Janus

Spinoza already solved this Cartesian puzzle. There are not two substances, extensa and cogitans, but one substance seen under two attributes. This re...

Your response does not contradict what I said. States of affairs or actualities are specific, and so are statements about them. If the actualities wer...

I think this is a matter of logic; to be this or that no observer would seem to be required. To be distinguished as this or that an observer is requir...

I meant you are stipulating that the sense of the term "existence" should be restricted to "exists for us".

You are appealing to a narrow concept of existence here.

I see it more as reducing duality to non-duality; non-duality being neither one nor many. Duality is simply based on the notion of separation, a conce...

I don't think it is quite as clear as you seem to think it is. but I do agree that religion also fulfills other needs; it can provide a sense of commu...

There is a fourth possibility, and that is that there are many people who have psychological needs for salvation, but that there is no real possibilit...

If Trump lies, some may interpret it as him speaking truth. Nonetheless it seems plausible to think there is a fact of the matter as to whether he lie...

Free will in a deterministic world would not be free will as it is conceived in the libertarian sense. It would simply consist in a lack of constraint...

If we want to discuss Trump, then we must all see him as Trump, not as Hillary Clinton or Shirley Temple, no? We must all first agree about what he ha...

It seems obvious. When I'm working with another carpenter and I ask her to pass me the saw, she does not pass me the router. When I throw the ball for...

It's not clear to me what you are trying to get at, Baker.

If we all saw different things; if I saw a bus where you saw a tree, then no normativity would be possible. The fact that at the basic level of bare p...

What kind of question is that?

I've been talking about perception not politics.

I don't see it that way. Why do we, as societies, desire normativity? I'd say it is because we care about social harmony. We don't need to establish n...

I would have thought that reality as it is in itself cannot be known in principle, because reality as it is in itself is defined by its not being real...

I would not agree that Kant thinks our cognitions distort reality. I think he would agree that what we perceive is real; the way I see the tree, for e...

:up: All you say there makes good sense to me.

:up:

I agree with that, assuming that you mean everything should be out in the open and that there should be no hidden or unacknowledged premises at work i...

I think @"creativesoul" is either trading on, or confusing himself with, an ambiguity of expression: "S believes a broken clock is not broken". The be...

I don't think so. I guess the question is who is to be the judge when it comes to personal salvation...or enlightenment?

:up:

OK, fair enough...I guess I misunderstood where you were going with it.

Well, I do get into arguments about whether metaphysical arguments are truth-apt, and I think it is true that they are not, for the simple reason that...

Fair enough, I am stretching the conventional meaning of "sound" somewhat to apply to premises as well as arguments. I think it is fair to say that wh...

I understand "sound or unsound" to be equivalent to "true or untrue". Premises can be sound or unsound, true or untrue, but when it comes to metaphysi...

As I undertsnd it a propositional attitude can be a belief even if not all propositional attitudes are beliefs. So, I searched and found this: Proposi...

Belief presupposes a belief in truth, not the possession of it. If the truth cannot be determined, it is a mere human presumption that says there must...

I just came across this thread, so apologies if I repeat what has already been said. I don't see philosophical arguments as being true or false, but r...

Why can't it be said that S had a propositional attitude towards the clock; namely the belief that it was functioning. I must admit I'm struggling to ...

It is tangential, and I'm being pedantic in saying that it is not that they couldn't have imagined it, but that they didn't. Although, that said, if d...

Not "unimaginable", but unimagined; if they can say what happened to them, then it could not have been unimaginable.

Why do you say that? The idea of moral responsibility is inevitable for self-reflective social animals. To the degree that someone cannot be responsib...

'Religion" is not a strictly definitive term, but an "umbrella" term under which what are generally soteriological practices and / or beliefs can be u...

That's fair enough. I tend to think we have a political, social, cultural and historical as well as a basic physical and biological existence, and bey...

No, you can feel certain that you are a cat, but you cannot be certain that you are a cat if you are not. The point was to draw a distinction between ...

Your citing of Descartes had apparently led me to think you were addressing the ontological, not the political, question of your existence; a differen...

You've never been called a bellicose bumpkin?

It's only exhausting in principle. I think the point still stands, if my existence is dependent on my being able to assert it, then I don't exist at s...

Sounds like you are probably talking about almost all of the universe, at least with reference to human experience.

I'd say there are as many conceptions of "the world" as there are people. The basic idea "the world" is culturally learned, it is now a convention, an...

Yes, that makes sense to me.

:lol: Yeah, that's about how seriously I take this nonsense. Any term can only be defined in other terms, so how does any term help? :roll: You know a...

We follow a convention and accept a taken-for-granted everyday world. But that world is not created by anyone since it doesn't actually exist.

Forever means there is no limit in prinicple. What does "qu-orever" mean? Tell me that and I'll tell you whether I meant that. I don't even know what ...

That notion of self-knowledge is unproblematic—it is a matter of developing awareness of what is being felt, thought and done and how those feelings, ...

I think cultural differences are overblown and that Wittgenstein's comment about not being able to understand the lion is ridiculous. What language is...