Srap Tasmaner

I like the use of “invoke” there: you pray to your gods, they pray to theirs. Anyway, I haven’t argued for an explanation of Christians faith, only th...

You know, the way you say this, it’s as if a Christian might say, “I approve of the job God Almighty is doing.” You see how ridiculous that is, right?...

I’m trying to read the article — no, I hadn’t read it before — and I come to this: Evidently David Lewis doesn’t know any Christians, and hasn’t so mu...

Merry Christmas, gang!

One way to look at this: you’ve rediscovered the cogito. The ‘necessity’ comes from asking the question at all — if there were nothing, there would be...

's all good, man

Not what I was saying and missing the point of this discussion. You're just saying that you don't agree with what gets marked as right and wrong in th...

I don't think it's anything special about the Abrahamic religions. Wisdom literatures always accumulate interpretations and theories of interpretation...

I think Genesis is an indication of what I mean. Many many Christians take the story in Genesis to be, well, a story, just a picturesque way of convey...

Agreed, that's an unsolvable problem with the fairy tale. I was trying to find a way to take 'eternity' as a way of conveying that our actions have in...

As I understand it, some theologians these days take the talk of fire and torment to be “picturesque” or “metaphorical”, and take hell to be the state...

Not completely laughable. People died. Mostly laughable. But not a riot. They weren't just expressing themselves destructively. They were there to sto...

As you mean it, that's incoherent. You want to say there’s no grass ‘out there’, that ‘grass’ is only a term of your model, but then it’s meaningless ...

I get that, and I get wanting to call that a “retreat from life” or something, but of course it’s not — there’s no such thing. It’s just another way o...

That the grass is not green, is the case when, for instance, it’s brown. I think you wanted: what’s the difference between ‘Today is Wednesday’ and ‘I...

1. If there is no grass, how can I have a belief “about the grass”? What would such a belief be about? 2. If I am referring not to the grass but to my...

Well, no, it’s just that there’s no point in striving for just laws in a lawless nation. Rule of law alone is certainly not enough, but it’s a require...

They may be scumbags one and all — that’s not the issue. They were not targeted as scumbags but as elected representatives carrying out their constitu...

There must be something different about us, and the smart money says it’s to do with language or something about us that shows itself most clearly in ...

I get the impulse to say that Descartes was conjuring a pseudo-problem, and ‘solving’ this so-called problem is offered to the over-educated as a poin...

Are you offended that Descartes had thoughts that he didn’t have to?

Overwhelmingly agree. Language: there is a temptation to look at computers and say, that's just syntax without semantics, which leads to a further tem...

Yes, I think the idea is quite simply that if it’s introspection then it’s not science, and there’s an optional detour through philosophy. (If introsp...

I keep wondering what the force of this 'accusation' is supposed to be. Why does it sound so much like saying phenomenology is "merely philosophy"?

I’ve been wondering where “aboutness” is in these causal chains, and how @"Isaac" proposes to infer 9 is about 8 from 9 was caused by 8. Since the mod...

Well, the phrase has two elements: the leap, and the faith. Leaping is not like walking, a steady, methodical progress from one place to another. Leap...

I won’t disagree, but only ask: why should this be so? But that’s too much, too fast. What does it mean to take a leap of faith? Do you know what it m...

This is a helpful summary. All we know is the river. We have reason to believe the river itself has tributaries, smaller streams that feed into the ri...

I don’t think so. I think there are strong objections to the single home theory, but they don’t touch the idea of a word being at home in a language-g...

I think that's exactly the right thing to say. Full endorsement from me.

Then what would you mean when you said "we see the same objects (differently)"?

Do you also think the external world and all the objects in it are an hypothesis instantiated in your individual brain?

And I don't see how you can say that with a straight face.

That's a really interesting thing to say. So does that mean that if there were a 1-to-1 mapping, we could *prove* not just what something is, but that...

Yes, these are all possibilities, and they are the sort of thing you're interested in, as I understand it, because you're interested in how that works...

I’m sympathetic to your thinking in this post, but this is backwards. That is, you’re talking here about reflecting on the meaning of a word, analysin...

I’m not sure what you’re saying here, but my claim is that — plausible or not, convincing or not — the following is not simply incomprehensible: https...

Exactly, though I believe some of my great aunts made jam out of them — but they either pickled or made jam out of everything, so... No persimmon tree...

As I understand it, the point of talking of qualia is in part to make room for our (affective) reactions to our perceptions. If there is something it ...

It’s just really not clear to me how neuroscience has changed the philosophical landscape here. For instance, the SEP quote @"fdrake" posted — we alre...

It seems the distinction wanted is not between 'direct' and 'indirect', but between 'inferential' and 'non-inferential' -- only those are terms more a...

What would that be that we don’t have? I’m seriously asking: what do you have in mind when you say there is a type of perception, direct perception, t...

Felicity here seems to be a matter of the spell you have cast, by speaking the word ‘bachelor’, coming off.

I am honored.

I'd be open to using a somewhat more "magical" vocabulary to talk about the role of our thoughts in the world. For instance, to think of someone as yo...

Blech. ‘Will’ and ‘action’ look like pretty crufty categories so I won’t take sides there. Insofar as the idea of ‘magick’ is just a souped-up ‘will’,...

or “without acting”.

Did he really? That seems broad enough to include regular, non-magickal action.

https://www.change.org/p/rename-the-williamsburg-bridge-as-the-sonny-rollins-williamsburg-bridge?s=01

There’s a bit of the argument that strikes me as a little odd. 1. Bees and humans perceive the flower differently. Therefore, 2. We cannot know what t...