Janus

There are many obvious facts of human life that are pre-science. There are also newer scientific facts. How do you purport to know what way I supposed...

I see philosophy as essentially ethical. Whereas morality involves others ethics need not. "How should I best live" is an ethical question. The answer...

Why would it be when we are all individuals and may find very different approaches individually beneficial? Even if there were only one way of doing p...

That's nonsense. Nothing doesn't make sense on the basis of reason alone except that which is self-contradictory. Materialism is self-contradictory on...

Yes I wasnt trying to suggest that animals could change their preference for their own kind. And I agree with you that such a disposition is a pragmat...

Unfortunately I can find nothing to disagree with there. :up: Yes it seems that whatever we say about this there will be a way or ways of interpreting...

I think the inference is that what we can possibly know of things does not exhaust their being. There has been a well-known disagreement between Kant ...

It depends on what you mean by "experience". If you restrict the term to mean "consciously experienced" and I agreed with that restriction then I woul...

Sounds nasty. I hope never to experience it.

If 'the thing in itself' denotes the thing "independent of any experience of it" then how can it be "the thing that excites our senses"? To say that i...

Right of course we have a concept we call "fundamental reality". My point was that if there is such a thing as a fundamental reality it is not a conce...

It was known as I said by being experienced and understood as a force. It is irrelevant that Newton may have coined the word 'gravity'. Are you going ...

I already acknowledged that the force was known but not the (scientific) explanation for it. That humans commonly consider other animals of lesser val...

Again I disagree. The force was known. It would have been observed everywhere and even felt in the body. What was different was the explanation for th...

Gravity defined simply as the tendency of things to fall was and is experienced by everyone. It is hardly something one could be unaware of. Speculati...

I like to maintain a distinction between what is deliberately learned in order to be able to participate in some specific activity and what one introj...

You mean if there were no constants then no stability including life would be possible? If so I agree. That seems obvious. I think using the word cons...

I am not clear what the distinction would be between being composed of propositions and being a proposition or set of propositions or being composed o...

If fundamental reality wasn't consistent with what? Life? If fundamental reality wasn't consistent with life life couldnt exist? Profound!

No, 'shape' is the name of a discernible. 'E' is the name of a human sound.

I would say that most everyone knows very well what theft, assault, rape, murder and torture are, so I'm not seeing the confusion you apparently think...

The almost universal agreement about the most significant moral issues I outlined above doesn't change from time to time or culture to culture, as lea...

The counterpoint would seem to be that what you "know" as right and wrong might not be what others "know" as right and wrong. That said, most everyone...

The shapes, not the names.

The presumptousness of the inexpert.

I'm not sure about saying that myths and metaphysical speculations are pre-rational. I guess it depends on what you mean by "rational". I think of rat...

If I understand what you are saying I think I agree. It is often said that the self, being the experiencer cannot be itself the object of experience, ...

Fair points!

Morality does not issue from anything as arcane as cosmogony but rather from the pragmatic necessities of harmonious social life.

Yes, there is the assumption that either we are all the same or that at least we are all basically the same. Is that assumption justifiable? I don't k...

I wasnt thinking so much of a distinction between hard and soft sciences. I think phenomenology is unique whether counted as science or not in that it...

I wasnt thinking clearly. I should have said "foster laziness" not "prevent laziness'. I find nothing to disagree with in what you've said. Perhaps an...

You had me almost believin' for a moment there!

As far as I remember Husserl considered phenomenology to be the science of consciousness, of human experience. I see the epoché, the bracketing of the...

I wonder whether using LLMs to tidy up grammar and improve clarity of expression would not hamper one's own development of those skills. In other word...

It does depend on how you define science. I think Husserl considered phenomenology to be a science, and I see no reason not to think of psychology, an...

AFAIK since Nietzsche Husserl and Heidegger the continentals have (purportedly at least) eschewed metaphysics or at least reduced it to be a subset of...

I refuse to use ChatGPT at all. I suspect some participants are using it to research particular issues and to enhance their own posts making them look...

OK. I'm not denying that so-called analytic and continental approaches to philosophy are concerned with different things. Its too complex a topic to b...

Certainly the brain can be studied by empirical science. Consciousness as such though is not an observable phenomenon. Dennett recommends an approach ...

I'm not concerned about labels. I just don't understand the call for a "first-person" science given that we already have phenomenology and (I forgot t...

Don't we already have, and have had for a long time, that "first-person science" in the form of phenomenology?

Right, but then isn't that the "simpleminded" case? :cool:

Well, I think it's either simpleminded or dishonestly tendentious. "Trying to gain a rhetorical advantage" seems a strategy more suited to sophistry t...

Would it be the robot's "brain" that decided or the robot itself? :wink:

It isn't different to what I've been saying all along. My writing seems clear to me, but maybe I overestimate its clarity for others, I don't know.

I'm familiar with Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience. I read the book many years ago. I agree that it makes no sense speaking about the brain d...

By "cause" I mean something like "provides the necessary conditions". I'm not thinking in terms of "linear' efficient causation, although that too arg...

You apparently just don't get it. I don't expect you to agree with me, but your objections, which amount to changing the subject, show no understandin...

A square circle is not either/ or and nor is it a paradox, It is just an incoherent conjoining of words.