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Count Timothy von Icarus

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5.56mm is occasionally used as a DMR as a compromise, because it allows the DM to use the same ammunition as the rest of a squad. But DMRs are overwhe...
July 14, 2024 at 12:34
You'd think professional assassins would know not to use 5.56mm with its garbage rainbow ballistics and would spring for 7.62mm, .30-06, or the fancy ...
July 14, 2024 at 12:15
I am not sure what the ultimate relevance for moral realism will amount to in any case. If obligations are just rules in some game we "play," why is i...
July 14, 2024 at 12:04
I think issues like the cat are simply mistranslations and over simplifications. The statement should be something like: The cat is sitting across the...
July 14, 2024 at 11:20
It's ok, the second term will only be 3 1/2 years long.:wink:
July 14, 2024 at 11:03
Sure but he is President and campaigning for a second term, so he can't avoid going on TV, which means similar things will keep happening.
July 14, 2024 at 00:41
I imagine the long term effects are more likely to be in the form of Trump being more vindictive and focused on retribution against his political enem...
July 14, 2024 at 00:34
Grazed on the ear. I can think of no worse contrast than Biden's campaign trying to talk up his "decent functioning," at his "big boy press conference...
July 13, 2024 at 23:29
The conservation part was the only reason I remembered it TBH. Or one that isn't horrifically complex. I actually think that is what gets people more ...
July 13, 2024 at 22:19
A = There are vampires. B = Vampires are dead. Not-B = Vampires are living. As you can clearly judge, this truth table works with Ts straight across t...
July 13, 2024 at 21:44
That's a cute one. It seems to trade off the ambiguity of translating statements into logic. Obviously when we say someone's testimony is "unreliable"...
July 13, 2024 at 20:05
This is Kreeft and Dougherty's argument for the superiority of Aristotlean logic for many common uses (evaluating writing, rhetoric, scientific argume...
July 13, 2024 at 11:05
The way you would usually use it in any sort natural language statement would be to say: "Look, A implies both B and not-B, so clearly A cannot be tru...
July 13, 2024 at 01:25
Material implication is often written in natural language as: If A, then B Or A implies B But they aren't perfect translations because all sorts of sh...
July 13, 2024 at 00:52
Yes indeed. I do think the problem of diagnosing bad faith "from the outside," is related to the fact that no determinant end lies behind action thoug...
July 12, 2024 at 17:00
Well this is tricky. Plato, Aristotle, or Augustine are aware that Scythians and Egyptians call things by different names, that people can make up new...
July 12, 2024 at 14:42
Reminds me of the famous quip in Chesterton's Orthodoxy: There are materialist realists. Some people posit that the are only a few universals, e.g. va...
July 12, 2024 at 13:00
The "facticity" of our being can't spring up uncaused, e.g. our being French, or 22 years old, etc. This would be quite a thing to try to argue. Nor c...
July 12, 2024 at 11:47
Of course he doesn't, that would be silly. His point is posterior to those things. It's the Good above all that he insists floats totally free. But th...
July 12, 2024 at 09:37
By realizing Sartre is simply wrong. Human beings have an essence, a nature. To ignore this is simply to be ruled by something that lies outside one's...
July 12, 2024 at 08:38
Yeah, it's not a contradiction, but the final row of the truth table for p?q ? p ? ¬q is the same p ? q ? ¬q for all values of p and q.
July 12, 2024 at 02:10
Are they not? First and last rows of the truth tables are all the same. Seems logically equivalent to me.
July 12, 2024 at 01:32
What would you be trying to say? I am having trouble thinking of an example.
July 12, 2024 at 00:16
Can anyone think up a real world example where you would point out that A implies both B and not-B except for saying something along the lines of: "A ...
July 12, 2024 at 00:10
I don't get this one. When I look outside my house I experience seeing my car for "biological reasons," but this doesn't undermine my claim that my ca...
July 11, 2024 at 19:12
No, and diversity doesn't "bother me." I said it doesn't make sense to try to define "mental life" and "freedom" in terms of particular neurological t...
July 11, 2024 at 10:03
I don't know how easy it is to separate these. Locke for instance is probably motivated in his rejection of innate ideas and the Cambridge Platonists ...
July 10, 2024 at 20:11
Right, but you seem to suggest that the "sound person" never gets outside this condition? But then it seems that if the "sound people" claim that they...
July 10, 2024 at 19:56
A number of your core points agree with my understanding. The Good is ultimately that towards which all rational natures strive, so there aren't so mu...
July 10, 2024 at 19:25
I know what a "sound argument" is in classical logic, I'm unsure what a "sound person" is. I would assume it's something like "being ruled by the rati...
July 10, 2024 at 16:51
Certainly, there are isomorphisms between leading theories of consciousness, but there are nonetheless many and it's not common to see conferences wit...
July 10, 2024 at 15:01
It seems easy to talk about ends, "biological function," constraints, or equilibrium in a way that doesn't require an agent. This is how a teleology o...
July 10, 2024 at 00:50
Why would trying to know what is good but failing to do so teach you how to act good? If what you learn in your inquiries suggest you should do that p...
July 10, 2024 at 00:19
If 0.9999 = 1 than it seems that 0.000...0001 should be equal to 0. But now I think we'll all agree that as you divide a number by smaller and smaller...
July 09, 2024 at 23:49
I mean, they claim to show these things. I think Hume is mostly engaged in elaborate question begging on this topic, and Kant's critical philosophy it...
July 09, 2024 at 21:53
I am at a loss for how the passage you cite is supposed to support your claim. In context, the passage you cite is Socrates discussing his initial fas...
July 09, 2024 at 20:37
I'd agree with trying to pair it down. In particular, I would try to get to the mystery of the cigarettes quicker. The mystery and intrigue can help p...
July 09, 2024 at 20:01
I feel like this is perhaps the area of philosophy most rife with confusion. How exactly would "undetermined" actions be free? If a choice is "determi...
July 09, 2024 at 19:41
This seems to bring up some important questions: How does one know if one is being good if one doesn't know what is good or in what goodness consists?...
July 08, 2024 at 23:43
I'm not sure how helpful this is if the question is the adequacy of Aristotle's moral philosophy. The Ethics and Politics make it fairly clear what is...
July 08, 2024 at 15:22
Modern liberal democracy sublated and incorporated into itself core elements of socialism and nationalism. All modern democracies have incorporated co...
July 08, 2024 at 13:25
A main point is that the focus on "peak experiences," tends to actually exclude a great deal of the people who we think of as "mystics" from the defin...
July 07, 2024 at 10:56
My favorite book on this is William Harmless' Mystics. Harmless has a real gift for letting ancient and medieval writers speak in their own voice thro...
July 06, 2024 at 11:45
Been slow on this but I will get around to parts two and three, which I've already finished. But I just read a suggestive quote in St. Maximus: Note t...
July 06, 2024 at 01:27
Aristotle allows that bad fortune can make people miserable. This is actually an argument in favor of the virtues, and ultimately for the life of cont...
July 05, 2024 at 21:06
This would be the state of vice—which involves the enjoyment and pursuit vice and ignorance vis-á-vis true virtue. Incontinence is the state where a p...
July 05, 2024 at 16:41
The explanatory gap is a problem for contemporary science and the way it has defined what a proper explanations must look like. I do not think it's a ...
July 05, 2024 at 11:40
"Happiness" is the common translation for the Greek term eudaimonia used by Aristotle. It's not a great translation. Eudaimonia could also be translat...
July 05, 2024 at 11:19
To return on topic, I think objections 1 and 2 ultimately stem from the modern tendency to only view theoretical reason or "objective knowledge" as fu...
July 04, 2024 at 21:15