Srap Tasmaner

"Have been" is inarguable, but I see no reason to think philosophy is the origin of the taboo against kin-slaying, for example. I take your point, and...

Oh yes, I know you and I suspect there's not a real question here. I was hoping to get others to wonder whether "better" and "worse" make sense here. ...

People consider all sorts of things --- whether they can afford to take care of the child, whether they feel prepared to handle the responsibility, wh...

Is a philosopher, then, like a troll guarding the bridge to parenthood? He pops up saying, "You may not pass until you have answered my riddle!" Most ...

No, it isn't. I know. No one can guarantee anything. I claim it is perfectly reasonable to assume, without argument, that people want to live. And I c...

Sure. You can argue that someone holds B because of A, but A also entails C, and they shouldn't hold C, so they should give up A. That leaves B as an ...

Right. I'm not defending the instinct for self-preservation. But I am arguing that we can rely on all members of our species having the same instinct....

We both reject the conclusion of the anti-natalist argument. Does that conclusion follow from the premises offered by the anti-natalist? I think, by a...

1. We are, all of us, ignorant and stupid, and have to expect others here will point out where we have shown that we are. (Our patron saint is famous ...

I would appreciate it if you did not accuse forum members you disagree with of lying. I can appreciate it more forcefully if need be.

Here's my first stab at it --- don't know if it's any good. What we want, think we want, is for the scent of just cut grass to be to smell what the lo...

Excellent! Seriously, this just what I'd like to hear. It's true. Maybe now that I've spent a little time with the idea I'd express this differently. ...

I don't think that's what I said. My claim, in a nutshell, is that we do not, as a matter of course, need a reason to save a life or create one. Under...

This is not even in the ballpark of what I've been posting. Maybe that's why I haven't been able to understand your responses.

Human reproduction is a fact. I would like, if possible, not to become entangled in the metaphysics of how two people become three people. At some poi...

I think English had already enshrined the distinction. That is a true thing to say.

Not interested. There's plenty of opportunity to have related discussions on their terms. I'm offering an alternative, not a counter-argument. What wh...

It's an idiom. Here it's meant to cover keeping someone from dying, resuscitating them, and procreating. If you want to be pedantic, something like "t...

Just making sure.

Set aside birth just for a moment. You haven't, so far as I know, claimed that procreating is just wrong; it's wrong because it's an instance of a sor...

Yes, our commitment to continue living appears to be instinctive. We might, in considering our own situation, choose to discount it as a bias; but whe...

I'll add one more point before calling it a night: if objects are assembled out of our sense impressions by our internal model-making machinery, we mi...

Okay, I thought that might be it. A little like Hume and the billiard balls. Let's say something like this: we can take an object, look at it, touch i...

I'm still confused. Is it the association of a given sound with the object we think of as making the sound that is puzzling?

Yes, and I was hoping someone would say something like this. I'm inclined to say that people feel attached to life whether they want to be or not. Peo...

The bridge example doesn't seem to originate with Turing, but comes up in an earlier lecture:

I tried excerpting the relevant bits from a pirated pdf found online, but it needs considerable reformatting. The whole book is essential reading if y...

It's in lectures 21 and 22 of Wittgenstein's Lectures on the Foundations of Mathcrnatics, Cambridge 1939. Turing is present throughout the book on and...

I'm not following this. Can you take another swing at it? So does this: you come to me with a toothache and I shoot you in the head. No it's not. Just...

Absolutely right. Everyone knows that, for us, maybe because we didn't evolve for it, utopia would suck. There's that Star Trek movie where Kirk is du...

This is a curious thing, because LW approaches philosophical problems in a way that suggests practicality -- think of the opening lines of the Blue Bo...

Do I have to be able to answer that question to build bridges?

Allowing contradictions in how you do calculus would cause all modern bridges to fall down. Does that matter? Is it different from the point about fou...

Is that a no to both then, neither of the others are in themselves unjust?

It's certainly common these days to treat set theory as fundamental, and for kids to learn naïve set theory, and I agree that's useful. But you didn't...

There is middle ground here though. Foundations of mathematics is nearly a separate field of study, and unnecessary for the doing of mathematics. You ...

On balance, I think the answer might be yes. And it's yes in part because of Turing. Nowadays engineers will to some degree rely on software to design...

I think you misread that. Sokal is only saying, what I thought was widely known, that the overwhelming majority of working mathematicians have nothing...

Agreed. Earlier today I was thinking a bit about the several "What is philosophy?" threads around, and thinking that the choice of terms, of the categ...

An argument that employs any -- what shall we call it? "technique"? "method"? "approach"? -- that can be misused is sophistry? And by "misused" there ...

Here are three arguments: A1. P is forced to experience L. Therefore A2. P is forced to experience something. B1. P is forced to experience L. B2. L i...

It is serious, but you have to know the context a little. It's an expression of PKD's disillusionment with square culture in the late sixties, his per...

If memory serves, a mosquito hawk was the target in this case:

This sounds so reasonable, but I'm not sure I understand how it's supposed to work. If we took this quite literally, is a judgment with a higher exter...

I like this very much right up to the word "precision" in the last sentence. Science might be like a kind of competitive ballroom dancing, where you l...

That's more than odd and doesn't inspire confidence.

Because we are wired to, yes? So it's all Kant by way of Darwin.

The point about LEM is that you give it up as an introduction rule, as a 'syntactic' matter. Semantically it means you are not entitled to assert that...

If you read ~ as an intuitionist, as Dummett would, then ~p only says that you haven't demonstrated p, and ~~p only says that you haven't demonstrated...