Janus

The OP says nothing about Schopenhauer's pessimism. The fact that Schopenhauer thinks we can know something about the thing in itself by introspection...

If only governments would do that, but I have little confidence that they will. It's not just governments and industry but the voters; if we all consi...

I understood this thread to be about whether we can know the nature of the in-itself not about whether we can "escape" from it. Presuming we can or ca...

That which I didn't address was off-topic in this thread, and I have no interest in going over your anti-natalism arguments again. Did I say you are j...

Some skilled writing, but for me the story lacked realism, plausibility and humanity.

When I said this: I was not aiming for a pessimistic characterization of human life in toto, but rather in general. I think some individuals can accep...

For sure a huge difference, but not only, or even predominately, in a good way. You can say we are higher than the other animals because we can do thi...

For me this raises the question as to whether the embodiment of an animal is not already the beginning of individuation. There seems to be the natural...

It cannot be denied that we are unique in possessing symbolic language, but other animals are each unique in other ways. The fact that we have written...

That's because your thinking is mired in human exceptionalism. This kind of thinking brought us to the dire situation regarding the environment we fin...

We see animals treating tress differently than the ground; for example, we see birds perching in trees, goannas climbing trees to escape from us, and ...

How do we know that individuation is something we do to nature, and not something nature does to us? After all it is not we who decide what will appea...

I am not impressed by what others think unless it accords with what I think, or they can change my mind by arguments powerful enough to be convincing,...

:cool: I don't see this as mystical. A perspectiveless world cannot be imagined, but it also cannot be imagined that the world absent any percipients ...

Thanks, I've read the book. Meillassoux actually rejects, and purports to refute, the correlationist argument as I remember it. From the fact that sub...

Yes, we can't say matter is alive in the sense that organisms are understood to be alive, because that would dissolve the distinction between life and...

It's simply the idea that the cosmos existed before humans. I don't understand what you think is problematic about the idea.

The only normativity I understand to be essential to rationality comprises coherency, consistency and non-contradiction. I see none of those in the id...

I don't see the idea of the world existing independently of humans as being nonsensical or contradictory at all, unlike 'round squares" or "the square...

:up: I made the point earlier that "will' might be thought of as energy, which in the current paradigm is understood to be matter. But then how is a "...

Drum or meat?

The point is more a sociological than a philosophical one. Sure, but that is just one among approach among others. Are you saying that some approaches...

The realist attitude is the only possible attitude in the context of the common world we all obviously share. The naive move is to extrapolate this at...

I agree, it seems incoherent.

I always liked James' characterization of thinkers as tough-minded or tender-minded.

I don't know everyone, so I can't answer that. I do doubt that there are not many well-educated people, including scientists, who realize that all we ...

We are morally responsible for our actions, (although then only insofar as they will impact others) but we don't have to answer to anyone for our thou...

I just don't see the point about science being only about how things appear to us as being difficult to understand or adding anything that hadn't alre...

We have, on the one hand, science which looks without to investigate phenomena and attempts to understand how things behave and interact, the world of...

I'm here to discuss philosophy with other people online, not to be referred to texts. If that book or article makes an argument that you think is sign...

We can say there is a discursive self, just as we might say there is a poetic self, a feeling self or an experiencing self, but are these selves anyth...

It presumptuous to claim that I'm not seeing a point that you cannot explain. If you think there is a point I'm not getting, then you should be able t...

That passage does not seem to explain anything in a coherent way. If you think it does, can you explain it to me? It simply follows grammatically that...

:up:

Only if you can make a coherent case; and finding that, it seems, remains the "holy grail" of idealism. "Some sense" is not a coherent case. I view Be...

All this sounds very vague and hand-wavy, which would be OK if we were doing mysticism or poetry.

OK, I'm very familiar with that oft-quoted passage and have actually read Schopenhauer's WWR, admittedly not closely but "skimmingly". I was asking fo...

Can you give a brief explanation of just what Schopenhauer's idealism consists in? I mean if the unifying factor that explains the commonality of expe...

I'm just pointing out that the "first person" there is redundant. Are there any experiences which are not "first person"?

I'm not committed to the laws of nature: I'm saying that regularities are observed everywhere; if you want to study things and try to understand how t...

I have no doubt that (some) animals have a sense of being (Dasein), but of course in order to think about, in the abstract sense, that primordial sens...

Or well-hung.

Yes, it's no first person.

Echoing the voice of Dasein.

It's interesting you say "closure and exclusiveness" because as you have also said, my everyday sensual experiences are exclusive to myself and closed...

I can relate to that. All experience is really non-dual and cannot be adequately explained in (necessarily) dualistic language, So, our explanations a...

I also read to catch up on things; mostly science and issues like resource depletion, global warming, ecology, cosmology...The interesting difference ...

I'd go further and say that absent rationality there could be no notion of collision in the first place. Of course that's true, but the experience its...

I agree with this in the sense that anyone who experiences anything is obviously a part of the lifeworld, but I don't think it follows that everything...