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apokrisis

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No. My solution is to focus instead on other models of development within Aristotle's writings - like the symmetry-breaking of potential by the separa...
September 15, 2016 at 03:39
You really are missing Banno! But anyway, my starting point would be that arriving at truth would have to be the result of a process - an epistemic pr...
September 15, 2016 at 00:01
Personally, I wouldn't because it would be something I believe on rational~empirical grounds rather than poetic or aesthetic. And a Peircean pragmatis...
September 14, 2016 at 21:43
As John points out, to make these kinds of measurements is no simple because it presumes taking a snapshot view of a world in motion. And to do this, ...
September 14, 2016 at 12:15
As I understand it, Aristotle's argument was that change could not have a beginning in an efficient cause. So the alternative had to be that there was...
September 14, 2016 at 12:07
That is certainly right. It is the way we sort out the self from the world in terms of the actions we can freely take vs the reality which is their co...
September 14, 2016 at 00:53
This sounds like his discussion of Zeno's paradoxes. But I would say that more generally Aristotle takes the position that nothing comes from nothing....
September 13, 2016 at 22:27
I guess this is where semiosis becomes close to idealism in that the "material world" feels like that which we can know the least. We only have the pl...
September 13, 2016 at 05:00
Every papercut turns into the Holocaust with you. Did I tell you to lie to yourself or did I say stop presuming that you own the truth?
September 13, 2016 at 04:31
So define suffering for me - in a way that doesn't include everything (like being tickled, vaguely bored or uneasy, laughing until it hurts, satiated ...
September 13, 2016 at 03:59
The biological and social context challenges that phenomenology in a basic way. Even pain can be pleasure as any masochist knows. So the counter-argum...
September 13, 2016 at 03:18
That's silly because instead I have pointed out that the phenomenology - particular feelings - are shaped or individuated within a socio-cultural, and...
September 13, 2016 at 02:38
I wrote that PF post about the nanoscale convergence zone where this has just been discovered to be the case for biology. But take again another examp...
September 13, 2016 at 01:48
Err....so nothing dualistic in your position because it is claiming the reality of "phenomenology" in terms of the idealistic? OK. Yeah. I never expla...
September 13, 2016 at 01:39
And that was what I explained. Aristotle was talking about potential in a different sense at that point - crisply formed possibility rather than actua...
September 13, 2016 at 01:30
My position agrees fundamentally with Kojeve when he says: "Taken separately, the Subject and the Object are abstractions that have neither “objective...
September 13, 2016 at 01:03
I've answered all this already. So you are simply returning me to your assertions rather than dealing with my arguments against them. Yes, you can cer...
September 12, 2016 at 22:09
That was Peirce's switch on Hegel too. First the bare potential - the vagueness as that to which the PNC does not apply - and then its symmetry-breaki...
September 12, 2016 at 21:45
Yes, they are part of the structure of life. We both agree that. But I say necessary for a reason, while you claim it to be an unreasonable fact. I as...
September 12, 2016 at 05:59
The core issue seems to be that you treat phenomenology as brute fact - we can't help what we feel - whereas I say scientific naturalism supports the ...
September 12, 2016 at 04:50
Only if you change torture's definition. Could it get any more laughable? Let me know when you are ready to deal with nature in terms of what is natur...
September 12, 2016 at 02:19
But treating torture as an issue that can be tackled via social institutions is pragmatic - of much more use in real life than telling the same tortur...
September 12, 2016 at 00:32
Great. But I was trying to turn this discussion away from romantic histrionics towards science-backed naturalism. As I said, show me that the brain is...
September 11, 2016 at 23:04
Nope. Not getting much sense of science there. Lovecraft? :) I've read him. I don't find him particularly insightful as he conflates the issues of bio...
September 11, 2016 at 21:41
Good lordy. What did you say about bubbles and psychological science? Do you believe animals have to be protected in some way from their existential d...
September 11, 2016 at 21:11
It is hard to know what you are driving at but science is comfortable with the cosmological principle for good reason.
September 11, 2016 at 21:07
Who is this "we"? Are you thinking of some malign god? If you are going to claim your view is science-backed, it is going to have to be naturalistic. ...
September 11, 2016 at 20:44
Right. It is instead a goal that has to be worked at. But we seem a long way now from your original thesis that the very possibility of a nasty paper ...
September 11, 2016 at 19:38
And yet pain, stress and suffering can cause the release of endorphins, serotonin and adrenaline - which feel pretty good. So you are not respecting t...
September 11, 2016 at 07:00
Sure, he might have said it was as pointless as life. But still, he did it. And so there must have been some point to it. And thus also some point to ...
September 11, 2016 at 05:48
That is why your argument is weak. You have to jump to unrepresentative extremes to make your case. Your whole approach is flawed in trying to reduce ...
September 10, 2016 at 23:11
I would say rather that we expect the past to be a constraint on future freedoms. The past can lock the free flow of events into restricted possibilit...
September 10, 2016 at 22:41
Again, my point is that you start from the histrionic and personal position that suffering, in any degree, is an unbearable fact. But most people just...
September 10, 2016 at 09:25
I accept that. But that also makes pessimism less interesting here in being less a metaphysical issue and more a practical one - unless it is actually...
September 10, 2016 at 05:26
But it was bad metaphysics that did the deceiving - the idea that individual lives must have cosmic or divine significance. And it is still bad metaph...
September 10, 2016 at 00:33
That's fine. Just give me the technical definition that would make this an important distinction here in your view. Is it that your claim is the crisp...
September 10, 2016 at 00:13
Remember also that deduction is simply a calculus of constraints. Take one premise, combine it with another, logic tells you what is necessarily the n...
September 09, 2016 at 23:49
It is the postulation of necessity. But it allows also for the role played by possibility or contingency. And also distinguishes between epistemic and...
September 09, 2016 at 23:18
This is perhaps the true existential crisis - when there seems no hope of a worldview at all. The Pessimist is taking comforting refuge in a concrete ...
September 09, 2016 at 22:52
I would suggest a more organic and less mechanical notion of explanation. Things are explained by pointing to the constraints that bound possibility. ...
September 09, 2016 at 22:36
It mostly all boils down to bad phrasing most likely - we simply lack good language for describing these things in philosophically rigorous way. But d...
September 09, 2016 at 01:38
Isn't this just a projection of an overly mechanistic model of causality on to the reality of the situation? Where is the hunger beyond the throbbing ...
September 09, 2016 at 01:09
My argument is that the generality of qualia is the socially constructed idea here and so due to linguistic self-awareness (the speaking which can tal...
September 08, 2016 at 23:13
Empirical claims about "what is" - the kinds of things people say as a result of common experience of the world - were the departure point for Ancient...
September 08, 2016 at 22:48
That's right. There is a self in primary awareness, but it is "off-stage" as the animal's awareness is of the world (as that which is not "self"). So ...
September 08, 2016 at 22:17
Sorry, I thought it was the axiom you had proposed. But instead your self-evident axiom is that objects are bounded. So still my answer would be the s...
September 08, 2016 at 21:32
Yep. A dichotomisation that arises to structure the "bloomiing, buzzing, confusion". This is a good way to put it because it shows how early on there ...
September 08, 2016 at 05:30
Wouldn't it be leaky or .... vague? That just puts us back dealing with dichotomies as I routinely argue. We can have the ideal or axiomatic notion of...
September 08, 2016 at 02:22
How do you live in the real world with such thin skin? But yes, you are being neuro-reductionist in your OP by going along with the idea that the evol...
September 08, 2016 at 02:05
Speaking of shit sandwiches, that's a doozy from neuro-reductionism. Sure, "mirror neurons" tell us something about embodied consciousness - the activ...
September 08, 2016 at 01:39