Well, there's a lot here, and I won't address remotely all of it. But I have a simple question. Is this real? For example, there's this quote from Rob...
Ah, well it's my fault then for picking a well-known geometric shape. I only meant that the sticks are arranged in such a way that they make up a thin...
Or, in pastiche of Berkeley, everything exists in the mind of God. And then what? Does He care more about some of His thoughts than others? Find some ...
If your intent is to make shit up, it's an excellent scale, imposing minimal constraint on your creativity. "Like our Heavenly Father, Everest is grea...
Quick note: some of what you say about Spinoza suggests "is God" or maybe "is like God" as an interesting predicate, and then you get @"Wayfarer"'s gr...
Oh I never got nearly that far! It's an old question. I think he mentions it in connection with negation because there's an argument (attributed there...
It is curious that the substance/mode or subject/predicate thing somehow gets tangled up with an historically somewhat religious question about whethe...
Not quite in the spirit of the enterprise though. I've taken two approaches so far: one is to see if I might have any use for saying something has a h...
Maybe. But there is a certain sort of discourse that says things only appear to be a certain way, but are actually another way, but says so non-lazily...
Could you spell this out a bit? Same for truth, right? A statement is true or false. And yet, there's an idiom that rarely finds its way into philosop...
Thanks. (I was at work when I asked, so not chasing links.) It sounds so very much like subject & predicate, the small, boring result of a long and ta...
It's a mythical Socrates that suits my purpose here. Long tradition of that. I don't know that Socrates would say that any wisdom emerged from those c...
One of the reasons I posted that, was that I've been mulling this over for the past few days: And what you quoted from me was written with Socratic pr...
Philosophy is a peculiar discipline: it's almost entirely conversation. It's not much like science, for the most part, because you don't do research. ...
Hmmm. Do you make any distinction between premises and inference rules? I'm trying to understand this. Are you arguing against the cut rule? In practi...
We've talked about the equivalence of P -> Q to ~P v Q, but it's often more intuitive I think to use another equivalence ~(P & ~Q), and to read this a...
Yeah that really leaps out in the passage quoted. Socrates doesn't offer a distinction among types of arguments, but among people who hear them or mak...
I only meant that there's the natural world, and then a particular part of it, people like us, and then there's a particular thing we do, engage in di...
There's that, but there's another meaning here too. If physics is the philosophy (or science) of the natural world, ethics the philosophy (or science)...
Wow, that is spot on. The last couple days I kept finding myself thinking about the Phaedo, because there's a passage there about losing faith in argu...
Yeah. You indicated to @"goremand" that you've already reached some conclusions. You indicated to me that there are a number of issues you think are a...
I've thought of another way to think about it too. Suppose we said that philosophy *aims to be* rational, but what that means continues to be in play....
Better than the last thing I said: Debating itself, the construction and use of arguments, what can be achieved with them and how, all of this is more...
Is it? Does it? Maybe. I have my doubts. But even if it is so, have we shown that this is *all* philosophy is? Honestly, these questions are, let's sa...
On the rationality thing. If philosophy takes up the question of whether philosophy is rational, and even if it judges that it is, this is merely a re...
This had occurred to me as well, that "justification" is not, as it seems we say around here now, univocal. So the question is, when philosophy demand...
Well that's certainly clearer. And that does make fruitful conversation difficult, but it also raises the ceiling of what we can attempt to do, I thin...
It is hardly outside the mainstream to think philosophy's mission might be principally if not exclusively critical. Starts with a guy called 'Socrates...
I strongly take issue with OLP not being nuanced. My God, read "A Plea for Excuses." Subtlety, maybe that's a little harder to say. Certainly OLP does...
One funny thing about all this is that you included the word "discourse" in the title. Every time I was writing "philosophical discourse" I wondered w...
Well, I haven't read him, so I can't fill in the argument, if there is one. I suppose, though, if you're going to talk about rules at all, then the na...
Does Rawls call this a "hypothetical contract"? How does he describe it? And how does he use this thought experiment to justify the formation of the s...
I've never read Rawls myself ? was never very interested in political theory. So I suppose Rawls made certain arguments that you found persuasive unti...
There are two issues here. One is whether rights are better conceived as natural or positive. You believe natural, but you ought to at least look at t...
I agree with (almost) all that! @"Pierre-Normand" had a useful thing about universality and generality that fits here too. And obviously I have in the...
Let's take your first example, the biologist. Here's a simple approach. You're doing biology, some research, some model building, some reading, etc. Y...
Don't bother. I'm doing some rereading and may have yet another take on all this at some point. In the meantime, have you considered that you might be...
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