Europe is trying to be more than a collection of rabidly aggressive self-centred microstates. European nationalism killed millions, least we forget. W...
Glad you liked it. I was fascinated by some bits and pieces, like the A???dhy?y?, or the idea that missionaries translating the Bible were a major for...
I see that you have already provided quite a few answers. Generally speaking, it was as you said a progressive cultural convergence between the German...
Kings kill people. That's part of the job description. Hadrian's war against the Jews killed hundreds of thousands. Ceasar's conquest of Gaul led to a...
First, a brief historical overview of the discipline(s): The Journey of a Psycholinguist In this episode of The Joy of Science, Shambhavi Chidambaram ...
It may thus be that what Karl der Gross was trying to do when getting crowned Western emperor was to push back against Irene, empress in Constantinopl...
The Roman Empire was still in existence in 800 AD, in the East, and it rulled over Sicily and the South of the Italian peninsula. The division between...
What is you point exactly? You keep changing track all the time. My point is that Charlemagne tried to be Western Emperor for a reason: it was politic...
Yes. It also speaks of the blindness of some philosophers to linguistics as a science. Witgenstein should have read Saussure, it would have avoided hi...
You know, the prevalent feeling when Rome fell was disbelief. Many couldn't accept the fact that it was over. They kept going on with the fiction that...
Charlemagne is not unknown. On the contrary, he is seen as a great king. Rightly so in my view. To compare him to Hitler is really unfair. E.g. Charle...
That's not true. The Franks, Lombards and co dominated the existing population but did not exterminate it. Nope. The Salian Franks, of which Charlemag...
Yaaa... it’s hard to draw a line, in a death through thousand wounds. And thanks for reminding us the general outline. My point is the empire could il...
Well yes, by different means, but Charlemagne remains there in the cultural background. I think the EEC founding members for instance overlap well wit...
There is some truth there, but these churches are also what doomed the empire, what caused its fall. The Alaric sack of Rome is only some 40 years aft...
This was written in French, is here sung in Spanish and in English... :-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9j1jumnQeSw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...
Nah. I post stuff in French. Daniel posted a (beautiful, thank you ) song in Spanish. This threads is for songs, not argumentation, so there’s no need...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls8i3Z4i56g (a Crass cover - I can't stand the original punk music but this version is highly listenable) Oh yeah? Wel...
I can see a pattern in analytic philosophy that goes like this: 1. A would-be philosopher assumes that analysis is the only correct way to explore and...
Yet as you must be aware, language is a source of confusion like no other, especially when used by people who don't actually think it means anything.....
It's useful, I think. Communication I mean. Like when you're cold you can say "I'm getting cold". And someone understands you and can give you advice,...
It stands to reason that not all mental events are linguistic. Some are sensations, like the sensation of cold. And sensations are notoriously hard to...
I mean an idea not yet expressed in words, or to try and be more precise, the germ of an idea in that part of our mental world that lays beyond the la...
But this gut-feeling also happens in mathematics. Once a math teacher asked me: ‘Okay so you can derive expression A from expression B and vice versa,...
Webster defines meaning as ‘the thing conveyed by language.’ (I kid you not) There is -- if we accept this definition — a categorical difference betwe...
Recognizing the obvious is not ‘mysticism’. My argument is empirical. People do mean something when they speak, usually. Otherwise they would have no ...
When people say: "there is not such thing as truth" or "truth is only agreement", they really think it's true. And when they say: "meaning does not ex...
I don't find these issues problematic, honestly. I have done quite a few translations for instance, and while it's hard to do well, it certainly can b...
I'm not talking of definitions proper, but of something much more basic: the intuitive meaning of the word. There is a common meaning at the core of "...
Not at all. I'm just saying that translation cannot be explained other than by reference to meaning. That's all. If you can describe what translation ...
Yet when people say things like: ‘that’s no good’, we know what they mean, by and large. A certain threshold of efficacy hasn’t been met. When they sa...
In fact I posit that translation from one language to another cannot be explained other than by reference to the meaning of words that has to be conve...
I never understood this belief that all beliefs are bad. It’s absurd. We are not zombies, we put our heart into things, and believe all sorts of thing...
Yes, if a 3D Euclidian geometric model can be part of our operating system, and if we didn’t steal it from the gods, it must be biological, eg encoded...
Yes, that was the project of old style empiricism. Get rid of the need for innate ideas, so as to avoid having to explain them. A shame it didn’t work...
It can also be a fight, a competition between them. E.g. in the case of a hyper-skeptic, aka a denialist, whose own reason finds ways to stubbornly re...
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