Janus

I honestly can't see any sense in which the cup is not in the cupboard. And I am completely familiar with all the idealist and anti-realist arguments;...

I think it makes sense to say that a class can be insulted, but obviously not that it can feel insulted.

OK, that does sound rather hysterical, so perhaps we ought to let it rest.

No I don't agree that the "inanimate thing we call the universe" is the "larger context"; it is just a part of the life and world we know, the part th...

No, nor do I.

:-O 8-) ;) :)

In this answer to MU earlier I already acknowledged that by 'transcendent' I meant 'an intuited or imagined context' that goes beyond the life and wor...

This is sounding very 'Vienna School'. If by 'sensibly' you mean something like 'in terms of the senses' then there's your category error right there;...

That's right because religious experiences cannot be intersubjectively corroborated. One person will say this constitutes very good reason to expunge ...

Overarching meaning that is understood to be given by a transcendent reality. Surely you knew this already? Are you that unfamiliar with religions and...

Well, I already knew you were inaptly demanding explanations, in terms of principles appropriate to contexts of immanent meaning, of positions that af...

Apparently you are thinking of "overarching" in a different sense than I am; which is fine, the word, as with all words is polysemous. I will explain ...

It could equally be called a "spiritual state". The cup is there in the cupboard in spirit.

This is truly a lame and lazy analogy! Surely you can do better than that? Face the truth man; you're deeply biased here.

So your favoured principle is "Guilty until proven innocent"? That in itself is revealingly tendentious; why not the other way around?

Sure, but you continue to ignore that little word: "overarching".

Sure they could be category errors, and by the same token, so could the atheist's claim that meaning of life talk is meaningless. The problem is that ...

The irony is amazing; it was you that initially made the completely unsupported claim that talk about the 'meaning of life' is a category error. I mer...

Jesus, man, talk about being pedantic! If the idea of a "meaning of life" makes sense; it is only in the context of theological notions. It's a huge s...

OK, but if I made a "mistake" it was that I thought it would have been obvious that the notion of an "author of life who intended it to have meaning" ...

You're just being obtuse; the "sense or context" for my statement is the traditional notions of God; if you can't or won't see that that is all I want...

The point is that the "hay" has already been made by the theological tradition. I'm not here to expound theism; but merely to point out that it is wit...

This (despite the restricted domain it prescribes) highlights two fourths of what philosophy deals with.The other two fourths is comprised of perfectl...

For the sake of convenient context here is my "blunt, unargued for assertion": Now, I haven't claimed that theology has "an internally undifferentiate...

But why demand that I give sense to an idea which is eminently familiar and exhaustively elaborated (theology) within the philosophical tradition; a t...

For millennia, within theistic contexts, it has been thought by philosophers and common folk alike that life has an author (God) who gives it an overa...

It's a common tactic to feign ignorance when you cannot deal with an idea: your response is not "harsh" at all, but rather soft and unconvincing. The ...

Yes, but I haven't assumed that. An overarching meaning is a meaning which is real beyond the "inside" of a context. If there is no "outside" to life ...

Ironically it is your response that is an "object lesson" in category error, because you are attributing your own prejuidical assumptions to a context...

Yes, but that is not meaning in an "overarching" sense, but meaning within a context.

The question about the meaning of life ('meaning', that is, taken in an overarching sense) is coherent if your premise is that life has an "author" wh...

What you say here is circular. If well-being is the best goal (which is itself questionable because of the ambiguity of the notion "well-being", but g...

Statement 1 is the greater insult because it is the more comprehensive; it insults all men, both individually and as a class. Statement 2 insults all ...

No, this is too simplistic; intention is the decision, whether conscious or not, to act on one desire rather than another.

What you say here leads me to highlight something about litewave's determinism. According to it, there is no source of action that is not an "external...

The intention is the choosing; whether that choosing is conscious or not. You are confusing yourself by reifying abstract notions. I don't have any mo...

I have already agreed that it is not rationally consistent with the scientific view of nature, and that it cannot be justified by pure rationality. Bu...

So, why not you and Napoleon, then?

I don't think it is arbitrary; it is the basis of being able to talk about "you" and 'me" in the first place. I think this cannot be anything beyond "...

Yes, exactly!

You still seem to be missing the point; these are justifications in terms of practical, not pure, reason. The point is that you cannot produce a ratio...

If we are exhaustively natural beings determined by the laws or order of physical nature and those laws are comprehensively rationally intelligible, t...

If the soul is the having, then it is empty apart from the had.

This has always been a bit of a problem for me, too. But finally now, as an old bastard, I am confident that the range of my philosophical interests w...

OK fairy nuff.

When has there ever been a real example of a physical process that wasn't dependent upon consciousness to manifest? As I see it physical processes and...

What difference exactly are you trying to indicate? What part of the statement I made are you disagreeing with? Of course I would agree there are patt...

I always have a few books (mostly philosophy) that I have read and/or am no longer interested in for sale on eBay. At the moment I have 3 Heidegger bo...

I imagine mailing direct as you do if you sell books on eBay. If Amazon or eBay are not used then it would be financially better for the seller and bu...

Sure, I used to reach profound states of self-realization and linguistic and sexual bliss when I was younger and acoholically intoxicated, especially ...