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Count Timothy von Icarus

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Of course you can also trace the emergence of quantity to contradictions inherit in sheer, indeterminate being :grin: /uploads/resized/files/po/9mam0i...
March 27, 2024 at 03:03
Actually, on second thought, that might not be true. Various conceptions of panentheism have just one ontological entity. Shankara has Brahman and May...
March 27, 2024 at 00:03
It depends on how you define parsimony. How many "brute facts," does naturalism require? The jury is out on that. Seemingly, it might be quite a lot. ...
March 26, 2024 at 23:59
But why should God's rule be anything like that of a human leader? It seems possible that God might want to say different things to different people a...
March 26, 2024 at 23:40
Yes, that is the defining claim of a substance-based metaphysics. I fail to see how this is a knock against process-metaphysics. It's saying "if we as...
March 26, 2024 at 17:19
Ha, no I didn't mean the denial of these things is hardly a problem. I meant that it isn't a problem to teach well justified positions just because so...
March 26, 2024 at 16:49
I am not sure if this follows. Consider a basic sketch of compatibalist free will as one's relative degree of self-determination: A. Initially, follow...
March 26, 2024 at 16:25
It's worth noting that Tegmark justifies his view with the claim that it fixes the Fine Tuning Problem in physics. I do not think this actually works....
March 26, 2024 at 15:50
The Synoptic Gospels were very likely not written like War and Peace, set out for publication by a single author, and then distributed. Material in th...
March 26, 2024 at 13:54
Ok, but he chooses to present his opinion as something much closer to "consensus historical fact:" "during his lifetime, Jesus himself didn't call him...
March 26, 2024 at 12:10
Apparently there is a third Bart Ehrman who goes on NPR and states that there is no evidence in Paul that Jesus is divine, and this is what I find to ...
March 26, 2024 at 11:20
Really? I am familiar with him largely through his name being synonymous with a sort of liberal "debunking" of the Scriptures. It certainly isn't a co...
March 26, 2024 at 10:34
I would say Ehrman is vastly overstating his thesis, especially when including Paul in these assertions. Here is how Paul refers to Christ: Granted, t...
March 25, 2024 at 22:10
Is there truly "no agreement?" People seem to agree on a lot of the basics. For example, no one seems to think that being ruled over by instinct, circ...
March 25, 2024 at 21:22
Teacher to student ratios tend to be such that it precludes many types of activities, and this ends up being a bit of a problem. A focus on "critical ...
March 25, 2024 at 13:53
Right, I am speaking to my own prior ignorance. Just the way it is usually talked about, I had always assumed the Iran coup was something more like a ...
March 25, 2024 at 13:39
This is what I thought because it gets repeated all the time as an explanation for the poor US - Iranian relation. Having later looked into the relati...
March 24, 2024 at 11:43
I've been sipping in and out of "Miester Eckhart's Book of Secrets." It's a compilation of aphorisms, sort of a Christian version of Zen koans in a wa...
March 23, 2024 at 00:19
I'd argue this is getting things backwards. We only understand "things" in terms of what they do. What properties does any thing have when it is inter...
March 22, 2024 at 20:23
Well, in the case of some genetic disorders, e.g. pseudo-exfoliation glaucoma, the problem seems to be with the rules, not the execution. With PEG, th...
March 22, 2024 at 18:50
:rofl: yeah, the grey and black only look seems optional. I am actually aware of a few "intentional communities" that seem to accomplish something qui...
March 22, 2024 at 16:29
I don't see why this should be the case. Protons seem to have beginnings and ends, which is why it seems fair to think of them as underlined by proces...
March 22, 2024 at 16:04
There are a lot of Amish here where I live. The Amish don't have jobs so much as they are community members, although if they are particularly skilled...
March 22, 2024 at 15:04
Absolutely. The one goal of philosophy. Our rallying cry is "to the sacred couch of contemplation!"
March 21, 2024 at 14:45
I do believe this remains a primary issue even with the waning of particle-based conceptions of being and the rise of process-based (pancomputationali...
March 21, 2024 at 14:00
Quite so, just an area that interests me so I can't help but throw my $0.02 in. Yes, and I agree that social conceptions of virtue only get you so far...
March 20, 2024 at 20:42
I don't really disagree with any of this. For Aristotle, human beings are fundamentally social creatures whose well-being is intrinsically linked to t...
March 20, 2024 at 19:53
I'm simply not sure that this is a key distinction in these authors, particularly not in the Consolation itself. Virtue often seems to be defined almo...
March 20, 2024 at 18:25
I won't disagree with you that this is how the machine is often interpreted. However, critics came back with the argument that "real happiness" involv...
March 20, 2024 at 17:14
Well, here is how he describes it: It seems like it can involve simulated romances, friends, career success, etc. Given Boethius' definition of happin...
March 20, 2024 at 14:20
I know this thread is quite old, but I do find the topic interesting. On the bolded, I wonder how common belief in the primacy of particles still is? ...
March 20, 2024 at 14:10
Excellent points. And then the elucidation of certain natural rights gives us something ready-made to point to in order to show why a certain act is w...
March 19, 2024 at 16:16
Well, the intelligibility of things seems to be accessible through images of them. For example, if we have a picture of FDR, we would say "FDR is in t...
March 19, 2024 at 14:45
I don't know what to tell you, lots of rational people have embraced the idea of natural rights. You seem to be hung up on the idea of enforcement, bu...
March 19, 2024 at 11:55
This is a consequence of modern philosophical innovations and the Reformation. The idea that understanding requires training, asceticism, meditation, ...
March 19, 2024 at 11:29
I can only recommend looking up what question begging actually is. In your first post, you seem to have mistaken my pointing out a use for natural rig...
March 18, 2024 at 23:28
No it isn't. P1: Violating natural rights is evil. P2: It is (relatively) easy to determine when natural rights have been violated. Conclusion: Natura...
March 18, 2024 at 22:01
So perhaps the machine will first train our subject in the virtues and, when this training is complete, eject him? And if he doesn't know he is in the...
March 18, 2024 at 20:06
Ah yes, the war to control the vast oil exports of Afghanistan and control the ever potent Afghan-Israeli rivalry. The "war for oil and Israel," makes...
March 18, 2024 at 19:46
Won't they mean something in that we can point to the evil being done in their violation? Rights, as the defense of the good, seem like they should ex...
March 18, 2024 at 19:19
Well, Boethius was awaiting his death, and I believe he was already undergoing torture when he wrote the Consolation, and he was living at sort of the...
March 18, 2024 at 16:46
Strangely, there seems to be a lot of similarity between thinkers who are often labeled as "existentialists" and those who are called "personalists." ...
March 18, 2024 at 15:54
This is not in any way obvious. US foreign policy is the result of values, personal ambition, internal politicking, economics, strategic concerns, and...
March 18, 2024 at 14:48
Well, since Epicurius is in the mix, I'll try to add some meat to this thread.
March 18, 2024 at 14:34
As any student in linear algebra can readily attest, Descartes' infliction of cruelty was not limited to animals...
March 18, 2024 at 14:02
I agree that its feedback, but isn't feedback a sort of circular causality? Right, it's protean and dynamic, in the same way that organic life is. Mor...
March 18, 2024 at 13:36
The reference to Hebbian learning was just an example of the extremely defuse number of phenomena that are "scientific," in the sense of involving cor...
March 18, 2024 at 12:44
What context? Judging the various merits of historical lines of thought? I should hope we have some basis for making these judgements, or else philoso...
March 17, 2024 at 19:12
But you can castrate pigs without anesthesia and leave them to wallow in pain, or pack chickens so closely together that you need saw their beaks off ...
March 17, 2024 at 18:57
No, I wouldn't say so. This would seem to flatten out what makes the "scientific method" distinct, why it only emerged in the modern era, etc. It rend...
March 16, 2024 at 19:26