Janus

I can't speak for speak for Pseudonym, but the point I have been emphasizing is the undecidability, as opposed to the meaninglessness, of metaphysical...

I guess so, but documentary evidence, even video is not the same as witnessing it yourself. Anyway the point of distinction is between verifiable at l...

So it is verifiable in principle but not at the present time? Oddly enough there are mamy examples of what we count as knowledge which are not verifia...

You could well be right. I have no doubt you are a more competent interpreter of Sellars than I am.

Whether or not there are aliens is not a metaphysical question, though, is it?

OK, well that still seems irrelevant to recent discussion, but at least it's back to the OP. I agree that people succumb to, or opt for, scientism. Bu...

OK, I see what you mean now, I think. If I'm right you mean that the conditions under which you mistake pooh for John are not determinable, as they ar...

Thanks for the lesson on Plato and Aristotle. I've actually read them, and about them, extensively. have you read them yourself? A lot of what you say...

"If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters--yes, even their own life--such a person cannot be...

Right, I'd say we can ask them simply because of the combinations of ideas made possible by language; which is no small thing. The fact that we can co...

The presumption of reality is primary, no skepticism in the Cartesian sense is possible without that presumption. Ancient skepticism consisted in the ...

Right. How near is "near". If the sun were really perceived to be "small and near" then presumably I would be able to touch it, and then perhaps I wou...

I don't know. I had thought you were wanting to say there is a substantive point about perceptual error in the 'John and Pooh' example beyond what is ...

I think it's fair to say that all of the ancients were naive realists insofar as they considered things to be substances; substantive entities that in...

I need to think about this some more Aaron, but my immediate take is that the difference between seeing John instead of seeing Pooh, that is the perce...

I disagree with him too, but it is indeed "an exquisite thought thing". And I've been tending to think lately, in general, that metaphysical speculati...

That makes sense; the fact that we can conceive infinity can only be on account of the existence of an infinite being, a fact which, if true, guarante...

I always thought this guarantee was a matter of the omnibeneficence of God: that because he is a perfectly good being he would not deceive us.

Does the idea that there is a perceptual error arise because we say "Is green, but looks blue under certain conditions"? What if we said "looks green ...

It's true that intersubjectivity cannot establish anything ":absolute". It is the incoherent demand for something "absolute" that is the problem. So, ...

"Essences in the things themselves" is basically Aristotle's alternative to Plato. I think the problem is that this idea tries to circumvent the relat...

You seem to be ignoring the fact that distinctions between real and imaginary or hallucinated "seemings" are established intersubjectively. So, your '...

So you think the mind is something other than the body/ brain? If you do think so then you are a dualist, and not merely a hylomorphic dualist either....

OK, but generalities or universals or whatever you want to call them are abstracted from real aspects of perception and are essential in order to be a...

You may not have use the word 'container', but when you speak about "taking place in the mind' that is exactly the model you are assuming. If you are ...

Bateson, unless I am mistaken, argues precisely against the kind of container model of mind that you are presenting.

Why, if the mind is a real aspect of nature, must something be mind-independent to be counted as real?

Sure numbers are "immaterial" if this term is defined to mean 'not material objects'. But this does not justify reifying immateriality as a substance,...

The way I see it this passage exemplifies the very category error I spoke of in previous posts. You demand that for something to be thought of as part...

I don't deny that number, multiplicity, is real; you'd be a fool to deny that; I don't even know what it could mean to deny it. What i do deny is that...

I wouldn't go so far as to say that there is unmediated contact with anything, but merely that there certainly seems to be. The question then becomes ...

OK, fine, keep worrying about it then. :razz:

Not everything that is real must have a location in space and time. What we call universals are abstractions from real differences and relations in na...

Yes, but the point you are missing is that the first one is directly experienced as a force. Don't worry about whether it is "in itself" an electromag...

It's not experienced as "an electromagnetic force" but as a push or a strike or whatever. It seems obvious to me that this is where the very concept o...

So you deny that you feel bodily impacts, and the power of your own body to affect other things? Really?

We don't need to conceptualize an apple as an apple to see it as something that we have encountered before. Animals do that all the time.

The answer to that seems quite simple; we feel forces that impact our own bodies, but we do not see them. So, when a billiard ball strikes another we ...

Right, causation isn't seen as something "in front of us" it is felt in us, in our bodies.

You don't feel the impact of forces on your body, the wind or sun on your face? Or the power of your own body to move things around, and the resistanc...

But Hume says we don't see causality.

That's funny! I do think it is a kind of metaphysical, but really more of a phenomenological, point. In any case, even if it is not meaningless, it is...

That's an utterly pointless point. Obviously dogs don't possess symbolic language ability, so they could hardly be expected to be able to abstract gen...

All these terms have their genesis in the proprioceptive experiences of the body: as abstractions they are just that; mere abstractions from a more fu...

I find it hard to imagine any embodied being whose primary sense would not be its own embodied-ness. So, just as we don't see causality, we don't hear...

I don't think it can reasonably be disputed that we experience causality directly in the form of forces acting on our bodies and our bodies acting on ...

Setting aside what I said in my previous post, does (2) mean that we can only experience one particular at a time? Say, I'm looking at two faces; what...

When I perceive anything I can compare it to memories that I have of perceiving other things and recognize similarities and differences between the tw...

Sure, I have no issue with the term 'transcend' in that kind of context. That's a usage of the term which I, and I believe Wittgenstein would, agree d...

Well, that's one view of what Wittgenstein was primarily about. Another view is that his main philosophical concern was to deflate metaphysical claims...