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Count Timothy von Icarus

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If it's helpful, Wittgenstein actually commented on Gödel's work (and Gödel commented very briefly on Wittgenstein's commentary). We've discussed it h...
March 30, 2025 at 22:56
This would of course rely on a definition of causation as necessarily being temporal. Most of the arguments for God as "First Cause" deny such a defla...
March 30, 2025 at 18:38
This gets at a common concern among fantasy writers and fans. Does a writer go with a "hard magic system" or a "soft magic system." A "hard magic syst...
March 30, 2025 at 18:30
That wasn't actually my post, but I'll still respond: The Oxford Very Short Introductions are sort of hit or miss, but the one on "Objectivity" is qui...
March 30, 2025 at 17:51
My apologies, as you can see, I removed a large portion of my post because I had written it on my phone in a very broken up manner and I realized the ...
March 30, 2025 at 13:08
Sure, but it cannot be "use all the way down," unless the human use of language spawns for the aether uncaused. For example, presumably, if ants didn'...
March 29, 2025 at 03:11
I wasn't thinking of Wittgenstein in particular there. A lot of people have worked with the idea of meaning as use, some in quite reductionist terms, ...
March 29, 2025 at 02:45
I think it's worth separating out the goal of avoiding bias (attaining objectivity) and the idea that "real/proper" science involves excluding value a...
March 29, 2025 at 02:16
A.C. Grayling challenges the strict reduction of meaning to use with examples like "e.g." and "QED," where people might very well use them properly wi...
March 28, 2025 at 20:54
:up: Yes, there is a great deal of uncertainty here, in part because man, as a social and cultural animal, always has his good filtered through social...
March 28, 2025 at 17:33
We have discussed Ligotti here a few times before. A really interesting book on the emergence of a sense of a "lack of meaning," which is in many ways...
March 28, 2025 at 17:19
lol, that reminds me, after I listened to the audiobook of Saint Gregory of Nyssa 's "The Life of Moses," (excellent quality BTW) the YouTube algorith...
March 28, 2025 at 16:56
I was thinking of Job's interlocutors, the Disciples' questions at the opening of John 9 as to whether a man was born blind because he sinned or his p...
March 28, 2025 at 15:59
Goodness is a general principle, so we shouldn't expect that it can be reduced to health. But nor is health, or facts about what promotes or hinders h...
March 28, 2025 at 13:20
Is medicine not a science? What about botany, zoology, or biology more generally, which have notions of health, harm, goal-directedness, function, etc...
March 28, 2025 at 12:37
You can swap in best interest there. I don't think it's the case that people have infallible judgement as to what is in their own best interest. I thi...
March 27, 2025 at 22:01
No, I would say there is a fact of the matter as to whether some particular individual would benefit from quitting smoking. Sort of like how you might...
March 27, 2025 at 19:56
The Moral Landscape? I'm a big fan even though I disagree with its core thesis and methodology. I still think it's a helpful framing of ethics for peo...
March 27, 2025 at 19:48
The irony here is that atheist, secular historians highly doubt the Jews were ever slaves.
March 27, 2025 at 19:21
Indeed, and the idea that the wretched, slaves, etc. were in their place precisely because they were wicked was obviously a popular opinion amongst th...
March 27, 2025 at 19:16
I don't see how it begs any question unless we're assuming that people are infallible about what is best for them. No I'm not. I'm saying there is a f...
March 27, 2025 at 18:32
Well, first I'd just point out that most people who embrace outlandish conspiracy theories don't reject reason. They see themselves as paragons of epi...
March 27, 2025 at 16:51
The opening of TLP makes several clear. The ones that jumped to mind as problematic are: "Noesis (a non-discursive, non-linguistic, reflexive grasp of...
March 27, 2025 at 16:29
Nothing of the sort. I am just pointing out that Wittgenstein starts from assumptions about the nature of truth and knowledge that were common to his ...
March 27, 2025 at 16:04
I suppose the above also gets into notions of "virtue epistemology," not just virtue ethics. Perhaps a broader question would be: "is philosophy—the l...
March 27, 2025 at 15:55
I think it's probably unhelpful to look at archetypes as being something like sets or some sort of ranking on a spectrum. It might it make more sense ...
March 27, 2025 at 15:26
I think that's exactly right. A more deflated view of reason tends to "democratize" things, devaluing the role of praxis and progress. Yet in so much ...
March 27, 2025 at 15:03
Well, if they are an emotivist, presumably they agree because baby stomping has negative emotional valance for them as well, and for no reason other t...
March 27, 2025 at 13:54
I never claimed that were the same. Emotivism, at least in most of the forms I am familiar with, claims that all value statements reduce to emotion, n...
March 27, 2025 at 12:48
I think it's important to note that people who reject emotivism do not deny that emotion plays a role in motivating people's value statements, nor is ...
March 27, 2025 at 12:33
That isn't agreement. I said that "'stomping babies is bad for them ' is an obvious empirical fact of medical science." To say "I agree that stomping ...
March 27, 2025 at 11:38
But what language an archeological text is written in is an empirical question, no? It's only obvious if you know the language in question, otherwise ...
March 27, 2025 at 11:25
I don't understand the relevance of the example. That certain text is written in a given language isn't the sort of thing that would be a hinge propos...
March 26, 2025 at 21:40
Or maybe people have emotions vis-á-vis questions of value because the events in question are good or bad? That is, "I feel repelled by x because x is...
March 26, 2025 at 20:30
I figured people in this thread might find a perspective outside the Western tradition interesting: https://www.patristicfaith.com/senior-contributors...
March 26, 2025 at 20:14
The term "noesis" has been revived by modern thinkers in a number of ways that are quite different from the term's historical meaning, so perhaps that...
March 26, 2025 at 17:38
I see your edits and they seem to me like just throwing stuff at a wall to see what sticks. How exactly does the fact that 20th century Jews appreciat...
March 26, 2025 at 15:58
Gotcha, against the consensus of historians and the claims of the texts themselves, the authors of the Scriptures were slaves because Nietzsche said t...
March 26, 2025 at 15:51
Nietzsche was not a religious scholar and never seriously studied the traditions he was commenting on. A lot of his "history" is just made up speculat...
March 26, 2025 at 14:24
The actual existence of God is sort of besides to point IMO. The point would be that people have often held conceptions of truth that would invalidate...
March 26, 2025 at 13:42
Where is the demonstration? Asserting something with no support is not a demonstration. The opening of TLP is just dogmatic assertions. There is certa...
March 25, 2025 at 22:35
I think you're probably correct about Wittgenstein, but I have seen later sympathetic commentators try to link together all of humanity (or all embodi...
March 25, 2025 at 17:05
Maybe try reading (and quoting) the entire sentence? For most Patristic thought, all men begin fundamentally deluded about truth, and we remain so for...
March 25, 2025 at 16:51
So the winning move reduces to: "it's not so much what we do as what we do that is of import?" :rofl: Do you think it is possible today to give an acc...
March 25, 2025 at 16:36
But are Wittgenstein's conclusions "tautologically" true for both the Christian and the atheist as well, or just for fellow Wittgensteinians? From the...
March 25, 2025 at 16:06
This is an interesting case, because God was often considered as the ontological ground of truth. Truth is most properly in the Divine Intellect, seco...
March 25, 2025 at 13:52
Why? Does Wittgenstein demonstrate things like: "Noesis is impossible." "Truth is strictly a property of propositions," "Judgement is only proper to d...
March 25, 2025 at 10:17
Yes, my point was not that hinge propositions involve noesis (indeed, the concept presumes there is no such thing as noesis). Rather, it was that, for...
March 25, 2025 at 01:48
Yes, perhaps I wasn't very clear there. I meant an "intellect" in the classical sense (nous), as in "being capable of noetic intuition, a simple, non-...
March 25, 2025 at 01:13
Are propositions like: "There is no such thing as noesis," "Truth is strictly a property of propositions," "Judgement is only proper to discursive rea...
March 25, 2025 at 01:00