Brian

First off, congratulations on feeling better and persevering through your illness. I suffered from major depression for about a decade as well and hav...

This topic has become so much more important to me in the era of Donald Trump, in which "Truth" seems to become not a correspondence between a belief ...

I'm not sure I agree that there must be an interpretation of its meaning. Rather, I think it would be more precise to say there must be an understandi...

To give a further analogy, Newtonian physics was a science in its early stages that was vastly progressed by Einsteinian physics. That doesn't mean Ne...

It's hard to define something like mental illness without first defining "illness" itself. The definitions I found of illness were pretty circular, bu...

I believe it is a science, with the caveat that it is a very young an underdeveloped science. Psychiatric science has a long way to go, although I bel...

Fair point. So what is truth then? I don't believe in things like abstract forms in the Platonic sense, so at best I would say that truth is an abstra...

For kant, things-in-themselves were independent of the wold of space and time, since space and time are mere a priori conditions of our experienced wo...

To me those would all be included in the world-for-us. We don't directly experience them via our senses but we do experience their effects on us and t...

I don't see how, but I'd like you to elaborate on your point if you don't mind.

A very timely subject. America is definitely a post-truth environment right now, I can tell you that. Truth to me is one of the foundational and most ...

I find this to be a tricky subject because the concept "nature" is not too clear and distinct on my view, as opposed to say, physicalism, which assert...

No, I think that full-blown atheism is a fully positive belief in the non-existence of God. It's an active believe with profound influences on the way...

"People can't consent to being born." Don't know if anyone has made this comment yet, but this is essentially the concept of thrownness in existential...

Not academic philosophy, but just started reading Dawkins' The God Delusion which I've never gotten around to before. I've also been reading snippets ...

I honestly think I disagree but cool thesis statement and I hope you go for it. Here's a counterargument for you to ponder and possibly try to refute ...

Interesting. I'll have to read up on this.

Agreed, I do not think most people's reasons for believing in God are based in logic. As you say, there may be a few philosophers out there who believ...

I guess I've always rejected idealism in all its forms, be it Berkeleyan, or transcendental or absolute. Which means, I suppose, that I have always su...

I was reading a bit of Russell's "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism" tonight because I had been reading Nietzsche and his theories of truth are so con...

I think psychology and psychiatry are both very much sciences, although I agree that they are less reliable than, say, physics and chemistry. I think,...

I've always found pragmatism fascinating due to its status as kind of the first major American philosophy. American culture is extremely pragmatic, ri...

Great summary! I'm reading Nietzsche at the moment and in certain passages Nietzsche often sounds like a continental pragmatist. Although he takes it ...

There are so many reasons to study Kant, not the least of which is of his historical importance. In terms of contemporary philosophy, to me, most of t...

"The nothing noths." Sorry, just had to bring Heidegger's possible meaningless description of nothing, or possibly deeply meaningful description, of n...

Have you ever read Hans Kelsen? He basically boils the idea of a law to that of a norm backed by coercive threat. In other words, a law amounts to som...

I think law often functions in both ways. There's certainly a power / freedom limiting side of many laws. On the other hand, many laws do also help to...

Not sure, say more? I've always had trouble pinning down precisely what absolute idealism IS so I would love to hear your thoughts on this. I've just ...

Further, I've always been incredulous of interpretations by Brian Leiter and similar Nietzschian scholars that Nietzsche - in certain points of time a...

Bitter, that all seems pretty right to me. I think at least in this period of Nietzsche's thought he would also basically agree. He does seem to be so...