Janus

The "point" is merely to sharpen one's mind in this particular game, just to explore the possibilities of a certain kind of analysis. If you enjoy it,...

What makes you think that Davidson cares about whether his distinction matters "in the context of life. concrete existence". Does music matter in that...

Thanks for your well-thought response. I actually agree with most of what you say, or at least right now can find no clear reason to disagree, but the...

You're still not getting the distinction. You don't teach a child a language where "a language" is defined as a complete set of rules that rigidly spe...

Try exercising some nuanced thinking. Or would that be too "abstract" and/or "idealist" for you? To say there is no such thing as a language is not th...

:cool:

:up:

I was thinking more along the line that we all feel the effect of gravity. We also feel (and see) the effects of the wind and feel the effects of the ...

True, but gravity is also felt? Even the so-called "primitives" knew that things fall to earth, and would have been aware of the force acting on their...

Yes, that's pretty much what I had in mind. Thanks for reminding me of Sellar's. I did read PSIM years ago, which is not to say I understood it all. I...

Watchin' through the window were ya? :joke:

Possibly for the unenlightened. :wink:

No, that's not what I'm claiming at all. The common sense invisible entities posited to explain phenomena in any culture must be commonly accepted ent...

The positing of hidden forces is to explain observed phenomena, no? It seems that humans have always imagined hidden forces to explain observed phenom...

I don't pretend to be an authority on this, but from what I've read, wind and solar, due to their intermittency and fluctuating energy production requ...

I disagree; I think invisible entities have always been prominent features of human thought; probably because the phenomenon of movement, which is eve...

Right, but I would say that the idea that things are not necessarily what they seem is itself an example of common sense. By saying that science is co...

As I said later, it was available on revisiting Youtube. I was beginning to imagine all kinds of conspiracies. :wink:

I take your point that most people are not likely to be able to do adequate science; the sciences (like the arts) are specialist activities that take ...

Great work! :clap: I watched it from here, but why is it unavailable on Youtube? Edit: it was unavailable when I first looked, now seems OK.

None of this addresses the obvious fact that there is inherent individual variation when it comes to physical and mental abilities. If you deny that t...

If I was cynical, I'd say that instead of the institutional indifference being the main culprit, at least in some, perhaps even many, cases, it is ins...

:cool:

Sure, but we don't know now if our predictions are correct.

Yes, in a way I think it could be said that whatever political and social hierarchies have existed in human life have come about due to self-organizat...

Yeah, I was joking of course; I don't hold with prophecies and revelations either. We cannot know the future and the more precisely we try to predict ...

No I didn't; I haven't said anything about "magical genetic structure" or attributes "popping into existence"; those words are yours and you are tryin...

So, you don't hold with prophecies and revelations? :joke:

If it was 666 you'd be the Great Beast of Revelation.

:cool: :smile: There you go, one more mention for you, even though I didn't actually say anything. Oh, whoops I did say something. Damn!

So, you've received 56,760 mentions?

.93 for me. I don't think any conclusions can be reasonably be drawn from just the ratio of responses to comments. A troll might score well over 1, wh...

I am simply stating the obvious fact that people and other animals are born with varying potentialities and attributes. I haven't anywhere denied that...

It's not a question of how I'm speaking of it; it's very straightforward, it's just natural variation. Are you seriously claiming that some people are...

If more is imputed to theology than exercise of the metaphysical imagination and stimulation of aesthetic and moral feeling, then we see a descent int...

You misunderstand religion if you think it is a matter of truth or falsity, of being correct or being mistaken. Right and who decides the standards? N...

What point are you trying to make? Even if Hierarchy Theory has "cracked the code of nature", so what? As I said nature is replete with hierarchy, tha...

Sure it is, and surely not the only one! Much of human life is projected illusion. Do you believe you are free from it? No, it is elitist to suppose t...

Reading over this thread it seems to be "much ado about nothing". Of course nature is hierarchical in the sense that larger things are composed of sma...

In that dimension of adaption we have no choice. I think what @"fdrake" had in mind with his comment is something like 'you have to work within the sy...

I think you are referring to fundamentalist religion. I think it is arguable that most religious people are not fundamentalists. They just entertain s...

I would say that religion does not inherently consist in enslavement to power structures. People, the great majority of people, who do not want to thi...

Only if it was VERY firm.

Do you think it is likely that the vast majority of people will be able to participate in this conversation anyway, regardless of religion? I think ma...

Spinoza advocated something similar. He believed that intelligence is too uncommon to allow humanity to live without the guidance of religion.

I don't see it as resignation. I "hope for the best and prepare for the worst". I also believe in the power of thought, although not so much in a "min...