Option 1 leaves open a whole bunch of other possibilities, most unconceived of as-yet. Therefore you don't know whether "the three options have the sa...
I think it's always useful as a grounding maneuver to think of the development of thought as something that was opened up by the possibility of lying....
Not all preferences are mere preferences, sometimes people can have preferences for the truth, either something that happens to be true, or something ...
I don't think "consciousness," "awareness," etc., have any particular crisp definition that's THE definition. There's always the temptation to think o...
Yes, I'd say there are degrees of consciousness. Waking up is a gradual process - at first awareness and thought are vague, cloudy, sluggish; the reve...
Generally speaking, I think all the (relatively safe) psychoactive drugs can be valuable in giving insight and getting the ol' noggin' joggin', but th...
The continuity is thus:- In his later years, Wittgenstein came to think of the Tractatus as an extended, somewhat more systematic example of an illust...
The bridge between biology and culture is evolutionary psychology. So: simply due to the nature of the human animal and the nature of its lived contex...
I just remembered another philosopher who might be useful for triangulation on this: Karl Popper. Towards the end of his life he developed the metaphy...
I'm not sure how comfortably the idea can be transferred from biology to philosophy, maybe it's too specific to biology? (And wouldn't Hegel's philoso...
This is a form of what's called "Panpsychism." There are many different versions of it. Usually a Panpsychist will respond to the, "are microchips con...
In order to be ACCEPTED as a fact, etc. Whether it is a fact or not depends on how reality is. The real facts could be buried somewhere else with ever...
Again, this just presupposes that logic is a property only of formal systems we construct. I can only repeat what I said above: if and when a logical ...
What does anything I said have to do with "enhancing one's moral character?" What does that even mean? Reproduction isn't a "blind instinct," if it we...
Reality's "real structure" can be consistent, complete, etc., reality itself just is what it is, whatever it happens to be, whatever we find it as. Bu...
It's a more or less Aristotelian position. Morality (which has nothing to do with any sort of "commandments" of course) is a function of teleology in ...
It's the abortionist who is the murderer, and "risking" isn't necessarily morally culpable if you've done your best to minimize the risk (it would be ...
Why can't it be a bit of both? That an object looks yellow to the jaundiced eye is as much a property of the object as of the jaundiced person. Again:...
Yes, but we're never at any point departing from a distinction between possibility (or in Kant's terms possible experience) and actuality. The apriori...
But isn't mathematics paradigmatically a practice that draws out what's implicit in postulates? It's just that what's implicit in physics models often...
Talk to people at the level they themselves talk. People vary in intelligence, but if you are yourself intelligent, you should be intelligent enough t...
This is our fundamental disagreement. They are very much part of the nature of the coin, in the sense that they are ways the coin exists under those c...
Yikes, this is really difficult! :) I don't agree with the a-s dichotomy. All truths are analytic, it just depends on how well acquainted we are with ...
Great stuff, thanks. I really must get into Heidegger, I've been reading more and more odds and ends that make me think it's about time I made a deep ...
It's not that I don't understand that idea, it's that I think it's incoherent, and that I understand objectivity to be simply scientific objectivity (...
That's an excellent exposition, but on reading it, it occurred to me - wasn't that covered, and answered in advance by Kant, when he put the CI as, "T...
I think that's sort of right, but I'm not sure what "moves from" means, and I'm not sure that "language" is the right term - "from concepts to reality...
Who ever thought it was? "Bent" is just the way a stick in water appears. And we all know it, it's not in the least mysterious or "subjective." Same f...
Racism is a mixture of two things: a high level of the psychological trait of "disgust", and a confusion between averages and stereotypes. Disgust was...
They appear that way to everyone, and everyone also knows that the stick isn't bent and that the Muller-Lyer lines are not of unequal length. So how c...
Oh I see what you mean now. That's definitely not the sense in which Wittgenstein thought philosophy was therapeutic. He didn't think philosophy was p...
It's really a bit deeper than that. The apriori is the deep underlying rules of the "grammar" of language and thought. Apriori statements look like th...
But it's objective only according to your preferred pretty pattern. There's no intrinsic reason, in nature, to prefer equal distribution. So what if p...
Look into "War Communism." Upon accession to power, the Communists immediately put into practice the full Communist manifesto, more or less by the boo...
Nothing, you'd have to genetically re-engineer people to work as drones. There's nothing special about money, it's just a medium of exchange that faci...
That's the trick though, consciousness isn't just "in the brain." The brain is at the end of a whole bunch of impinging causal chains, consciousness i...
I think you're looking at it in a weird way, nature is potential, your genetics is your potential, but that doesn't mean your nature is "determined" b...
Yes, there's nothing apriori to suggest that all forms of being are necessarily time-and-space bound, and we already have examples of possible things ...
I don't think so, and that's a very weird construal of Wittgenstein. Even on the point of philosophy being "therapeutic," that's a common idea about W...
Yes, well that's the "Catholic" attitude. But lots of people can't stand decoration and like things to be clean-lined and functional. Art and life see...
As with most things, it's a bell-curve distribution. A few people are ok with being alone (and for them being alone is solitude rather than loneliness...
Yes, when there are two different ultimate values, and there's some confusion between which value is being held as ultimate. IOW, you can have an acti...
Yeah I do think materialism is waning - you can see increasing scepticism about materialism on both the Left and Right. I'm not sure how to parse "tur...
I'm referring to the 60s generation who followed Marcuse, the New Left who became today's liberal establishment, etc. The aetiology of it's quite simp...
I think it's natural variation - the balance between the various psychological factors that people like Haidt, Pinker and Peterson talk about (e.g. hi...
America nowadays is a a civic concept, it's about civic association via an idea/ideal. European is more of a racial concept, basically genetic (it mea...
Some on the Alt Right thought the movie hilarious precisely because it represents as an ideal for Blacks what Whites are forbidden from thinking about...
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