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Count Timothy von Icarus

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Iggy Pop is the one that gets me. I saw him when he was probably like 65 or so and he still put on a hell of a show.
May 06, 2024 at 17:29
It might be helpful if you shared what your definition of "objective" is. The term is used in very many ways. I think I would be inclined to agree wit...
May 04, 2024 at 13:38
No, far from it. Even the biggest advocates for "reducibility in theory," wouldn't claim it has been reduced. There are all sorts of ad hoc work aroun...
May 02, 2024 at 19:52
I wasn't thinking of deism at all. I was thinking of the understanding of the relationship between God, Providence, and nature in ancient and medieval...
May 02, 2024 at 19:44
The entire concept of "strong emergence," only makes sense in a metaphysics where things are the sum total of their parts though. But that's the very ...
May 02, 2024 at 19:40
How is it a "cop out?" It seems to flow naturally from panentheism and the classical understanding of Providence. The idea that nature itself is a the...
May 02, 2024 at 18:53
:up: Yes, that's why I tried to clarify with the reference to methodological reductionism and smallism. Like I said, I think some sort of broadly defi...
May 02, 2024 at 16:34
IDK, my reading might be biased, but I do read a lot of popular physics. Smallism doesn't always come in for explicit attacks (although it certainly d...
May 02, 2024 at 16:24
All explanations of the world are going to be ontologically reductive in some ways, because you invariably face the problem of "the One and the Many."...
May 02, 2024 at 14:58
I thought of saying something about the "terminal malfunction of another moist robot," but I was concerned it would be mean spirited as well. But this...
May 02, 2024 at 14:44
Teleology is sort of at the heart of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis debate. It is far from being the only issue, but opponents of EES also often ...
May 02, 2024 at 14:13
It's also held as a dogmatic position itself, which you point out. In existentialism, it's generally held out as freeing people from a "tyranny of ide...
May 02, 2024 at 09:20
For Hegel, it's more of a "freedom to..." In a great deal of modern philosophy, freedom is thought of in terms of potentiality. This is freedom as the...
April 30, 2024 at 18:24
Ha, well people certainly can lack a well developed sense of practical reasoning concerning different arts, etc. However, it's certainly not the case ...
April 30, 2024 at 17:56
Interestingly, for Hegel, this historical question is central the ethics proper. Both what we "have done," and what we "ought to do," are ultimately d...
April 30, 2024 at 09:55
Begging the question is when you assume your conclusion. E.g., something like: "our perception of objects is indirect because we don't perceive things...
April 30, 2024 at 01:16
It's worth noting that this problem doesn't seem limited to practical judgement (good/bad), but applies as readily to aesthetic judgement (beautiful/u...
April 29, 2024 at 20:12
Certainly what is considered a virtue is filtered through different contexts, but there are also threads that seem to run through almost all contexts....
April 29, 2024 at 19:46
How so? Even if the human good is just defined by personal preference, it is clear that people can make choices that they themselves regret. Hence, pe...
April 29, 2024 at 11:07
I'll respond to the rest later, but it's worth pointing out that that MacIntyre's interest in Thomism, and his conversion to Catholicism, come after t...
April 27, 2024 at 12:00
MacIntyre's theses are difficult to adequately sum up. It might be worth quoting his warning from the second edition: The Enlightenment demand that et...
April 27, 2024 at 01:55
I can think of one reason to preference the reduction of the negative over the maximization of some positive principle (e.g., pleasure for J.S. Mill)....
April 26, 2024 at 12:00
Glad you liked it! I'm not sure how familiar you are with the tradition. I've written some very general summaries I'll share below. In terms of going ...
April 24, 2024 at 14:31
I think people get to this in different ways, but I can think of a few examples. There is Sokolowski's "The Phenomenology of the Human Person," (excel...
April 24, 2024 at 13:47
I'm not sure what your definition of "objective," is here, but it seems like the objective should be a subset of number two. The objective is the view...
April 23, 2024 at 11:55
To reframe this to see if I am getting it right this would be something like: "I find all these murders unpleasant, you all do too. So let's not murde...
April 22, 2024 at 21:18
Violation! The fact that the stair has a bottom shows we are dealing with Hegel's "bad infinity." Anyhow, Aristotle claims that we cannot have an actu...
April 22, 2024 at 19:20
I think it's a good analogy in some respects. Two things worth pointing out: 1. That people differ in their opinions is as true for what are generally...
April 22, 2024 at 16:10
These and other seemingly absolute statements seem sort of at odds with your prior claims that no one can know anything and that any pretension to kno...
April 22, 2024 at 02:41
This is a good thread. I will just point out a few things. First, an additional argument that might help out with these claims can be found in the par...
April 19, 2024 at 12:13
There seems to be space in realist accounts for both what Husserl calls the "truth of correctness" (true/false) and a "truth of completeness" (awarene...
April 17, 2024 at 12:03
I've tried using this example as a more intuitive way to summarize the "more is different of computation." When you have a grain of table salt and you...
April 16, 2024 at 18:32
This of course requires the epiphenomenalism is not true, and in turn that reductionism and causal closure are not true, in essence ruling out most po...
April 16, 2024 at 18:11
If conscience is thought of as a sort of "set of moral first principles," à la Aquinas, it seems possible to explain how people can often get things s...
April 16, 2024 at 17:13
Since you seem to be building off Aristotle you might look closely at this part. The idea that "objectivity approaches truth at the limit," or that "x...
April 15, 2024 at 14:43
This is the intuitive idea behind Aquinas' ethics. It is always bad to deny one's conscience, even if one's moral reasoning is ultimately in error (ho...
April 15, 2024 at 13:06
Here is the better St. Augustine passage I was thinking of from De Trinitate:
April 15, 2024 at 09:24
Hume famously denied finding any real self during introspection, finding instead a "bundle of sensations," in the Enquiry. But I encountered a pretty ...
April 14, 2024 at 23:20
There is spatial separation when any property is instantiated. Properties are only instantiated in interactions. A thing having a photograph taken of ...
April 13, 2024 at 17:15
Aristotle makes just this point in the Posterior Analytics. Aristotle, in Metaphysics, IX 10, distinguishes between two kinds of truth: truth as the c...
April 13, 2024 at 16:01
Sort of. An artist's rendering or a skillful photographer can utilize their skill (a sort of pictorial syntax) to bring out more of a thing's properti...
April 13, 2024 at 12:46
Exactly. A lot of phenomenological treatments go a step further, claiming that one cannot be aware of the intelligibilities of things without language...
April 13, 2024 at 11:45
The Phaedrus is also helpful here in the "love" is normally excluded from the analytical frame in a way moral goodness is not (at least not from the E...
April 13, 2024 at 10:59
It can be seen, but not demonstrated. That's Schindler's thesis anyhow. In each of the three images Socrates creates in the middle of the Republic som...
April 13, 2024 at 01:17
An interesting mix. Plato and Aristotle have a pretty similar vision of the human good, but Nietzsche and Kant's seem very different from each other a...
April 12, 2024 at 12:28
And by 1788 we get Legrange's Analytical Mechanics boasting that it has no diagrams, only algebraic equations, because these involve less of the human...
April 12, 2024 at 03:34
It's worth considering how the description of the polis is framed originally as a means of describing how justice improves the self-governing soul. He...
April 12, 2024 at 03:20
Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre were the first philosophers I read and I initially took it as a sort of gospel. But having now read a lot more philosophy...
April 12, 2024 at 03:00
I would read the text first, but I have two recommendations for secondary sources. The first is Wallace's "Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, an...
April 12, 2024 at 02:10
It seems to me that I know my parents. I do not know them perfectly, as God knows them. I do not need to know them perfectly to know them at all. It w...
April 12, 2024 at 01:38