There is a pretty massive conflation common in this area of thought re "science" and "empiricism." This is pivotal in how different varieties of empir...
This just seems like relativism though, as in "what is true is relative to systems that theoretical reason (truth) cannot decide between." Here is why...
I was just thinking of more straightforward examples, like if we had never seen an animal, nor any picture or drawing, it could still be described to ...
I objected to the weak modal formulation of essences, that's hardly the same thing. But yes, there are also other ways to conceive of modality as well...
I assume the unstated premises here are that the "One True Explanation of Everything" isn't really true and is only not criticized out of force, other...
I guess I probably wouldn't agree with the ideas behind this, so that might be a difference. Right, I have no problems with fallibilism and a circular...
How so? I'm genuinely confused here? What exactly would be your explanation of why relativism and pluralism re truth is wrong? A thorny issue. I suppo...
He is definitely worth checking out. After Virtue is the classic for a reason but I actually think folks who don't agree with After Virtue might find ...
No? And yet to the question of where relativism applies you say that this itself is subject to relativism. Presuming that philosophy includes epistemo...
Distinctions between our intuitions about the real, actual, existing, etc. are the bread and butter of metaphysics. Indeed, words like actual, virtual...
The last of an era. Almost, Charles Taylor is still alive. He certainly has an interesting thesis in After Virtue. Arguably, the "apocalypse" thesis c...
And these are true measures of usefulness, or only "useful" measures for usefulness? The problem is that this seems to head towards an infinite regres...
Why not just: "there are different ways of describing the same thing that might be equally correct. Some might be more useful in some situations. And ...
Have you finished Olesky's book? I have not made it all the way through, but I think his exact objections are covered in depth (that's at least what t...
Yes, that the one sentence explanation of essences you've offered is metaphysically insubstantial (which was @"Wayfarer"'s point in the other thread)....
What about propositions such as: "other groups of humans should not be enslaved?" or "all humans deserve dignity and some groups are not 'subhuman?" O...
So if "One Truth" (I guess I will start capitalizing it too) is "unhelpful," does that mean we affirm mutually contradictory truths based on what is "...
There are indeed a lot of different "types of memory," and perhaps "faculties" involved in different sorts. I figure episodic memory is what we're foc...
More and more it's the extended family/(intentional) community, at least in the ideal case (for religious intellectuals). But it's not like the altern...
The constant use of irony and humor is sort of a defining feature of the Alt-Right and something they are self-consciously aware of. It's why their bi...
It's the thing we were discussing. If water was not H2O in Aristotle's day would this mean that being H2O is neither essential nor necessary for water...
Lots of thinkers. If it's "there are something like essences, but they change," we can consider Hegel, a number of Hegelians, Whitehead, maybe Heidegg...
First, because people end up offending others without realizing it and holding on to a sort of subtle bigotry. But more importantly, I think it ties i...
That's an interesting point, although I am not sure if it would challenge notions of essences or substantial form directly. Essences and substantial f...
IIRC, Spade actually gets to some of the well known problems with "bundle metaphysics," fairly early on. At any rate, it seems fairly unobjectionable ...
In the context of athiesm, it seems to me like there are two general modes of bigotry. The first is your (earlier) Sam Harris or Nietzsche type, which...
BTW, collectivist attacks on the "individual" from the direction of nominalism are not the only ones. You could also consider here what Nietzsche says...
There have been countries dominated by nominalist ideology though. They can be individualistic or collectivist. That's the whole idea. There is no suc...
Something is a human being because it looks like what? As you said: How does one collocation of sense data "look like a human being?" in any definitiv...
If something "looks like a human being" we should treat it with dignity because...? "Nominalism is true because realism is certainly false." Good one....
What makes something a "human being?" "Usefulness?" The judgements of some "language community?" Real life caricatures like H.P. Lovecraft seemed to d...
This is a difficulty for truth as primarily a property of (linguistic) propositions instead of "the adequacy of an intellect to being." Epicycles get ...
Yes, this akin to the problem of circularity in Locke where the nominal essence by which different things are defined ends up determining the real ess...
Paul Vincent Spade's The Warp and Woof of Metaphysics might frame things in terms you are more familiar with. Or Klima's comparison, but I would say t...
That's a good example. What is impossible/contradictory is not always obvious. That is one of the risks when talking about potential/possibility in lo...
I'm not sure if this makes much sense as a critique. A lot of realism is extremely person centered and sees a strong telos at work in history (the his...
Do you not see the irony in having the write off fairly popular opinions in philosophy as "unserious" here? Grayling is responding to other profession...
That sentence isn't meant to be a definition of essential properties. It's a response to representationalism. We had a thread on a while back. I think...
Lots of people take that sort of view seriously. I see it all the time. We were just in a thread were total anti-realism and relativism re values was ...
Right, or, to continue with the broadly Aristotlian view, we also have stuff like "humanity considered absolutely," "the notion of humanity in my mind...
I like Fisher for some things, but I'd rather say that we are surfing on the waves of Zygmunt Bauman's "liquid modernity." We haven't entered a "post-...
And arguably something already vanishing, a product of a particular moment in history. I've seen a number of people observe how the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s...
It's just an admittedly old-fashioned way of putting it. People have a potential for knowledge/understanding/good behavior, etc. The goal of education...
Right, but there is a difference between methodological bracketing and simplifying assumptions and allowing that bracketing to become a sort of metaph...
I don't see how this is a problem. The fact that people still break the law is not an argument against good jurisprudence. The fact that people still ...
So, for example: "Fire is the release of phlogiston." I think the essentialist would tend to say the concept of fire (the understanding in the mind ac...
The framing of the infinite regress of justifications is in Posterior Analytics I.2, although I think it might show up elsewhere. Aristotle answers th...
This is what haecceity is called in to do (although, a lot of philosophy of quantum mechanics denies particles' haecceity, e.g. Wheeler's idea of ther...
What would the opposite of this be? You start with premises that are foundational and then refuse to affirm what follows from them? So: P P?Q But then...
Comments