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Count Timothy von Icarus

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In: The Forms  — view comment
To be clear, when I say he has reductionist tendencies, I don't mean "materialist reductionism." That substantial form is built up from other "regular...
May 17, 2025 at 14:51
As noted in the other thread, PA just lays out the challenge to scientific knowledge and demonstration. The full justification of the solution spans a...
May 17, 2025 at 14:47
:up: Right, and common objections to this tend to rely on the assumption that any such systems must be defined according to some sort of rigid binary....
May 17, 2025 at 14:20
Facing East in Winter by Rowan Williams. It's a philosophical treatment of the doctrines in Orthodox Christianity, primarily those in the Philokalia, ...
May 17, 2025 at 13:40
Try applying this logic to other questions. Does Iraq really have or not have WMD, or does it depend on what is useful to us? Are there truly substanc...
May 17, 2025 at 13:11
All physical beings are changing and so arguably they all are processes, yes. Mark Bickhard had a good (if flawed) article on this that I've posted pa...
May 17, 2025 at 12:49
Sometimes. At times, theoretical work needs to take a more philosophical look at what is mean by change and motion, and so "process." This comes up a ...
May 17, 2025 at 12:07
Yes, that's a provisional definition. Sach's translation/commentary, which is fairly widely used, is quoted in the post you are quoting from: I bolded...
May 17, 2025 at 11:56
What we discussed in that thread isn't Aristotle's answer to the question Wittgenstein took up, just an ancillary point that the positive skeptic's po...
May 16, 2025 at 16:37
No, Kripke is driven to a "skeptical solution" (his term) which learns to live with the paradox, as opposed to a "straight solution" which dissolves t...
May 16, 2025 at 12:18
The distinction is not supposed to be merely natural versus artificial. This would severely truncate the role of aims as a principle of unity by which...
May 16, 2025 at 11:42
The rule following argument is an argument from underdetermination. These arguments have been made for millennia. That's the relation. If you or at @"...
May 16, 2025 at 10:54
The question is whether they would have warrant, not us. Would they?
May 16, 2025 at 03:13
Yes, that's the idea behind equipollence. Phyrronean skepticism relies on a sort of underdetermination and Hume is specifically riffing off this, alth...
May 16, 2025 at 03:06
It's a bit confusing because Aristotle seems to say different things in different places, and because "ousia" might get translated as "substance," "be...
May 16, 2025 at 02:38
One cannot logically follow Book XII of the Metaphysics because it talks about God? Aquinas doesn't use arguments from common experience? On this acco...
May 16, 2025 at 02:13
"Reasons" seem entirely divorced from causes because "causes" in mechanistic philosophy of nature are reduced to bare, inscrutable brute facts. When c...
May 16, 2025 at 01:54
I wouldn't frame it in terms of some sort of dialectical of caused action versus free action. I think libertarian free will is incoherent, but that's ...
May 15, 2025 at 21:31
Yes, that's a useful distinction, although I don't think the two are unrelated. The numbers you are adding up play a role in the second sense of "reas...
May 15, 2025 at 17:00
:up: In particular, the influence of a sort of Humean anthropology, which is extremely dominant in economics (and thus has huge influence on liberal g...
May 15, 2025 at 16:06
Do you think witness testimony should be admissable in trials? Or, because it might be based on one person's perceptual experiences, should witness re...
May 15, 2025 at 15:26
The "rule following argument," like the many other empiricist arguments from underdetermination, relies on presupposing empiricism's epistemic presupp...
May 15, 2025 at 15:16
In: The Forms  — view comment
Good recommendation. From the introduction: Of course, the author strangely spends a lot of time arguing that Peirce is not a scholastic realist, even...
May 15, 2025 at 14:18
I am not sure if any philosopher has ever tried to ground logic in "intuition" in the sense you are using the term. This would make logic simply a mat...
May 14, 2025 at 22:19
Sure. Thinking is an act, a change. It either occurs for some reason or it doesn't. Thinking is a move from potentially thinking something to actually...
May 14, 2025 at 20:06
It's important for building up a coherent ethics and moving to a "metaphysics of goodness." From a practical perspective, I don't think it's necessary...
May 14, 2025 at 17:45
"Act follows on being." What a thing does, how it interacts with other things or parts of itself depends upon what it is. Otherwise, anything could be...
May 14, 2025 at 15:54
There are hierarchies of distinctions. Distinctions like act/potency or part/whole are more general than any particular science (e.g. physics, logic, ...
May 14, 2025 at 14:32
But that isn't what "your house key" means. If someone changes the locks on my door while I'm out, my key doesn't cease to be mine. And if I bend the ...
May 14, 2025 at 14:09
PNC can be formulated as a metaphysical, epistemic, or semantic principle. Ultimately, the latter will tie back to the former if the former is affirme...
May 14, 2025 at 13:47
Or apparently by anything more distinct than "what I currently desire." But logic involves what is true, so this makes truth simply a consequence of w...
May 14, 2025 at 11:29
If I'm misrepresenting you, surely you can lay out what determines usefulness then. This: Leaves "use" as an unanalyzable primitive. And a trivial log...
May 14, 2025 at 03:17
This was the original idea though, natural laws were "active." Hence the change in philosophy of nature/natural science from a language of "desires," ...
May 14, 2025 at 02:38
I've asked this question to @"Banno" many times and never received anything but deflection. His notion of use seems to bottom out in a sheer voluntari...
May 14, 2025 at 02:32
It's often more difficult to come up with definitions for notions other than substance (things), since such concepts will always inhere in something e...
May 14, 2025 at 01:35
In: The Forms  — view comment
There is a historical relation too in that biosemiotics and the invocation of semiotics in physics almost always involves the tripartite semiotics rec...
May 14, 2025 at 01:28
In: The Forms  — view comment
Seeing is a power of humans, one every sighted person is innately familiar with. I don't think a reductionist account is the only true account of sigh...
May 14, 2025 at 01:09
In: The Forms  — view comment
Right, Perl is very good on this. I suppose one of the difficulties here is the modern phobia that appearances might be arbitrarily, randomly related ...
May 13, 2025 at 20:29
In: The Forms  — view comment
Indeed, that was precisely my point. I don't think neuroscience is any more properly first philosophy then philosophy of language, particularly if it ...
May 13, 2025 at 19:57
I'm not sure if Mill was necessarily motivated by racism. His initial examples on slavery are from ancient Europe. He just has a view of "natural man"...
May 12, 2025 at 21:59
In: The Forms  — view comment
Principles might be a better way to understand it. Plato's Theory of Forms is a particular metaphysical explanation of unifying principles. Whether it...
May 12, 2025 at 21:08
Thanks, you as well. I have mostly read stuff on Taoism that is tied to its contemporary formulations, so that might be the discrepancy. I don't know ...
May 12, 2025 at 18:53
In: The Forms  — view comment
Right, but if one does not distinguish between univocal and equivocal usage then common facts such as "running involves legs," become unequivocally fa...
May 12, 2025 at 14:34
I'll agree that there are multiple notions of "intuition" and "understanding" that are unhelpfully related but distinct. I was referring to "what is s...
May 12, 2025 at 14:15
Do you mean Borges' Library of Babel or the story from Genesis or something else? (The first is one of my favorite ways to think about this sort of th...
May 12, 2025 at 13:51
In: The Forms  — view comment
Right, but it's worth pointing out that this is sometimes denied (i.e., there is no truth about "what a thing is") and people still try to do ontology...
May 12, 2025 at 01:26
In: The Forms  — view comment
all predication is equivocal? Then you don't have logic. That terms are never predicated univocally? Then you also don't have logic. But a basketball ...
May 12, 2025 at 00:58
BTW, I think this is fair if the measuring point is 1925 (a century). But what if we use 1975, half a century? Or the end of the Cold War, when neo-li...
May 10, 2025 at 21:05
I maintain that Western Civilization has been in serious decline since the death of Marcus Aurelius and the ascension of his son to the purple! :cool:...
May 10, 2025 at 17:56
:rofl: Historically at least, this seems to have proven quite true.
May 10, 2025 at 13:53