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Pierre-Normand

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I hope you don't mind an inconsequential quibble, but radiocarbon dating relies on carbon-14, which has a rather short half-live (5,730 years), and is...
January 31, 2016 at 11:48
Hi csalisbuty, Thanks for raising up the problem of ancestrality. I wasn't acquainted with it -- at least not under this guise. I gave it some thought...
January 31, 2016 at 09:37
Hi Willow, I apologize for the long delay. Brassier's example of people pointing at Saturn, while not knowing what it is, is supposed to problematize ...
January 31, 2016 at 09:21
Haugeland's Pattern and Being was first published in the volume Dennett and His Critics, before it was reprinted in Haugeland's Having Thought: Essays...
January 30, 2016 at 05:23
I would likely endorse that too ;-)
January 30, 2016 at 01:32
Off topic (and spoiler): I only saw Von Trier's Dogville, and watched it two or three times. I was quite moved by it, emotionally, but also intellectu...
January 30, 2016 at 01:25
Let me apologize again for putting you on the back burner. I'll likely be back to you before the next 48h.
January 28, 2016 at 15:00
Yes, that's a fair characterization. You can also say that it's a form of strong correlationism. Your main question to me concerns the the 'existence'...
January 28, 2016 at 08:33
No. I was charging you with trying to advance a deductive argument in support of the validity of inductive reasoning. I don't think just pointing out ...
January 26, 2016 at 06:03
John, I think when you are trying to construct an argument to defend inductive reasoning, you may be involving yourself in a performative contradictio...
January 26, 2016 at 01:36
Hi Agustino, Yes, your figures for coal (60%), gas (11%) and cement production (8%) match what I can find in the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Dioxide...
January 25, 2016 at 12:34
Some more suggestions (all available online): John McDowell, Avoiding the Myth of the Given John Haugeland, Pattern and Being Susan Hurley, Varieties ...
January 25, 2016 at 11:57
This post strikes me as an excellent summary, much better than I could have done myself. I thought for a second that you had misconstrued Quines' trea...
January 25, 2016 at 11:06
Who are the other two? And who is being threatened with being bumped in fourth place? Regarding Dennett, I agree that Consciousness Explained is very ...
January 25, 2016 at 04:00
I'll make a few more comments later on, but meanwhile let me just provide some of the most relevant references. There is, of course, Putnam's The Coll...
January 24, 2016 at 23:41
This, and earlier paragraphs that I didn't quote, is very nicely put. I think you would enjoy Sebastian Rödl's Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry ...
January 24, 2016 at 11:51
I am only quoting and responding to this paragraph because it nicely hones in on the ground of my perplexity with Brassier's idea of the thing itself,...
January 24, 2016 at 10:23
I am quoting myself because I want to preemptively address a possible objection, but I don't want to dilute the main point of the previous post. I was...
January 24, 2016 at 08:10
They are ontologically co-eval with the objects that fall under them. So the sortal concepts have the same ontological status, that is, the very same ...
January 24, 2016 at 06:49
Yes, you are right. I misused the term "naive realist". I meant to refer to the stance of some scientific realists, who I believe to be naive ;-). How...
January 24, 2016 at 00:21
This definition might be false and naive under one reading, and unobjectionable, though consistent with the kind of realist conceptualism that I take ...
January 23, 2016 at 23:51
I explained this to mean "exist as a P, where P is a sortal concept". It could be, for instance "exist as a bean". I didn't raise any issue about sort...
January 23, 2016 at 12:20
But there is a seeing as, a sortal concept, that makes something -- or rather singles it out as -- a bean. The question that can't possibly be answere...
January 23, 2016 at 11:56
Hi Willow, I'll respond later (and edit this post), just to let you know. (On edit: I answered below, at long last)
January 23, 2016 at 11:26
I am glad you noticed too. Maybe I should have read the whole thread before commenting.
January 23, 2016 at 10:58
Quite agreed. Brandom offers little improvement over Sellars on this issue, which is why I mostly rely on McDowell and Haugeland for suitable correcti...
January 23, 2016 at 10:18
Following Frege (or maybe, Wiggins' construal of Frege in his The Sense and Reference of Predicates: A Running Repair to Frege's Doctrine and a Plea f...
January 23, 2016 at 04:22
I've just finished reading Brassier's paper, so I can now comment. Brassier is attacking correlationism and other forms of anti-realism (including ide...
January 22, 2016 at 12:11
I think this is rather nicely put. I had missed this response earlier. Let me just make clear that I agree with your attack on the presupposition of t...
January 21, 2016 at 23:13
I'm even later to this party. But since this text makes contact both with preoccupations of continental philosophy that I am much ignorant of, but fin...
January 21, 2016 at 06:59
Bagatelles are little things; the video already disappeared!
January 20, 2016 at 15:47
This document expresses your stances on several separable philosophical topics (e.g. atheism, free will and hedonism). No doubt, you wish to integrate...
January 19, 2016 at 00:38
New readers of Aristotle (or Leibnitz, or Hume, or Kant, or Wittgenstein, etc.) produce new insights all the time! This is because their ideas are con...
January 19, 2016 at 00:14
Your post raises many issues and I will comment on just one of them. This concerns your idea of a dualism of stuff, or material constituent, and arran...
January 18, 2016 at 20:49
Hi John, You don't need much acquaintance with the current state of neuroscience in order to follow this debate. Philosophical Foundations of Neurosci...
January 18, 2016 at 02:18
Yes, though Aristotle's notions of form and matter, and of act and power, are more general and abstract, and thus applicable to a broader range of emp...
January 17, 2016 at 07:54
No, the thesis is quite different. One main point of Wiggins' theory of the sortal dependency of identity precisely is to deny any simple dualism of m...
January 17, 2016 at 06:23
You misunderstand. I wasn't arguing that we are providing criteria for distinguishing objects that do persist from objects that don't persist at all. ...
January 17, 2016 at 05:29
It is unclear to me that such a distinction is intelligible. It's like saying that one is entitled to say that some tomato is red while not being enti...
January 17, 2016 at 04:52
Another way to phrase this would be to ask: how can we come to detect interesting patterns in the empirical world, patterns, that is, that are relevan...
January 17, 2016 at 04:16
Yes, that's how it sounds to me too. TheWillowOfDarkness seems to be defending the metaphysical stance that Putnam argued against and labeled 'metaphy...
January 17, 2016 at 02:48
Many of the landmark papers on meaning and reference from 20th century analytic philosophers are collected in the book Meaning and Reference, edited b...
January 16, 2016 at 05:53
What you say here would be correct, it seems to be, if you would restrict it to (Fregean) objects and attributes (Fregean concepts); and drop the idea...
January 16, 2016 at 04:08
It is nevertheless and essential paper and I second your recommendation. I started typing in some comments about its relevance and its relation to the...
January 15, 2016 at 18:36
Some things (1) are of no general interest because they are trite and trivial. This is different from them (2) not arousing general interest just beca...
January 15, 2016 at 05:56
No doubt. But one of the main points that the authors make is that there was until recently an expectation that a philosopher should have a special in...
January 15, 2016 at 05:06
The authors lament the movement of philosophy away from the impetus to cultivate wisdom -- conceived in broadly moral terms -- and towards cleverness,...
January 15, 2016 at 03:13
Don't sweat it, though. I've just finished re-reading it. It's much more difficult than I remembered it to be. It is likely that I had earlier read an...
January 15, 2016 at 01:44
True, but what is at issue in discussions about truth, meaning, knowledge and correspondance aren't the qualitative feels of the experiences (i.e. wha...
January 14, 2016 at 02:44
Although that issue seems resolved now, it is important when discussing about language and meaning to always be very clear on the use/mention distinct...
January 14, 2016 at 01:38