Janus

But you said that you (by which I assumed you meant the collective 'we') understood everything about dirt, which would seem to be a contradiction. Or ...

We don't manipulate the laws of nature: at best we manipulate natural materials in accordance with our understanding of the laws governing their behav...

If you think it is possible to "understand everything about something" or "know all the properties of dirt" or that you can, without consequences "do ...

Of course I haven't said that natural materials cannot be manipulated. Mastery is another matter altogether. We cannot even master our own natures. If...

Rather, I think it leads to the illusion of a mastery of nature.

People should be allowed, even encouraged, to express, rather than censor, their stupid opinions and racist humour, so as to reveal, rather than keep ...

It's a Ponzi scheme if it is running on investors' capital, and not on reinvestment of profits, and there is no plausible likelihood of there ever bei...

I'm trying to envision a society which runs with a different ethos. It seems to me that the Enlightenment paradigm of a mechanical Nature, coupled wit...

Yes, lack of proper regulation is a real danger. The way I see it, the Industrial Revolution made possible the spectacular burgeoning of science and t...

I think it is more accurate to say that, from a physical perspective, the four fundamental forces or interactions: the strong, the weak, the electroma...

Can a society function well if its inexpert members do not trust the most expert available opinion when it comes to scientific, medical, ecological an...

Thanks Theorem, for your well-considered response. I think this passage gives the clue to where our differences lie. If we can form regarding any thin...

Climate change (generated by us) is a real threat, and so we are a real threat insofar as we created it and are unwilling or unable to do anything to ...

Thanks. :cool:

I didn't mean to be dismissive of your arguments Theorem, but apart from Kant's analysis of the Transcendental Subject, which I agree that he says mor...

It's not entirely clear to me which elucidations you are referring to here, Mww, but I presume that you were referring to the ones presented by @"Theo...

Thanks for that, @"Mww." I'm not much of a fan of Kant's Practical philosophy. I don't see faith as a form of knowledge in any 'pure' (propositional) ...

Glad to be of service S(weetheart). :smile: :cool: :love: :halo: :yum: :starstruck: :joke:

Obviously, I don't agree with your interpretation of Kant, but there is no point wasting time and energy repeating myself. Again, I don't agree that K...

What did you "already do"? You haven't given any examples of objects whose origin, whether natural or artificial, is open to serious doubt. I can resp...

That's not how I interpret it. "Kant draws a line in the sand and tells us it's impossible to cross because" it's impossible in principle to see the o...

I don't flippantly reject that prediction, I thoughtfully reject that flippant prediction. :razz:

Great, I do so enjoy being chastised for rejecting predictions I didn't reject, much less flippantly reject.

OK, but doesn't the same as what you say here apply to speaking of 'things in themselves'? I can excuse Kant for this because it seems natural to thin...

That's a flippant and facile way to dismiss a prediction. Of course you must be familiar with the story of the boy who cried "wolf". No doubt superfic...

The way I read Kant, he is saying not that the noumenal causes the phenomenal, but rather that it is the phenomenal thought as in itself rather than a...

:up: :up:

No, if you want to claim there is no inherent difference between objects intentionally produced and those naturally produced then you would need to pr...

If you mean to say that the natural occurrence of an object indistinguishable from a carved stone tablet or a manuscript is possible, then I think you...

My understanding is that Hegel rejected the ding an sich as a 'mind-independent thing', because he saw it as another idea within consciousness, and no...

I would say that a text, insofar as its author created it for some reason, embodies something of the intentions of its author. A text also possesses i...

I believe Kant's arguments for noumena were purely logical, or formal, not causal. Something along the lines that 'if there are appearances then logic...

Yes, sorry I was a bit slow, but I see what you meant now about what nobody had said and I agree.

I completely agree with what you write here. Not sure about what "nobody has said yet", though...

I think the climate-change deniers have a relatively insignificant effect on what actually gets done. They are more of a symptom, or a voice for post ...

Politicians and the wealthy are not going to solve the problem because it is not in their short term interests to do so. The same goes for the populac...

No, your problem is that you don't argue in good faith. You still haven't directly answered the questions I asked. You're an insincere time-waster, Te...

Yes, a typo: it was meant to be "(even more or less) correctly".

You haven't directly answered the question. I want you to say that both of the examples of interpretation of the sentience are equally valid or correc...

You mean not being able to correctly interpret what someone said? Are you really that stupid or are you merely trolling?

Learn to read: I said not merely 'interpret' but 'interpret even more or less correctly'. If we are only interpreting what others say arbitrarily, tha...

So, neither of those example interpretations of the sentence I gave is more or less correct then? That would mean that neither of us can interpret (ev...

The "intentional fallacy" is the idea that a work perfectly mirrors the author's intentions; as thought the work was wholly conceived in every detail ...

Of course there may not be any such thing as an absolutely correct interpretation; would you also say that there are no more or less correct interpret...

So the meaning of the text, the correct interpretation, is "what the author had in mind"? Are you saying that texts cannot convey what their authors h...

How can there be "consistency, coherence, etc." between texts if they are inherently meaningless. If the meaning were merely in our heads, then we cou...

I'd say that is untrue: there is always a causal connection between the original work of Shakespeare and any copy of it. In any case I don't see the r...

So, you claim there is no difference between an ancient tablet and an object that displays naturally produced marks; that both embody no inherent mean...

I couldn't detect any change there, and I have nothing to add at the moment.

Yes, and here we seem to be back to the point introduced by @"Baden" about the impossibility of speaking about the noumenal. We don't know what the Re...