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Antony Nickles

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In the essay of Dewey's that I attached to the original post, he claims, more even than not purporting a explicit version, that democracy is not maint...
September 21, 2022 at 04:10
Well, democracy is not our participation in a process (say, voting), it is not the granting of power or authority, it is a way we live. It is not codi...
September 19, 2022 at 08:41
Just that Dewey is not talking about "the process" of democracy, but the conditions of its existence, what makes it what it is (not how it works, but ...
September 19, 2022 at 07:59
What I wanted to convey is that for Dewey democracy is not come to through argument. The way in which we come to democracy is through pledging our all...
September 13, 2022 at 03:58
To tie this back in, there is not an argument for democracy; Dewey is describing democracy without advocating for it because equality and freedom are ...
September 09, 2022 at 14:38
I understand you feel the lack of power here, and you are not wrong. When Dewey reacts to those chiding his call for democracy as a "utopia", it is in...
September 08, 2022 at 05:56
Plato thought that knowledge was greater than or equal to virtue; that, if we knew what the good was, we'd do it. But I side with Emerson, who says "c...
September 08, 2022 at 01:38
I need more. Are we asking why tyranny? as if, what does tyranny have to do with democracy? say, when we are off searching for the right and good in o...
September 08, 2022 at 00:21
. We do not need to agree on or share interests or needs; and the means for discussing those are just the conditions of the world as they are. Yes, Ga...
September 08, 2022 at 00:10
But Dewey is reacting to tyranny, just as the founders did, even mentioning a simpler time when it was strictly physical tyranny rather than the tyran...
September 07, 2022 at 17:54
It seems obvious to say yes; sometimes when we are intransigent, others where we do not have common-enough interests to make disagreement possible. Bu...
September 07, 2022 at 03:54
To the extent we allow ourselves to fall into what Dewey calls cliques, sects, and antagonistic factions (which I take as what you mean by “politics”)...
September 07, 2022 at 01:28
I'd be interested to know where that ties in to the tradition, but I don't take Dewey as wanting to separate the two; only for us to see that knowledg...
September 06, 2022 at 06:27
[reply="NOS4A2;735871" To understand, what would the victims remember? And to what gain? I'm also interested in your bringing up the forces against de...
September 05, 2022 at 20:49
Despite the title of this discussion (being provocative simply to draw attention), I wouldn’t say Dewey is against institutions or truth or science or...
September 05, 2022 at 20:47
I'm not arguing against this; the picture of mental processes is of the kind of "hidden" thing under discussion here (one example among others like ru...
August 15, 2022 at 23:46
Witt is looking at how our practices work and break down, including why we abandon our ordinary criteria. The approach above is caught in the trap Wit...
August 12, 2022 at 07:01
Categorizing each other, rather than responding to our claims and readings, diminishes our effort to personally respond to a text or discussion and le...
August 12, 2022 at 02:39
I am not assuming it, I am making a claim that Witt is thinking of the moral realm as something particular, yet different. You just denied he is, with...
August 11, 2022 at 05:10
I think it will help to show the differentiation I'm trying to make about "the ordinary" to point out that we are not talking about the obvious, surfa...
August 10, 2022 at 06:19
I get that and it’s appreciated, but I’m only left to speculate where you’re going without a claim to a certain interpretation of the quotations and t...
August 09, 2022 at 15:54
You're assuming what ethics and moral philosophy looks like. Aren't the subjects of thoughtfulness, understanding, teaching, treating people as more t...
August 09, 2022 at 06:33
So science can change our picture of the world, even our vision of ourselves. It finds the anomalous, the contradictory, and we are certain it is not ...
August 09, 2022 at 05:39
No, I was revisiting Witt's claim we are discussing in the PI. I would think science's shifts in paradigms (to reconcile new facts, etc.) offer it the...
August 06, 2022 at 19:06
"What a Copernicus or a Darwin really achieved was not the discovery of a new true theory but a fertile point of view." (CV 18) The point of view that...
August 06, 2022 at 10:23
But this is science and empiricism (repeatability by anyone allowing for stability and certainty). This is the “explanation” that Philosophy for Witt ...
August 04, 2022 at 20:10
But the Pi does not only morally implore us to take certain actions, but to do so in the name of our betterment, not only in thinking, understanding, ...
August 04, 2022 at 18:30
They are our ordinary criteria; how we judge that a thing (or act) is that thing, what matters for it, counts in our culture, etc., and for each thing...
August 04, 2022 at 17:47
I absolutely agree. Instead of wanting some specific criteria, we come to see our ordinary means of judgment and identity and felicity as good enough....
July 29, 2022 at 16:54
@"Luke" brings up an excellent quote that furthers the discussion here through a distinction in the senses of “hidden”. What Witt is talking about is ...
July 29, 2022 at 08:26
Yes, I agree that philososphy believed in hidden things (still does). But Wittgenstein did not "crack the code" in the sense of solve the problem. He ...
July 29, 2022 at 00:46
“This is the very fixation that I have been discussing this whole time” — Antony Nickles So if we are in agreement, I must have been confused in takin...
July 28, 2022 at 21:55
This is the very fixation that I have been discussing this whole time, which Wittgenstein investigates in the PI (though starting out we “do not yet s...
July 28, 2022 at 20:40
I'm not sure where you are finding that Wittgenstein assumes that the world is intelligible, or whether that is your prerequisite. I would agree in th...
July 28, 2022 at 01:42
Since I donate, I can attach files; so attached is the Meno, by Plato, which is I believe the text under discussion about the knowledge of virtue. The...
July 18, 2022 at 09:48
I did not mean a "mental picture", which would just be us picturing something to ourselves, which, as he says, is analogous to a picture like a painti...
July 06, 2022 at 01:49
Well it appears the use of "picture" that I am focused on is not the only way in which Witt uses that word in the PI (there are more than 300 instance...
July 05, 2022 at 05:52
Representation was the wrong word; what I was talking about was a picture, like meaning as correspondence (word to world). I agree that a broad view a...
July 03, 2022 at 23:50
It is a "picture" that held him captive in the Tract. He does not reject a condition, he rejects pictures; that there is a single framework we have, o...
July 03, 2022 at 19:54
To clarify, I am not saying Witt is denying personal experience in the PI; just that the only options are not so black-and-white as my experience or s...
July 02, 2022 at 23:53
The picture of "representation" of the world, or what is the case, is what is taken apart in the PI as the product off the requirement for a crystalli...
July 02, 2022 at 23:38
Even with Witt--someone classed as an "ordinary language philosopher"--he has terms, like, criteria, grammar, aspect, etc. But his way of doing philos...
July 02, 2022 at 02:03
I guess the analogy--of something "hidden"--here isn't straightforward. But, if we require certainty for moral deliberations, it "hides" the ordinary ...
July 02, 2022 at 01:31
So we could both agree that it is true that we can not ensure agreement in ethical and aesthetic dialogue; agree that that is part of the grammar of t...
July 01, 2022 at 05:43
He's within and responding to the tradition of western analytic philosophy (the problem of other minds, epistemology, ethics, education, skepticism, e...
June 30, 2022 at 20:33
Maybe it would have been clearer to say that picturing "perception" as something special happening in us (as if, all the time) is mystifying what is j...
June 30, 2022 at 17:17
I was trying to fill out Witt's story of how philosophy is led to imagine and search for something "hidden", rather than working with what is in plain...
June 30, 2022 at 08:21
The term ordinary language philosophy was coined to refer to Wittgenstein's method, not a position that he is for or against (though Moore and others ...
June 29, 2022 at 23:01
In distinguishing what is viewable from what is hidden (the doable from the fantasy), I take "working on oneself" to be an ethical admonishment--work ...
June 29, 2022 at 05:08
That "everything lies open" is not to say it is clearly evident, but that we do not need special access or are learning anything new or creating a spe...
June 28, 2022 at 04:03