Janus

Yes, it is remarkable what language (and the opposable thumb?) has enabled those little naked apes to do. Of course, fossil fuels have been a fortuito...

Right, except that I'm not prioritising thought over feeling. If anything I go the other way. Thought without affect is of no significance. On the oth...

I agree that what is said is not an adequate reflection of what is experienced. Affectivity alone does not say anything, it is just feeling.

:up:

I took you to be saying that a monkey descendant has produced the work of Shakespeare. and thus that the experiment has already been run. Obviously th...

It's not clear to me what you are arguing, or what you are arguing against. The idea of intellectual intuition is the idea that we can hsve purely rat...

Right, the chain of explanation is always potentially without end. The child can always endlessly ask 'why?'.

Considering the number of posdible combinations of English words, not to mention the almost infintely greater number of possible combinations of the l...

The philosophical point seems to be that we evolved from ancestral animals along with all the other contemporary species, and that what we are able to...

When it is presented as a philosophical position it is not so much an ideology as an inference to the best explanation, which is that humans evolved f...

There are no intuitions (in the ordinary non-Kantian sense) that are not linguistically formed, or at least that can be talked about without putting t...

As may mystics and theists. :up: I really cannot see any reason why this should be denied. It seems to me that those who reject it are those who just ...

Ah, of course, not so familiar with him either, other than reading Mere Christianity about 40 years ago. As I remember it his arguments didn't impress...

:cool:

Is this David Lewis you are speaking about? I'm not very familiar with his work. Is he a theist? I think you are right: that it is only theology which...

I agree that reality, in the determinate sense, is what is agreed upon intersubjectively. So, reality cannot be anything more, or other, than empirica...

I just see the two explanations as being different. Deciding to go to the shop can be explained in terms of intentionality or in terms of physical cau...

I don't see why a decision to (for example) go to the shop to buy milk, cannot be explained in terms of physical causes (environmental conditions and ...

The only reality we describe is the reality of shared human experience and concern, as I see it. Saying that the map is not the territory is saying th...

BTW I think this is an interesting OP, and the only reason I haven't commented is that I haven't found anything interesting to say about it, that hasn...

I can't help interjecting here, since I have already explained this to you. The categories of understanding are identifiable simply by reflecting on t...

:up:

So, not "boneheaded mistakes" but stoneheaded mistakes? (Just joking; I live just five minutes from the stoner capital of Australia). :halo:

I think it depends on what we mean by "ethics". If we think of ethics as the art of living well, then it has a broader provenance than morality, and s...

I'd say that with the advent and evolutionary development of culture, factors other than the merely biological certainly came into play, plausibly to ...

I'm not seeing why acquiring the capacity for reason should not be thought of as a result of evolutionary biology, driven by adaptation. We know that ...

I don't think many would disagree that reason is indispensable to human life. However, even if the semantic content of logic or rational thought canno...

:rofl: Gave me a laugh! The question was about people who are (presumably) capable of thinking strictly rationally, philosophers for example; what exp...

The neural networks in your brain have been formed by your unique life experience and genetic constitution such that hearing the proposition affects t...

That's a non-answer, or an argument from authority, (whivh amounts to being a non-answer) which I suspect you know. Do you think your argument and/or ...

Science only deals with subjects insofar as they are material, or physical, if you like. It is only those kinds of inquiries that can be rigorously te...

:up: It seems that there are, roughly speaking, two kinds of thinkers about the nature of the brain/mind: those who wish to discover new and better wa...

What exactly leads you to think so?

:up: cheers

Arse'n'all!

That sounds like an interesting avenue of investigation, that I am yet to take the first step upon. If only we had more time! Can you recommend an int...

There is no need to write a treatise on the foundations of logic; logical principles are actually fairly simple. We arrive at synthetic generalization...

But these "givens" that state what, for example, all experience must be like are not purely logically given (that is they are not tautologies in that ...

I wasn't referring to the subject: the argument from reason itself is not a purely deductive argument. You seem to be taking it for granted that a pur...

But, so what? That kind of purely formal logical deduction has little to do with actual human life and reasoning. Your "Argument from Reason" itself i...

So do I. The demand for certainty seems to be the motivator for the kind of platonist thinking that wants to place reason high up on on a throne presi...

I see two possibilities regarding my belief about anything whatsoever: the first being that the information I have encountered regarding the thing my ...

Good on you, mate, you must be used to it then...

I think these posts assess the issues aptly. Unisex toilets... :up: Although they might need to be phased in to get people used to the idea. I agree w...

The way I see it, everything that is outside of our conscious experience including what we don't know about ourselves is what we refer to apophaticall...

Regarding the trolley problem: people generally do not want to be agents causing the death of others, even it is accidental and not at all their fault...

:up: Yes, that is the conundrum. Perhaps part of the problem is the incapacity of people to viscerally care for more than some relatively small number...

The way I see it, we ought to cooperate if we want to enjoy happy lives, but not with anything that goes against a balanced sense of compassion and fa...

If we could somehow know the absolute truth about "life, the universe and everything" then it might make a difference to how we live our lives. But as...

If things-in-themselves are responsible for producing the phenomenal things, and the phenomenal things are reliably invariant (to varying degrees acco...