant events (that are...
September 12, 2016 at 11:24
That seems to be an epistemological issue about our knowledge of the past that is quite unconnected to the topic of this thread. Myself, I think knowl...
September 12, 2016 at 03:23
Yes, but my view, which I have defended in my discussion with Question, is that the theory of relativity merely is a theory about the metric of spacet...
September 12, 2016 at 03:17
This is my point also, and it is true regardless of whatever quantum-mechanics (or special or general relativity) may tell us about physical laws. I s...
September 12, 2016 at 03:09
How is that a point that I am missing? How is that related to anything that was at issue in my argument with Question? I agree that there are fundamen...
September 12, 2016 at 03:05
It may be the case the the die, while tumbling, already is set on a deterministic trajectory such that it is merely an epistemological possibility tha...
September 12, 2016 at 00:34
That's because nothing is traditionally regarded to "cause" the collapse of the wave-function, or decoherence to occur. Decoherence just is a branchin...
September 12, 2016 at 00:01
That's very simple. When Ceasar crossed the Rubicon, this became a historical fact. It will remain true in the future that Caesar crossed the Rubicon ...
September 11, 2016 at 23:45
I think there is at least a fourfold distinction between logical, metaphysical, historical and epistemological possibilities (and there likely are sev...
September 11, 2016 at 23:33
I mean to be referring to the history of the world that we find ourselves in when we make empirical observations of any kind. It matters little for th...
September 11, 2016 at 04:17
Einstein's theory of general relativity is a theory of gravitation that is formulated within the framework of classical physics. It is an obsolete the...
September 10, 2016 at 23:45
Well, that is your own assessment of the situation. While general relativity on its own may suggest (rather than logically entail) something like the ...
September 10, 2016 at 21:56
The article indeed seems to portray the view as being, if not contestable, at least contested. While Andreas Albrecht was defending it, Avshalom Elitz...
September 10, 2016 at 19:20
Thanks for the reference. I'll read it carefully. At first glace, though, it seems like the author advocates his block universe view as the only possi...
September 10, 2016 at 18:37
Of course not. It is rather invariant under Galilean transformations. The Lorentzian signature is a feature of the metric of spacetime, and, it is tru...
September 10, 2016 at 11:02
I don't understand what argument you are trying to make, or what it is I have written that you may be disagreeing with (if anything). There is no ment...
September 10, 2016 at 10:07
That's quite helpful, StreetlightX, thanks.
September 10, 2016 at 09:23
Although he was an empiricist and a phenomenalist, I would hesitate to rank Russell as a logical empiricist himself. It's true that his work on logic ...
September 10, 2016 at 09:07
I see little connection between the historical tradition of logical positivism and what you call the "simulated universe theory". Logical positivism a...
September 10, 2016 at 08:09
This seems wrong. The general theory of relativity is not inconsistent with the laws of physics being indeterministic. GR is a deterministic theory of...
September 10, 2016 at 06:47
Could you post a couple of them side by side? I could compare them with the French original and venture an opinion regarding which one, if any, seems ...
September 10, 2016 at 06:23
Yes it is! Thanks.
September 09, 2016 at 08:13
If anyone finds a copy of the original French, let me know.
September 09, 2016 at 05:56
I have much more familiarity with Quine but stand to learn more from Derrida. So, I am leaning toward Derrida.
September 08, 2016 at 07:15
Evans' The Varieties of Reference, already mentioned, belongs downstream in the same vein; so does David Wiggins' paper The Sense and Reference of Pre...
September 06, 2016 at 02:40
I agree with this, but the same can be said of substances as they are conceived within a pluralistic ontology. Empirically knowable substances also es...
September 01, 2016 at 11:22
Your example is good but we are miscommunicating. On my view, neither process nor substance are noumenal. Both are empirical and, qua pure concepts, t...
September 01, 2016 at 11:16
Incidentally, when StreetlightX cited arguments to the effect that analog quantities don't make room for the concept of negation, I immediately though...
September 01, 2016 at 10:58
Here is the rub. (My argument here is influenced by similar consideration advanced by Michel Bitbol in some papers on the philosophy of physics, which...
September 01, 2016 at 10:45
Pure process ontologies, it seems to me, have been developed mainly as a retreat from what was perceived as troublesome essentialist implications of t...
September 01, 2016 at 10:29
Also, just in case anyone would be interested, regarding the recent state of the debate regarding necessity and philosophy of language, E. J. Lowe (wh...
September 01, 2016 at 08:40
I would also like to stress that, although the necessary a posteriori status of propositions expressed with the help of the "actually..." operator may...
September 01, 2016 at 05:19
Is "AP" analytic philosophy? Yes, Frege, Russell, Carnap, Quine, Davidson, Kripke and many other philosophers have devoted much energy studying formal...
September 01, 2016 at 04:50
Let us denote "AS" the sentence "Actually, the capital of France is Paris." Agreed, if by "the above statement" you mean to refer to the proposition P...
September 01, 2016 at 02:46
Yes, under the interpretation that Soames proposes, under Kaplan's 2D semantic framework, that is indeed the case. But one must be careful about what ...
September 01, 2016 at 00:43
Why not simply say that it is known a priori to be necessarily true and hence uninformative? What makes it known to be necessarily true, though, is a ...
August 31, 2016 at 10:33
Although I have been mainly agreeing with TGW against StreetlightX, there may be a sense in which I agree with StreetlightX's Wittgensteinian point ab...
August 31, 2016 at 10:18
I am not entirely sure about that last point. Regarding the first, linguistic use need not be at issue. Lois Lane may have seen a man flying in the sk...
August 31, 2016 at 09:59
When the same individual is denoted by two names that have two distinct Fregean senses, then, upon learning that they are identical, what is learned b...
August 31, 2016 at 09:02
Peter Geach's thesis of relative identity makes trouble for Leibniz's law of indiscernibility of identicals. Wiggins's thesis of the sortal dependency...
August 31, 2016 at 07:07
Yes, the old PF seems to have been suffering from bugs and lack of maintenance lately. But the "PF" mentioned in the title of this thread is this foru...
August 30, 2016 at 23:34
A very good paper discussing the phenomenology of dreams from an embodied and cognitive science perspective is Andy Clark's The Twisted Matrix: Dream,...
August 30, 2016 at 02:08
Thanks for posting Soames' commentary, Mongrel. And thanks to Soames for commenting!
August 30, 2016 at 01:03
Yes. This may also be related to what Wittgenstein has identified as the "loss of problems". "Some philosophers (or whatever you like to call them) su...
August 29, 2016 at 10:10
That's quite right. The most valuable things are the least useful. Useful things possess mainly derivative value. So, when I am asked about the useful...
August 29, 2016 at 10:07
That's a good question; or rather a good challenge to my view. I think what's required for the validity of the inference you are trying to make, from ...
August 29, 2016 at 09:51
I think Dennett is right about 90% of the published literature in Anglo-American philosophy: that it has a significance comparable the study of the hi...
August 29, 2016 at 09:29