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Count Timothy von Icarus

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Nothing in virtue ethics suggests that we need to claim that being tortured "benefits us." This is a creation of your own invention you keep returning...
December 10, 2024 at 00:55
Socrates, the hero of the Platonic corpus, is executed by a mob though. Isn't the question rather whether or not people can be more or less unified, m...
December 09, 2024 at 20:36
As Ricoeur puts it, Aristotle is primarily a "philosopher of quiddity." Aristotle does not have the clear distinction between a thing's essence (what ...
December 09, 2024 at 18:53
Is your contention that it isn't beneficial for us to be virtuous? So being prudent, courageous (as opposed to brash or cowardly), scientifically mind...
December 09, 2024 at 15:24
Is that the proper order? Seems to me we know concrete events better than general principles. They are what are "best known to us." Most people have n...
December 08, 2024 at 14:19
Is this not a "no true Scotsman" or "'real communism/capitalism' has never been tried," situation? No doubt someone could argue something similar abou...
December 08, 2024 at 14:15
One of my favorite topics. We have had similar discussions before (see: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/905552). is right that Arist...
December 08, 2024 at 14:05
Well, the rebels in the south have plowed right into Damascus and are like a 40 minute jog from the center and neighborhoods are mobilizing their own ...
December 07, 2024 at 16:00
/uploads/resized/files/7o/6s4g90qxow4b6yk9.jpg /uploads/resized/files/x6/3z1m05i3xpo1zjlu.jpg Comparison of what the situation was roughly like for th...
December 07, 2024 at 13:44
It was unclear to me if they might somehow hold on to Homs or not, but given Iran is also openly evacuating its officers and that Assad's family has r...
December 07, 2024 at 04:47
I'd say it's question begging sophistry (in precisely the way Plato frames sophistry). To make the distinction is to have already presupposed that the...
December 07, 2024 at 04:22
Yes, the "intellect as a whole" as the image of the cosmos versus "the mathematical model."
December 06, 2024 at 03:09
Two things: First, it seems like you keep ignoring the option of analagous predication here, but have you given an argument for why it is implausible?...
December 06, 2024 at 02:57
Well, for this you need metaphysics to explain why the Good is a principle and why we should think it is a unified principle. Do Stoicism, Platonism, ...
December 06, 2024 at 01:23
Harris gets some crucial things right. However, he knows he has serious problems. In particular he: -Wants to define science broadly such that it is c...
December 05, 2024 at 15:14
I'll just share Kenneth Gallagher's metaphysical (as opposed to nomic/physical necessity) principle of causation vis-a-vis mobile being:
December 05, 2024 at 15:10
I would tend to disagree with both. It is not always good for us to have what we "perceive as good." We can be wrong about what is truly good or truly...
December 05, 2024 at 14:46
The terms here aren't completely equivocal either though. They have an analogous relation. But the good by which someone is a "good leader" or a "good...
December 04, 2024 at 15:11
It can, but it need not. However, if the Good was properly "transcedent," then—by definition—it cannot be absent from that which it transcends (e.g. t...
December 04, 2024 at 03:38
Here is a decent start: So, one might assume that whatever the Good is, it is sought for its own sake and that it must be a principle realized unequal...
December 04, 2024 at 01:26
Maybe for many of the Stoics, and arguably for Aristotle, but I think what ataraxia normally describes is just the lower stages of the "beatific visio...
December 02, 2024 at 22:55
Well, on the classical view, studying philosophy is "good for you" because it makes you a good person who loves justice and acts justly. In the Republ...
December 02, 2024 at 17:37
I guess the other thing is that "doing the right thing" in contemporary ethics tends to be sensuously sterile, and this can make it seem bizarre how i...
December 02, 2024 at 03:28
It's possible my explanation is bad. I don't think these are two different uses at all, and I don't think Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, St. Augustine, B...
December 02, 2024 at 03:15
I forgot if I shared this quote in this thread: Or "metaphysics is naturally the queen of the sciences." Reminds me of a saying of my grandfather's. W...
December 01, 2024 at 21:30
Potentially, yes. Trump thinks about things very transactionally. He wants to "win" any deal. But Putin is sort of stuck with maximalist aims, which i...
December 01, 2024 at 15:34
You recall incorrectly. I attempted to explain how pluralists and monists actually justify their arguments because the versions of the debate being pr...
December 01, 2024 at 14:23
I guess I don't understand why you think this is a problem. Health is also predicated analogously. What is healthy for a person or a society is not wh...
November 30, 2024 at 22:25
Well, we could start with Plato and my post above: Now, it seems we agree that it's better for people to live in a society that provisions for the com...
November 30, 2024 at 14:59
Well, the difficulty here is that "virtuous" has come to mean something very different in modern ethics. The term can mean simply, "being more in line...
November 30, 2024 at 14:09
Are the examples impossible or do you just not want to call this "pleasure?" Something like the Gammas in "A Brave New World," doesn't seem impossible...
November 30, 2024 at 13:35
Yes, as Socrates says in the Republic, we would prefer to always have what is truly best, not what merely seems best at the moment, or what others say...
November 30, 2024 at 01:12
This depends on how you want to define "happiness" I suppose. In Boethius' sense, this is eudaimonia, "flourishing." No one in this tradition argues t...
November 30, 2024 at 00:03
pros hen predication is open to us. The history leading up to Kant is probably relevant here in that it is the denial of analogy, the drive towards th...
November 29, 2024 at 23:29
Well no, I explained the symmetry that I think exists. You have invented your own positions to argue with that no one has presented. An eyebrow raiser...
November 29, 2024 at 22:27
Yet the two aren't unrelated, even if they aren't identical. Just as beliefs and statements are the sort of things that can be true or false, and thes...
November 29, 2024 at 21:13
With Russia short on men and material and Hezbollah reeling from having its entire leadership killed, taking heavy losses from air strikes, and seemin...
November 29, 2024 at 20:01
Perhaps there is a happy via media between the "self as a hermetically sealed solipsism," and rejecting that it is primarily people (or more broadly o...
November 28, 2024 at 18:49
If something is good, it's choice worthy. It doesn't make sense to choose the worse over the better. People do choose the worse over the better, but t...
November 28, 2024 at 14:28
Depends on what you mean by "separate." Medicine is a normative practice. However, consider a child with cancer. It's bad for them to have cancer. It'...
November 28, 2024 at 14:15
Well that's just the tip of the iceberg, convertability doesn't entail a perfect symmetry. Just consider the types of things we call "true" or "false....
November 28, 2024 at 12:26
But that's the very point I was putting in question, I'd argue that the good is to practical reason as truth is to theoretical reason (and as beauty i...
November 27, 2024 at 21:20
Ok. Do you think this is a good position? Is it "as defendable as any other?" Let me point out a similar problem. While not as popular as "nothing is ...
November 27, 2024 at 18:02
You can think of self-determination in terms of human organizations as well. The society that follows through on the Durden plan to "return to monke,"...
November 27, 2024 at 17:35
To be honest, this objection seems to beg the question to me. It only makes sense if "flourishing" and "freedom" are relativized such that being the "...
November 27, 2024 at 17:23
Sure, but this seems in the same vein as: "if the individual is the sole arbiter of truth, then who's to say that anything is or isn't true?" Yet sure...
November 27, 2024 at 16:45
:up: Yes, or they point to brain regions, neurons, hormones, etc., as if these are not part of us and as if these would not have to be involved if we ...
November 27, 2024 at 02:26
I do think this is a problem modern ethics creates for itself. It tends to be more rules based (an after effect of the Reformation and theologies that...
November 27, 2024 at 02:10
Biology can inform ethics without ethics being reducible to biology. In some sense, intentional action seems to always seek after some good. For examp...
November 27, 2024 at 02:01
Right, and the justification will also depend on the experience(s). So, for instance, with a single experience set off by a drug or hypoxia, it is per...
November 26, 2024 at 18:18