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Count Timothy von Icarus

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Modes of knowledge are tricky as are final causes. I don't think it makes sense to talk of the "God of the philosophers" "creating the world with a pu...
July 22, 2024 at 00:34
I don't reject it. It's a fine answer. It's just incomplete. It's like if someone asked for an explanation of rain and stopping at "it falls from the ...
July 21, 2024 at 22:03
Right, I don't mean to deny all particularity here. There are relative goods and these will be assessed by different people based on their own unique ...
July 21, 2024 at 21:44
I'm not sure what your getting at here. It's not an approximate solution, in the example the program spits out the shortest path between all the nodes...
July 21, 2024 at 21:25
This is almost certainly correct. His entire later philosophy would collapse if we couldn't follow rules. The problem as I see it is that his argument...
July 21, 2024 at 21:05
Fine. My standards are pretty low by this point. I do not think she will be a strong candidate though. I think she would be a significantly stronger c...
July 21, 2024 at 19:33
Right, but you see the problem here right? How does any individual ever know that they are properly chastising someone for following a rule wrong? Per...
July 21, 2024 at 19:04
What I was hoping to show is that freedom can't be thought of purely in terms of a power/potency. Nor can it be thought of something standing over and...
July 21, 2024 at 13:56
If freedom is conceived of as a pure power/potency, then even good habits are deleterious to freedom since they still constrain possibilities of actio...
July 21, 2024 at 12:12
I've always found invocations of the private language argument strange because it's hardly clear that there is one coherent argument on this topic or ...
July 21, 2024 at 11:43
Yes, if we divide practical and moral reasoning into two discrete things. I see no reason to do this though. When someone cares more about something o...
July 20, 2024 at 20:13
Exactly lol. That's one way of framing it in the "Tarzan Versus Crusoe," discussion at least, but there is also the idea that Crusoe cannot make new r...
July 20, 2024 at 19:20
In his own metaphorical terms, I think when Wittgenstein says that his spade is turned when he hits the bedrock of "forms of life," many would simply ...
July 20, 2024 at 19:00
That isn't Wittgenstein though. Wittgensteinians often make claims that are the opposite of "common sense." For example, the claim that a man who wash...
July 20, 2024 at 18:44
Language and mathematics are social practices. Language and mathematics are things we learn how to do through social interactions. Children raised in ...
July 20, 2024 at 17:42
More "give your own opinion," because discussions about "what Wittgenstein really meant," are interminable. If it's a misrepresentation it's not Grayl...
July 20, 2024 at 16:01
:up: I agree with all of that and I think it's a problem for Wittgenstein's philosophy, at least in how it is often interpreted. I do wonder how he wo...
July 20, 2024 at 14:48
It seems relevant to the claim that meaning is use, which is of course different from the claim that use helps to fix our determine meaning. And this ...
July 20, 2024 at 13:47
That's a tough call. The form of life "human" seems like it should wrap around the others, but there does seem to be some potential for fuzziness. Fre...
July 20, 2024 at 12:54
Right. It's conditioned on expectations about the future in many forms. If I press an elevator button not knowing someone is stuck in the shaft (and h...
July 20, 2024 at 12:43
Yes, this is the problem I mentioned vis-á-vis defining freedom purely in terms of potency. Etc. The contradictions continue up to a level of social f...
July 20, 2024 at 12:39
Ancillary point from Grayling: We can understand the meaning of a word, say the German word for "village" and have not the first clue how to use it in...
July 20, 2024 at 12:29
Interestingly, even on a reductive physicalist account, the general notion here should be true. Sign relations involving human cognition are incredibl...
July 20, 2024 at 11:52
IDK, it seems like some consequentialists consider the intended consequences of acts. To totally ignore them makes our marauding soldier a hero so lon...
July 20, 2024 at 02:55
Suppose no weakness of will, a person is able to make themselves so whatever they deem to be choiceworthy (e.g., no "I really shouldn't eat that donut...
July 20, 2024 at 00:37
This still seems to have it that a marauding soldier who rescues a girl for the sole purpose of raping her would have performed a good act. And suppos...
July 20, 2024 at 00:24
There is a link in the first post to a detailed write up. It's on the word "here." I'm making them knowingly. I would tend to sum up the vision of fre...
July 19, 2024 at 23:43
A map is something used to know territories themselves, no? It is "that through which we know," not "what we know," (or at least not "all that we know...
July 19, 2024 at 15:51
I haven't finished yet, but I made it a good deal through and have a question: In general, I think defining ethics in terms of freedom can work, since...
July 19, 2024 at 15:19
I don't think so. However numbers exist, they don't seem exist in the way physical systems do, so this is not strictly an issue. It is however relevan...
July 19, 2024 at 14:50
Go back and read how Plotinus describes freedom across 6.8, which he explicitly ascribes to the One (as I have shown.) Or go read the quotes by two re...
July 19, 2024 at 13:42
Thinking of the two as timelessly equivalent leads to the Scandal of Deduction. P(I) should allow us to know O in "no time at all," on the view that t...
July 19, 2024 at 13:30
Sure, people act devilish. This is different from a species whose telos specifically non-being. Like I said, a species whose end is specifically to th...
July 18, 2024 at 22:01
I'm not sure it is. Consider zip bombs, which were a way to overwhelm PCs and make them crash or ton overwhelm anti-virus software. The zip bomb is ju...
July 18, 2024 at 21:13
I have a friend who is a math PhD. I have never really had a chance to discuss this sort of thing in depth, but I have asked him before if he though m...
July 18, 2024 at 20:40
"What is math?" is a question situated in a larger metaphysical arena. If we say "it is just symbolic manipulation," we are then led to ask: "what are...
July 18, 2024 at 20:28
The Scandal also has some implications for philosophy of mathematics. Some might have it that 2+2 is just another name for 4. 2+2 is 4. And in some se...
July 18, 2024 at 18:52
This sounds like the "Scandal of Deduction," and it actually holds not just for syllogisms but for all deterministic computation and deduction. From a...
July 18, 2024 at 18:29
Or disjunctive syllogism. I did verify that this is a way to prove MT.
July 18, 2024 at 16:44
Strong justification: We should adopt a "pay as you throw," fee system for our city's garbage collection services. This gives people an incentive to p...
July 18, 2024 at 14:15
I think this is right idea. Most "vices" only make sense in the context of their being a corresponding virtue associated with them. If prudence is sim...
July 18, 2024 at 13:31
I don't find anything objectionable in that quote. It's the same straightforward reading of Plotinus I have been pointing to in other scholars. The On...
July 18, 2024 at 10:17
Seems right, you can prove MT with contraposition and MP. But you can do a disjunctive syllogism too. Then again, this probably also amounts to the sa...
July 18, 2024 at 03:03
That's not contraposed, I do see now that I didn't contrapose them in the post despite referencing it. It's ~c ? ~a. This is of course assuming ~c bec...
July 18, 2024 at 02:33
I didn't contrapose them when I copied and pasted it, I inverted it. 1. a ? (b ? ~b) 2. If b is true (b ? ~b) is false. If b is false (b ? ~b) is fals...
July 18, 2024 at 02:30
If a ? c it does. Contraposition, flip em and switch em (reverse the order and negate both). Brad always wears his hat (a) on Mondays (c). If Brad is ...
July 18, 2024 at 02:20
But couldn't we just assume B here and get ~A just the same? "If B then ~A," seems to work fine here because the conjunct is still going to come up fa...
July 18, 2024 at 02:04
1. a ? (b ? ~b) 2. If b is true (b ? ~b) is false. If b is false (b ? ~b) is false, so (b ? ~b) is false. 3.~a ? ~(b ? ~b) - contraposition (1) 4. ~a ...
July 18, 2024 at 01:12
I'm saying that a being oriented towards evil is a contradiction in terms. Evil is a privation. How can a being be oriented fundamentally towards non-...
July 17, 2024 at 19:51
:up: It's worth noting that Aristotle explicitly rejects Anaximander's theory of natural selection in De Anima, but I don't think that leaves his phil...
July 17, 2024 at 16:46