Janus

If it is not pangs of hunger that motivate animals to eat, then what is it? Lions, for example, will not show any interest in prey when sated. It seem...

Not something that could ever be empirically confirmed. So what do your instincts tell you? Do they tell you it doesn't matter if you torture animals,...

No prior awareness of the hunger of the self for subsistence then?

The problem I see with what you are apparently proposing (that the difference between sophistry and philosophy is itself only apparent) is that you mu...

That makes sense. Clarity means determinability. And mathematical and logical propositions are more determinable than empirical truths. The former two...

Yes, but all those advances are in regard to the world we experience and precisely how it is thinkable. They really say nothing about the unthinkable;...

I think that is just what people have been doing for centuries; I'm just not convinced that subsequent scientific advances bestow any improved ability...

The only problem for your view seems to be that whatever philosophical implications we might think are inherent in the maths cased science cannot them...

I think it is just here where have nothing more than intuition to rely on. Anything we might believe regarding "prime matter, pure potential, unformed...

Perhaps the "unrepresented" is a kind of retrospective formation. We experience things as they are presented to us. Then we say we represent them to o...

As I said think there is a useful logical distinction between identity and identification. To identify something is to identify it as something which,...

The difference is that for Schopenhauer the ontological principal and principle is a blind, mindless, purposeless striving. The notion of logos is qui...

I'm right there with you... 8-)

For me there are different senses of 'know'. First there is the knowing of participation, familiarity. I believe animals do this; it seems obvious. Wi...

I believe I could recognize the identity of most of the posters on here that I interact with, and quite a few that I don't, just from the character, t...

The problem here is that values have evolved within cultures that were previously separated from one another. As the population and the means of trans...

I'm not proposing any "thought/ world duality, in fact I am proposing just the opposite, Is there any continuum-in-itself apart from the one we know? ...

No, I can very easily imagine culture specific values, What I am saying is that if they are merely culture specific then they arbitrary in relation to...

The problem with what you say here is that if there is no essential value that consists in virtue of simply being a human value, then all values, incl...

I was referring to dimensions of inherent human meaning.

So, there could well be other dimensions of inherent meaning then?

Does 'inherent meaning' here mean something like 'no precisely formulated preordained purpose' or something stronger and/or more comprehensive than th...

I don't see how this follows. To separate "one piece of a continuum from another" is not necessarily to treat it as digital; but simply to treat it as...

Yes, that's a better way of putting it; precisely the expression I was groping for.

From a purely cultural point of view something is only genius if it is judged to be so. Something cannot coherently be said to be genius from 'an abse...

Or from the possibility of different actions? I think of the fully fledged symbolic logic of negation and opposition as being prefigured in the less d...

I found nothing to respond to in what you wrote except this. How do you determine genius in the absence of any criteria of cultural value? Also, you s...

Seems a bit superficially dismissive. And I don't think apologetics of any kind was what Hegel was actually interested in. Have you actually attempted...

Yes, I guess that is the big question. But even if the real turned out to be (that is if we could know without question that it definitely was) discre...

I think what you say here is very one-sided: there could be no heritage absent the presently available expressions of unique past individuals. I''m no...

I actually agree very much with this, and I wasn't implying that I think modern Western culture is not teeming with existential and spiritual problems...

Those statistics you cite are merely that; statistics, and they don't necessarily reflect the status of love and friendship in the vast lebenswelt. I ...

Nature does 'talk to you' in non-linguistic ways and instinctive moral commands act in ways like your body telling you what to eat and not in ways lik...

I think it's worth noting that the continuum, just as much as digital logic, exists only by virtue of thought. Thought enables the coming-to-be of par...

A society that was genuinely "for nobody" would mean a society that was equally for everybody. Why should we expect to enjoy anything more than a situ...

The "moral environment", in both the broadest global and the narrowest local senses, is obviously influential on both the individual development, as w...

Humans (mostly) have natural moral instincts just as social animals have natural social instincts that 'tell them what to do'.

Perhaps I am not really disagreeing with you, but to me Russell's example is not a good analogy because the chicken should not expect invariant behavi...

I think I'm more saying that nature as far as we can tell is and has always been uniform, even if only statistically, and not deterministically so, an...

And in particular: All I can say is that as I conceive it the discreteness of digitally or symbolically conceptualized entities (the conceptual bounda...

I actually don't agree that we have no rational warrant for expecting the invariances we are so familiar with to continue to be. There is a huge (rela...

You seem to be running together two different processes in your thinking; you seem to be conflating perceptualization and symbolic conceptualization. ...

I.m not sure I understand the question. Digitization is the introduction of crisply discrete values, One discrete value cannot be another discrete val...

Digitization just is the introduction of precise boundaries. Problem?

A boundary is only put precisely there by digitization.

What you write here seems to me to risk blurring a very good binary distinction between the digital and the analogue, or between the dichotomous and t...

It might seem something of a weird or even perverse thought, but I don't think time could have had a beginning, because a beginning can coherently be ...

Yeah, I guess they probably couldn't do more harm than is already being done if they worked against, rather than for, plutocratic interests.

Implementing projects, if by that you mean projection and development of infrastructure, seems to be mostly a function of state governments in Austral...

Well, I guess if "getting more done" is your criteria for the good life, then a "decent" tyrant ( if there is such a thing) might be useful. I agree t...