Or perhaps we have too narrowly defined the intellect? Hence we rail against so many smart people acting so stupidly. We might consider here Plato's c...
I considered this thread closely and went for a walk today to ponder it. I've detailed the first part of the walk here: https://thephilosophyforum.com...
Yes, this is helpful. So the argument boils down to something like: "to have a reason or explanation is to have a cause and cause just means 'some pri...
This could also deserve its own thread. I find this problem constantly, particularly where science intersects with philosophy, even with people I whol...
You'd have to do a lot of unpacking there. It's an operationalization. It's not unlike how entropy is a very deep concept, but we certainly have usefu...
What's the underlying assumption? All facts about anything can be wholly explained by facts about smaller composite parts? Prima facie, one could also...
Yes, or the idea that whenever there is one cat on a mat there are actually trillions of cats on a mat (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/problem-of-...
Few I'd imagine. But that also is not what we were discussing, which is not "nothing existed prior to humans" but "no discrete, proper wholes exist ou...
It's not hard to find this idea on this very forum. Sometimes it isn't the language community, sometimes things don't exist prior to the mind judging ...
Broadly, perhaps in spirit. I mean, is it a philosophy of common sense? Of iterative development? I hardly think so, it's often self-consciously radic...
But "either the world faithfully writes on us a blank slates or tigers and ants did not exist as discrete organic wholes until a language community de...
A misunderstanding of how it is practiced or how it ought to be practiced? Because in terms of how it is practiced, I think philosophers very frequent...
Did our ancestors centuries ago experience and refer to tigers? Did they refer to and experience water and wetness? I'd say so. But surely they didn't...
The rules of chess are stipulated, not arbitrary. They did not pop out of the aether uncaused. How much fun is it going to be to play a game with tota...
Well, that's a fair point, but I am not totally sure what other language to use. Aside from "have," possession and participation are the two most comm...
I didn't see the question. If one wants to consider what makes a tiger a tiger, an organic whole, then one looks at tigers, of course, but also what m...
Yes, Locke's real essences are at least arguably defined in terms of his nominal essences, so they are just "whatever really underlies whatever we use...
Yes, sure, that's what I said to Frank earlier. I am not sure what the point is supposed to be though. "If you assume all properties are accidental th...
One wouldn't need to believe in essences to believe there are distinct sorts of things? That's all an essence is. Maybe I can clear this up. It seems ...
You might approach it through the convertibility of Goodness and Being. But the Doctrine of Transcendentals is a tricky subject. A difficulty here is ...
Also, not everyone agrees that essences are decomposable into discrete properties. So, one way to still use the idea is to say that Socrates's essence...
They're essential as respects the idea that all men are necessarily a certain sort of thing, man, and not anything else. But the idea isn't that you a...
No, the idea is that if Socrates is a man he is a particular sort of thing. So if Socrates is a chimpanzee, then he is not a man. Essences are conting...
No, this is profoundly misunderstanding what an essence is supposed to be, even vis-a-vis contemporary analytic essential properties. It's on a level ...
Ok, that makes sense. Yes, how Quine defines "fact" here is at odds with most philosophy. You'd have to define perfect I suppose. If it is the older u...
Banno is not a good person to ask about this. He considered himself to have dispatched any notion of essence, still a quite active topic in contempora...
Yes, I was thinking of the Aristotelian tradition, he coins the term essence. Plato's participation is fairly different. We face the same infinite reg...
Absolutely true, given Quine's assumptions. However, if we take Quine seriously then we never need any particular belief to make sense of anything. Th...
That's not really addressing the question though. The skeptical thesis is one thing, the claim that there "is no fact of the matter" is another. But y...
Yes, I understand the underdetemination argument. As noted above, one can apply it to any manner of things other than reference. So is there no fact o...
If arguments from undetermination show there is no "fact of the matter" about something, how does this not also apply to the inverse square law, the t...
Not "perfect," just a substantial (type-of-thingal) form (actuality), which could be rendered "actual type of thing" or "what-it-is-to-be of certain t...
Utter nonsense. Any look at a t-rex, the paradigmatic monster, tells us that it did not evolve from random mutations, but was designed. It is plain as...
That is very much my take as well. Quine is in many respects a lot like Hume. He is a great diagnostician, running down the dominant assumptions of hi...
Yes, we might agree to "all men by nature desire to know," or that the first principle of science and philosophy is wonder, without assenting to "all ...
Here is the issue I spot. Tigers are animals, and being an animal seems essential to what a tiger is. But not only tigers are animals. Likewise, being...
I recall you saying you read Perl's "Thinking Being," but I forget exactly what you thought about it. I think Perl does a good job explaining the phen...
I have a laundry list of things I think are wrong with the presuppositions in play, but let's just start with a naive bit plausible, obvious rebuttal,...
The atomic number is a good definition. It's not the essence. The only thing with the essence of a tiger would be a tiger, not a collection of symbols...
No, I like a lot of work using enactivism and phenomenology, in part because they avoid notions like "all we know are our own concepts" and "words don...
We've been over that a bit. Quine's starting premises are dubious, and in particular there have been a great many challenges to his holism, although t...
It can be. Like I said, if desirability is taken as just referring to feeling, desire as "whatever we currently have an appetite for" then it doesn't ...
For Kant practical reason refers to the capacity of human beings to determine what they ought to do. On your view, does Kant not think it is choicewor...
Right, so representationalism. "We don't experience anything, we only experience our experiences of things." But it seems to me that if one takes this...
Potentially. In its original context and much philosophy since, a chess piece is not the sort of thing that has an essence though. Artifacts wouldn't ...
Yeah. It's in Greek like all of the NT. ?????????, logisamenos, it's the middle voice of logos, word/reason, from which we get "logic." It is used thr...
This seems to be a common issue. A conflation of sign vehicles and signified, and of sense/interpretant and referent. My hunch is that the dominance o...
No, but you suggested a coastline does not exist separate from the act of measuring it, and then used painting as a follow up example, and that one ca...
I heard an argument related to this recently. Bertrand Russell says something like: "mathematics is the field where we believe we know things most cer...
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