Janus

Those emotions you mention are dispositions of physical bodies and physically felt; so I don't know what you mean by saying they are non-physical.

No causation as it generally understood consists in energetic physical interactions that are indifferent to any ethical qualities we might impute to a...

If you aspire to be a believer then you have to accept that your finite intellect will never be able to understand the ways of an infinte intentionail...

Karma is not causation as it is ordinarily understood.

The claim is not that human actions are uncaused.

It doesn't tell against Spinozistic notions of God, or against the idea of God-given rewards in the afterlife; although of course there can be no evid...

Sure, it's just that it tells against the theory of Karma is all.

The problem is that it is very commonly observed that bad things happen to good people and good things happen to bad people.

I meant in the context of your use of it.

We can think rationally about God. This is what theology is all about. Or think of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz , Hegel and the Russian sophiologists. ...

Superstition often seems to derive from associations between things in terms of their perceived qualities or even between the names used to refer to t...

I haven't made any reference to determinism, but rather to determination. The difference between scientific knowledge and 'humanities' knowledge is th...

Yes, you explained it in another way, but very well! 8-)

Science enables us to understand the mechanics of what we are (physically) constrained by, but it does not inform us as to what we should do in situat...

I don't say that a naturalistic understanding of ethics, based in science would be wrong; if it is good science it should be right. I say that when we...

I certainly agree that we value potence over impotence, and that seems natural enough insofar as the difference has practical import. Beyond the ambit...

I like the names 'Loeb' and 'Lingam' (although I think the first is misspelt; it should be 'Low Ebb'). I think they themselves must be aliens, most li...

Sure gravity is a constraint on us; something that makes activities both difficult and possible. It is undeniably a very big, perhaps even the biggest...

Well, I have to take account of it if I want to survive. But I don't think gravity qualifies as "telos or value"and I don't see how it has any ethical...

Assuming that's true for argument's sake, you still haven't explained why we should care about such "telos or values". This failure seems to be the nu...

OK, well it looks like you have a very different notion of what "objectification" consists in than I do, so we can either talk past one another or agr...

I'm conjecturing that the reduction in brutality or physical violence is a result of civilize-ation, and that civilizing tendencies are both the resul...

I don't know, I would say the ethic behind "purity, loyalty and such" is the basically the avoidance of objectification; which I would call the basis ...

Sure, but you seem to be assuming your conclusion since reasonableness is tied to acts of measurement only on the assumption of the primacy of pragmat...

Yeah! I'd like to add that I am certainly in agreement with fostering conditions of "general reasonableness", but I don't think that precludes per se ...

This is not the kind of issue I would class as being directly morally or ethically significant in terms of effect on other humans.

Well, good luck with that; I don't think it will ever work because of the differences in mind sets between individuals.

OK, thanks for making the effort, but I'm afraid that after reading what you have cited I still have no idea how pragmatism relates to ethics other pe...

I would have thought it is obvious that I was referring to the time of its writing. :s The critiques of traditional philosophy offered by Hume and by ...

OK, you seem to be valorizing science over 'mere' philosophy; an attitude which I would count as an expression of scientism. But philosophy, and speci...

For me, though, it is not merely a matter of the observer and the observed. The essence of subjective experience is participation, and all the dynamic...

I would agree with darhbarracuda if the suggestion is that morality and ethics can only be grounded in understandings of human subjectivity; and not i...

I think it just comes down to 'more prosperity, less violence'. The prosperous also have much greater technological means now for keeping the less pro...

Except it's not as useful as the first person perspective when it comes to human interaction; and what could be more important for humans than that? I...

Hume's work is the only one that offers the critique, though; and assuming that the critique is correct, then his book has a value, on those grounds, ...

I read the passage differently; Peirce seems to want to distinguish self-consciousness from both "pure apperception" which is the assertion of "THE ( ...

Sure art "is not a purpose", it transcends purpose and that's why architecture can be art, and science or mathematics can be an art. But it's also tru...

So-called primitive art always had purposes that were really nothing like what we might consider the purpose of art. For that matter what about the di...

OK, but many novels are written to be merely entertainment, paintings are painted just for interior decoration and music is composed to make money, to...

If the only attributes we know are extensa and cogitans, material and thought, then the question as to what to call mental (or even what might be thou...

OK, sure, but under the idea that a thing may be of higher or lower artistic merit, then paintings, musical compositions or poems, also may be more or...

I disagree with you that this is Spinoza's view. He clearly states that extensa cannot have causal influence on cogitans, and cogitans cannot have cau...

So, you believe Dennett is doing nothing more ambitious than attacking substance dualism? Thinking along Spinozan lines:if extensa (materiality) and c...

I don't know what it could sensibly even mean to say that consciousness is an illusion. An illusion compared to what purported reality, exactly? I hav...

You seem to be contradicting yourself here by saying both that architecture is not art and that the Sydney Opera House is "high art". Is it the only c...

You know, sometimes I push too hard, especially when I think, rightly or wrongly, that the other person is misreading, or being stubborn, pedantic or ...

It's just the way the discussion has evolved; discussions often show a creative tendency not to remain within the narrow confines of imposed ideas con...

Again, you are committing a simplistic reading of my view. I am not claiming that "virtually everything is art", just that all human activities exempl...

Really? The four horsemen?

Post-apocalyptic man/horse porn?