Janus

Of course we do live in the moment or better we do live now (where 'now' is not understood to be some incoherent 'point-instant') that is trivially tr...

I guess it depends on what is meant by "mental hygiene ". For me ethics has nothing to do with "optimisation", this notion reeks of 'capital', ethics ...

This is a good point in principle, but I doubt any of us actually live in the moment entirely without anticipation of future joy (or suffering). The t...

Sorry, but this reads like 'Think and Grow Rich' 'don't-forget-your-mental-hygeine', self-aggrandizing horseshit.

Your enjoyment of pleasure now is partly resulting from an accumulation of the effects of past pleasurable moments and the anticipation that pleasure ...

Without the accumulation over time there is no pleasure in the moment. The moment, as a point instant in time, is a chimera.

Yes, I definitely agree with you that "counterpart concepts" may be more amenable to causal accounts in physicalist terms, and may allow for some more...

The problem I see here is that terms such as "cognition" and "conation" and the like are as much folk psychological notions (despite being more 'techn...

For me the idea that universals could exist apart from the world is unintelligible, so there wouldn't seem to be any alternative to saying they are "p...

I am not sure what you think a "fine appreciation of music" consists in TGW, that is whether you think it is necessarily confined to some genre(s). In...

This way of thinking seems wrong-headed. Better to say that particulars are also universals, and universals are also particulars. or perhaps rather th...

Well why should we not say the predicates in the model are or are not reflective of the properties of what is being modeled?

Yes, but a model which doesn't model anything is not much of a model.

Ciceronianus, since this exchange, your enthusiasm and my curiosity has led me to do some reading of and about Dewey, and I must say that I agree with...

Because to express it this way would be to tendentiously make it appear that the properties of neutrinos are entirely constructed by us.

Yes, I agree that Aristotelian metaphysics is far more consonant with the richest kinds of phenomenological, pragmatist, process and enactive/ embodie...

I don't think this is so much a "novel idea" as a misunderstanding of modern realism, in the sense of understanding it as being monolithic. I mean, th...

I think this is the kind of classic false dichotomy that is typical of so much of the philosophical tradition, and that both platonic realism and nomi...

I am not convinced that we could know what the claim that the universe is mathematical means. For us the universe is sensate, material, and we can't m...

I read it but have not had the time to comment on it.

I agree that on a certain kind of reflection experience may seem to be a kind of interiority; but I don't agree if that is taken to support a claim th...

We reliably perceive resemblances in common. This naturally leads to the idea that what gives rise to intersubjective perceptions of resemblances must...

Yes, but I haven't been arguing that there are no universals, just that we have no idea what it would mean to say that they are real independently of ...

It may seem "odd" just because we can 'back-form' no exhaustive conceptualization of the process. But that we can produce no conceptual back-formation...

Streetlight, should that be "intra-conceptual difference"? If not, could you explain this entailment further? I'm not seeing it.

The notion of determinate essence is misleading. Or to put it another way, the perfectly intelligible notion of essence becomes by a fallacy of mispla...

The problem with this whole argument is that we know whether an entity is human, a tiger, a monkey, a frog and so on, not on the basis of running thou...

Darth, I don't think it is possible to "prove" that the world has no meaning, because any such "proof" would, contradictorily, be meaningful. The worl...

, I think the point of Brassier's paper is precisely emphasizing the importance of attempting to get clear about the relationship between concepts and...

That's convenient...

If you now want to distinguish between 'conceiving the possible existence' and 'conceiving the possibility', then your objection is inappropriate sinc...

Point taken, Cavacava, thanks. I certainly don't want to argue that there is a clear correlation between gun laws and shooting deaths or rampage killi...

Nonsense. A population of a few million people is plenty big enough to assess average trends.

Are you seriously claiming that you can't conceive of the possibility that there might be things in the universe that no one will ever know about? I t...

This supposed "reductio" of Berkeley's is based on an equivocation between conceiving of the possibility of an object and conceiving of the object, an...

OK, but if an object is a "bundle of ideas" then it is a bundle of conceptions; i.e. it is conceptual. That doesn't change the substance of the argume...

Is that a question or a statement? If the former then I don't understand it, and if the latter, then what is an object, beyond being a conception, acc...

Interestingly the US and Belgium, being the only countries with permissive gun laws are bang in the middle when it comes to both Rampage Shooting Inci...

Wayfarer, your reference to Aristotle reminds me of the parallel, or even isomorphy, that the contrast between his and Plato's understanding of the Fo...

I think it's fair to say that Berkeley's 'master argument' is, to put it very simply, based on the tautologous idea that what can be conceived must be...

This is nonsense; neutrinos ( their effects at least) can be measured, as can time and space; that's how we make sense of these things. The idea that ...

I pretty much agree with what both of you write here.

I tend to agree with Wittgenstein that philosophy is about getting clear about how language reflects common understanding and clearing up remaining co...

Well I can tell you the mode of existence of common objects; that they can be seen, felt, are publicly available to perception and so on. Everyone can...

You still haven't said anything about how the existence of your computer is analagous or similar to the supposed existence of abstracta. 'Augmenting' ...

I read it and it said precisely nothing about what it means for an abstraction to exist; and you haven't augmented your paucity of explanation since. ...

As I see it you're just playing with a tautology 'concepts are conceptual' and imagining that it can tell you something about how things are.

Then how can an abstraction be "more like your computer"?

That makes it no clearer. Your computer is not an abstraction.

You're misunderstanding; I know what 'abstraction' means, I have no idea what it means to say 'abstractions exist'. Can you explain what it means?