Wayfarer

It's worth remembering that 'small is beautiful' was a book, and a damned fine one, by the economist E F Schumacher, who for some time was (perhaps ir...

I was simply observing that it is impossible to conceive of a universe with just one item. 'One' depends on there being 'more than one'. Notice this p...

Hey I'm a pretty assiduous news reader, and am following the debacle of the Trump presidency, but nowhere have I seen the suggestion that Jeff Session...

That's the question being asked! Don't forget, Hume was inquiring into the 'nature of human understanding'. He is asking very deep questions about wha...

More a regular conjunction of events than a coincidence. He simply observed that, whereas logical propositions or deductive truths, are true by virtue...

Who would be around to count it?

One salient point about James Comey's testimony before the Senate is that he was very well-prepared. When he started to interact with Donald Trump, he...

It's what you said: you don't expect anything from politics. All politicians are liars, democracy is corrupt, it's all shit. You can't even own what y...

That's what you would like to see, is more like it. I think Obama was world's ahead, he did a lot to protect the people, the environment, the economy....

So the fact that I can say that 'there's a liar in the White House', but you cannot, is because I'm scared? Pull the other one, Agustino.

Actually I do get it Agustino - and this is not an ad hominem, but a sincere appraisal. You are actually a fascist sympathiser, or proto-fascist, or s...

Right. Well, the story is, Trump instructed everyone else to leave the room, and then said 'I expect loyalty'. This is the behaviour of a dictatorship...

Did you grow up in Eastern Europe?

You cite it, you show it. Just to recap, if you haven't been following, there is evidence of (1) some co-operation or contact of some kind, between 'p...

Citation please. Wouldn't want to add to the fake news that's already in circulation.

Crap analogy. When you roll the dice, they don't fly out of your hand and float through space. There's a reason why that is. They have six sides, with...

That is called 'historicism'. Reason is sovereign, because it is the standard that truth claims are obliged to meet, not because it is imbued with som...

Which is why I have decided it's better never to debate politics with you - because your politics seems basically fascistic. Which is why I think you ...

I never said Obama 'told no lies', but I see zero evidence that Obama was the spectacularly mendacious bullshit artist that Trump is. Obama was also d...

Yeah I suppose that's true. I didn't much like the name of the thread, actually, and tend not to use that name in such a casual manner myself. That's ...

I object to that term 'chemically induced'. It is derogatory and dismissive. The point about certain classes of drugs -entheogens, they have been call...

Anyone who characterises Kant as being 'asleep' or in 'dogmatic slumber' has no grasp of Kant. He was a workaholic and his ideas were constantly chang...

I see no evidence of that, but I suppose evidence doesn't really matter, post truth.

Just to set the record straight here - during Trump's campaign, according to Politifact, which is a fact-checking service, not a media organisation, T...

There was a good essay recently on why Trump is not just a liar - he's a bullshitter. He invents a lot of distractions, muddies the waters, changes th...

I very much doubt Russell would have said anything like that.

I think, whatever Mueller says, the GOP and the 'Trump supporters', and Trump, will just continue to lie. As he can now lie with the weight of the Pre...

thanks! Bit muddle-headed of me. Only discovered him via your posts. Probably not within scope of my syllabus, but I can't help but like his notion of...

It's more than that. There is a William Blake line which was famous in the counterculture, 'when the doors of perception are cleansed, then everything...

One of my favourite books at one point in life (along with Alduous Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, which explores similar territory.) There is the ...

sorry baccarat, or some board game or another. So I read. Anyway, the only valuable thing about Hume was prodding Kant to show that he was wrong, whic...

That's because if you adopt his attitude to philosophy, there's nothing at stake. It is a purely critical enterprise, wholly concerned with puncturing...

Generally, your post is OK, except for this line. I have read that the derivation of white and black was originally the sunlit vs the shady side of a ...

Or maybe, made to understand the meaning of truth, law, the constitution, the meaning of the Presidency. That alone would be all the punishment that h...

I don't think that Trump is going to badger, bully, lie and harass his way out of this one. James Comey is not some poor trades guy you can stiff for ...

Good luck with that. Pray to St Jude the Apostle.

I have heard about Zappfe on forums previously. Also am quite familiar with Camus. I think the underlying driver for both is very much 'in the shadow ...

One point that should be brought out is that 'scientific reason' and 'philosophical rationalism' are very different creatures. Or, put another way, th...

It will be interesting to see if it still works in foxholes. I am flat out on a project at this point, so will only be able to make the odd scattered ...

Beats me. I never understand why you come out all guns blazing for Putin, either. That's why I've decided to 'never discuss politics with Agustino'. W...

Notice the implicit dualism of 'out there'. It imagines 'the world', as object, to me, the observer, 'in here'. Whatever is real is 'out there somewhe...

It's a huge question - the interplay between observation and hypothesis. The formulation of evolution and the age of the earth are textbook cases of s...

You don't have to have been alive in the Jurassic age to know there were dinosaurs. But then, humans know such things, because we're capable of such k...

Math is a pretty major one, isn't it? Science couldn't get going without maths and the rules of inference, and the like - so maths is prior to the sci...

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Thank you comrade. I must commend your always unswerving faithfulness and loyalty to the great cause. You are indeed an exemplar to all the progressiv...

I guess what I'm saying is that, if the GOP had any real conservative principles, Trump would never have become leader, but because he's won on TV, be...

I agree, I would normally never like McCain, but 'now' is not normal. McCain turned up on Aussie TV last week and got stuck right into Trump - for tha...

A Russian commentator here on Aussie TV was saying the other week - Russian opinion polls have a very high approval for Putin. But in Russia, not appr...

No argument from me. I think it's disgraceful that more principled Republicans aren't standing up. I'm not American, but I admire McCain as a principl...