There is the ens reale versus ens rationis distinction at the beginning. Roark takes it as analytic that something that really exists is "greater," "b...
I'd agree that Saussure's semiotics have not had a particularly helpful influence (in part because they led to Derrida :rofl: ). I was thinking more o...
Does it? It seems neutral to me. Consider a stop sign, traffic lights, etc. Many of the most obvious conventional signs are about processes or behavio...
It might be more that I have not properly communicated the claim properly. Pace Plato, Aristotle allows that weakness of will can occur, so he wouldn'...
Sure, you are correct. Provided that we accept that "it just is, for no reason at all," is as good an explanation of things as any other, this would i...
Arguments from brute facts in cosmology are almost always extremely ad hoc. Yours is no exception. "It just is, for no reason at all," could be applie...
Sure, I am pointing out that the conclusion can be given a different interpretation, and according to published responses to the article it may need t...
Arguably, the argument simply proves that the atheist cannot deny God (i.e. the being greater than which no being can be thought) without affirming a ...
On the argument, there seems to be a few issues. The first is "greater than." A critic can equivocate on this and argue that it properly applies only ...
Where does Berkeley lay out an alternative theory of matter? I mostly recall him being fairly adamant about wholly eliminating matter ("immaterialism"...
Gaunilo of Marmoutier took this approach by positing an "island greater than which none can be conceived," in order to try to show that Anselm's argum...
Yes, I agree that you could render a proposition like that. However, Aristotle's point was about judgement. So if we judge Truman's hair to be "Truman...
Yes, we could arbitrary use the sound "dog." You could even use it to refer to something different in each instance. You could render "fixed by divine...
I would disagree. The way we talk about such things is not arbitrary. When we appeal to "our ways of talking about things," we just push the explanati...
"Blonde" and "black" are universals. If either we're unique terms that are only predicable of Truman's hair then they certainly couldn't fail to apply...
I'd say it does. If it didn't rely on this at all, then communicating with someone with whom you do not share a common language (a common set of pre-a...
However, if reference wasn't fixed by convention at all there would be no need for languages in the first place. The sound of "dog" could be arbitrari...
Yes, I think this is correct. It's similar to how the eliminitivist claims that when we claim that we are "conscious," "selves," or "taste, smell, hea...
R. Scott Bakker has a neat paper on this question. I rarely agree with Bakker on philosophy, but he is normally thought provoking A good question. If ...
What is "science proper?" To me, it's always seemed a bitter irony that just as there is an explosion in scientific progress (helping to drive the "Gr...
Ah, but when it comes to dealing with fascists, cannons have generally proved more effective than sticks of butter. The current far-right's obsession ...
Klima's target is how Anselm's ontological argument has been received and analyzed in contemporary thought, and he's referring to reference as it has ...
Maybe in some limited sense of "alive" as in necessarily mobile/mutable biological life. But per Book XII of the Metaphysics: Vaguely. Or there is a s...
A relevant, helpful article on some of the terms: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/medieval-terms/#Sign I might skip past the historical overview be...
There is a lot of strong support for the view that organisms and the ordered cosmos as a whole are most properly beings. However, this distinction res...
I think the critique simply misunderstands Berkeley, as does Johnson's reply. The argument from the stone isn't really an informal fallacy so much as ...
I'll just stick to the opening section for now. First, I will point out that the distinction between ens reale and ens rationis probably is more impor...
Perhaps. Robots might make better citizens. Unless you mean their inclusion? In which case, excluding qualia from your philosophy to "avoid problems" ...
Quine's thesis is not merely skeptical, that we "cannot be certain." It's that there is no reference going on. That's a big difference. But in any cas...
It seems to me that there is a more effective reductio pointing in the opposite direction. For what could be more obvious then that we do refer to thi...
The lable is very diffuse and is applied in different ways by different people. It tends to be self-consciously adopted most in continental philosophy...
There is an irony in the general analytic tendency to ignore medieval thought (continentals do too, but less). No other period reflects the rigor and ...
This is probably the Eleatics. The big dialectic that drives Plato's Parmenides is trying find a via media between the silence of a single, undifferen...
I suppose the question here is "what is the primary purpose of ethics?" In Plato, Aristotle's Ethics, St. Augustine, Boethius, St. Thomas, Dante, etc....
I long accepted the idea that morality should be about actions. I now think it's a poor assumption. Actions are not discrete wholes and their boundari...
They don't? This sounds like the anti-metaphysical movement redux. Unless the notion is that existence/being should just mean "every possible thing th...
You're backing the wrong horse then. This is our manifest destiny! /uploads/files/sc/4hapzf85nstcwt5a.jpg You are correct though, many of the executiv...
Yes, we have many different concepts surrounding existence. Ens vs esse, various uses of "is," "being is said many ways," ens rationis vs ens reale, e...
I think you are getting at something important, however I might quibble with the use of the term "essence" in these cases because it will lead to conf...
Sellar's myth of the given argument, even if one accepts it, respects epistemology. It doesn't imply that the existence of a rabbit as a whole/organis...
I have no idea how you came to this take. Essence has to do with what something is, it is not dependent on a human's understanding it. If it was, then...
And here is the objectional premise driving the slide to moral nihilism in much thought. "If something has to do with desirability or choiceworthyness...
Does the fact that a minority of people also reject that the Earth is round, the germ theory of disease, or that the Holocaust happened also demonstra...
I agree with Bob that you appear to be equivocating here, hence my confusion. Right, that's exactly what I mean by "arbitrary." Now, like I said, the ...
The description is relative to choices we make, not truth. No one says that the expression of truth isn't relative in this way, and people don't tend ...
Not everyone. Some, certainly. Some (mis)readings of Wittgenstein, or other appeals to underdetermination, seem to result in very wild theses. Just fo...
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