Srap Tasmaner

A quick point and my lunch break is done. The best scientific theory tells you not just that earth in fact goes around the sun, but why it looks like ...

I don't have a text on front of me, but from context I thought he was talking about 'proof of the external world', that sort of thing. And his respons...

?

Sorry, I thought both passages were clear enough. The word that jumped out at me in the first passage was "decision". I remember reading this sort of ...

One thing I really like is Heidegger's hermeneutic approach: you start from the asking of whatever question, and you don't skip right over how the que...

It’s not like it’s an accident that Being and Time birthed existentialism. One more note on philosophy as clarification. So Heidegger’s your guy on bo...

Except that’s exactly what Heidegger did not do. He comes to phenomenological ontology as his rethinking of Husserl’s phenomenology, and the argument ...

Well, that’s the thing. Whatever Being is, it’s not a Fregean concept, so philosophy done this way can — by choice, mind you — have nothing at all to ...

How so?

As you like. What problems were you pointing out with the predicate "__ is an apple"?

Thank goodness! (I was genuinely puzzled by the ever so slightly hostile tone of your response. I like science!) Insofar as I was indeed quibbling wit...

But not by by saying something like "There is something that is an apple and is imaginary", surely.

How so?

Maybe, a little, but that's not really my intention. What I'm trying to quibble with is not the research, and not the usefulness of whatever framework...

As I understand it -- and I'm not even an amateur cognitive scientist, so -- there is nothing in our brains that could conceivably correspond to what ...

This part sounds pretty a priori to me.

I'm good with that, but I'm not sure it provides a 'way in' for someone starting from a 'categorical' understanding. If you think categorically, then ...

What is the difference between how I relate to a real apple, how I comport myself toward it, and how I relate to an imaginary apple? I can, for instan...

I don’t think anyone would have a problem with that if they were convinced that “indirect realism” was not “indirect irrealism” or some such thing. We...

Jesus, as if they weren’t hard enough on their own. On the other hand, something like this is becoming vaguely mainstream in post-analytic Anglo-Ameri...

But it sounds pretty empty. Does it make sense for me to be oriented toward something as something that ‘just is’? People aren’t cameras. I could see ...

For what it’s worth, Grice says something like this too with his thing about “natural meaning” and “non-natural meaning”. He claims a kind of continui...

One answer would be that abstraction is what we resort to under uncertainty or dispute, but I don’t think that’s an argument that we don’t generally s...

Not for nothing, but I’m reminded now that there’s a similar issue (similar to what I’m trying to understand about phenomena and appearances) raised b...

Is he? It’s a phrase that occurs in some books and movies, and we understand how fiction works so we understand that we are to pretend it’s a story ab...

You should stop reading @"Hanover"‘s Shoutbox posts. Stop now.

No. Maybe we can ask the question straight up: is it because things can seem to us to be something they are not that we can pretend that they are some...

I’ve been dancing around it, but there may be some connection between being and pretending. In the introduction to Being and Time, Heidegger addresses...

When Tolkien pretends that what he offers to the public is a translation of The Red Book of Westmarch, he pretends both that there is such a thing and...

I wasn’t really arguing against treating ‘__ exists’ as a predicate, just suggesting that most of the examples we think of are really about something ...

I meant logical predicates, sorry, not grammatical. (It’s grammatically subject and predicate, as usual, or one noun phrase and one verb phrase, and t...

From Ruth Krauss. I think it’s in A Hole is to Dig but it might be Open House for Butterflies.

So far as the surface grammar goes, sure. “Exists” is after all an English verb, so it’s something English noun phrases can do. You can imagine someon...

In English, that’s a field, and that it is a field, is a fact. For speakers of English, the fieldhood of that field is as neutral as it gets. “In Engl...

Are you saying something like this: "Is Bb5 legal?" -- Depends on the position. "Is Bb5 good?" -- Depends on the position.

I first read Being and Time nearly forty years ago. Just started re-reading it yesterday, so I will return with all the answers shortly.

But they are, as described, oriented toward the field as something, and that something is different in each case. In turn, that changes what they will...

I agree with the gist of what you're saying, and the language I quoted is so suggestive that it must capture something essential, must be somehow righ...

Except that they really don't seem to. You can work alongside someone for years, or see them at the grocery store every few days, and never have any i...

Full responses will have to come later for me, but I can give you a quick idea of why I say 'yes' here with a joke: "A conservative and a liberal pull...

Yeah, I have. I know exactly what he believes in, and what I assume he gets up to when he’s not posting here. So what? What does who he is or what he’...

I’m confused. Do you two approve of what @"StreetlightX" pointed out the Biden administration is up to with oil drilling? Why are we talking about Tru...

One more thing along these lines. There’s a heartbreaking story Tim Alberta did for The Atlantic about the chairman of the Michigan state house commit...

Scenario 1. Two, let’s say, scholars disagree over the meaning of a text because they interpret it differently, despite having a shared interpretive f...

If they have a building where they meet, that might also be called ‘the club’, so there’s some ambiguity there, but I meant the club as an abstraction...

No, no, a club. The International Brotherhood of Amateur Philosophers. That’s a thing that’s not me, but we can’t define my location relative to it. O...

My location, then, is to be defined relative to a thing that is not me. But not just any thing. If I am a member of a club, my location cannot be defi...

This looks like a mistake to me: 1. What does it mean for me, for instance, to have a location? 2. It means that, given something else that has a loca...

Or us. It’s where we are. A post or two in, it occurred to me that reversing the relational definition is probably the inevitable way in. We get the t...

@"Manuel" Look at this way. My phone has GPS. It knows that it is somewhere, only operationally, only insofar as it knows where it is in relation to o...