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Count Timothy von Icarus

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Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, it was often remarked how the US Republican Party had far more "discipline" than their rivals. That is, they wer...
March 16, 2024 at 13:07
Now this gives me an idea for a book I had in mind. I really enjoyed Christopher Buehlman's "Between Two Fires," a historical fiction/fantasy novel se...
March 16, 2024 at 12:48
Interestingly enough, the book that kicked this thread off makes a case for a certain type of relativism. Plato's Good falls into the category of "thi...
March 16, 2024 at 11:18
That's a good quote. I think the idea of meaning being defined by social practice causes particular problems for nominalists. On the one hand, I don't...
March 15, 2024 at 16:55
:up: I had forgot the ethics was so short because my copy had an introduction as long as the book lol. Another classic. Big fan of Murdoch too. I do t...
March 15, 2024 at 15:22
Passive voice might be another example. It's perfectly grammatical, and should be used in some cases. It can also be used in order to make things ambi...
March 15, 2024 at 14:40
Isn't that the very point of contention re Kirpkestein, that it seems obvious that Robinson Cursoe can develop practices off on his island? It seems t...
March 15, 2024 at 11:58
:up: In a way, it seems like there is always sort of nothing but God. I think. Aquinas is tricky on this point. God is present to all things and gives...
March 14, 2024 at 18:22
Ok, I was honestly just trying to be helpful in pulling these out. I see that you have gone back and made it clearer. I would just point to two things...
March 14, 2024 at 18:03
What logic? You seem to be saying something like: "an entity is free if and only if it is free from its inception." I do not see a demonstration of th...
March 14, 2024 at 17:27
I am not sure about that. Is an embryo free or self-determining? A baby? A two year old? A teenager? At some point, people seem to gain more of an abi...
March 14, 2024 at 17:05
The Socrates of The Clouds has the advantage of being quite funny though. "Huh? We don't deal with mortals here; we're contemplating the Sun. Oh you w...
March 14, 2024 at 16:35
I did, but I will admit that I had a hard time following it. My point would be that looking to Plato for a discussion of radical skepticism might not ...
March 14, 2024 at 15:51
Two things are important here: First is that skepticism had its heyday after Plato, with the Academy itself having a "skeptical period." So, while thr...
March 14, 2024 at 15:35
I was just rereading Boethius' "The Consolation of Philosophy," and I've decided it might be the pound for pound greatest moral work of all time. It's...
March 14, 2024 at 11:48
Is the idea here that necessity needs to be imparted by something else that is necessary? But consider the case of being dead (as opposed to simply no...
March 13, 2024 at 21:28
I'm inclined to agree with you here. My point relates to those who would make the claim that there is only appearance. That said, I have to ask, is yo...
March 13, 2024 at 21:11
An oft missed point. If appearances are the only reality then there is no meaningful appearance/reality distinction. With language, this often seems t...
March 13, 2024 at 18:46
I don't know if I totally followed all of that, but I do think it's true that lack of novelty or its maximization end up having interesting similariti...
March 13, 2024 at 16:23
Sounds like a pretty serious problem for an interpretation of Wittgenstein to have. Is this supposed to be a communitarian interpretation of Wittgenst...
March 13, 2024 at 16:09
Sex expression = phenotype expression related to sex. IDK, sometimes it is used for sex-related gene expression too, but that's less common. Either wa...
March 12, 2024 at 19:47
Well, you have to consider the framing here. Plato, for instance, lays this view out in the Timaeus as the goal of "becoming like God," and this would...
March 12, 2024 at 12:04
I could see an argument that the function of sex in the species is not the same as the sex of an individual, sentient animal of any sort, for whom sex...
March 12, 2024 at 11:29
It seems like this is less ambiguous in the aggregate. We wouldn't say the number of chromosomes humans have exists on a spectrum because trisomies oc...
March 12, 2024 at 02:46
The only reason continentals haven't caught up here is because they're too busy debating if they exist or not or exactly how it is that the nothing no...
March 12, 2024 at 01:39
The words of a person who has never smoked toad venom or watched Tom Brady win a Superbowl despite being down 28-3 at the end of the third quarter.
March 11, 2024 at 22:10
That's a great example, and one I shall start using since it is a little nicer than the "shit smells like... well shit to humans; flies love it," I ha...
March 11, 2024 at 17:12
I have a great deal of sympathy for some forms of adverbialism. It seems to get something right, namely that conciousness is processual, not a bunch o...
March 11, 2024 at 16:50
Thanks. I have practiced quite a bit because it's hard to place Hegel in dialogue with other ideas without breaking it out of its own weird way of spe...
March 11, 2024 at 16:28
I actually considered bringing up the example of televisions, radios, etc. On the one hand, yes, we could say these are "indirect" in that they involv...
March 11, 2024 at 14:28
No, I don't think so. I thought you were saying they were unconnected because your response to "people can learn to communicate ideas across cultures ...
March 11, 2024 at 13:22
Yes, historically and throughout disparate cultures and eras, and through all different minds. Hegel lived before Darwin. I think his ideas could make...
March 11, 2024 at 10:40
I am not sure if I get your meaning. In Hegel's view at least, this unfolding isn't the cognitive discovery of some agent. It's the movement of all of...
March 10, 2024 at 23:18
Right, I don't disagree with you, but that goes to my other point. If unconscious inference makes something indirect, then all knowledge is necessaril...
March 10, 2024 at 17:11
I don't think the problem requires "severe idealism." Hegel's idealism is generally labeled "objective," because it affirms the existence of nature as...
March 10, 2024 at 13:23
It's very hard to give an account of knowledge that transcends the nature/mind, subjective/objective divide. I would imagine this is why recourse to p...
March 09, 2024 at 19:37
This certainly covers some of them, although I would replace "ignore" with "sidestep" or "discount as confused." I would tend to associate this view m...
March 09, 2024 at 18:55
Wasn't he charged for unrelated sex crimes? He wasn't convicted if I recall, rather there was a warrant out for him to be questioned in regards to cri...
March 09, 2024 at 13:09
I made a thread a while back on a related point. Essentially, I was looking for a formal way to state that it doesn't make sense to posit things/prope...
March 09, 2024 at 12:33
Sorry, I don't mean to be oblique. It's that I think accusations of dualism really depend heavily on the exact formulation involved, so I don't want t...
March 09, 2024 at 11:53
If "direct knowledge" is aphenomenal knowledge, it wouldn't seem to make sense as a concept. So I think the disagreement is about the relevance of the...
March 08, 2024 at 18:11
I'll share my favorite phenomenology-based explanation: Sokolowski's real focus in thought and language though, not perception. He goes on to elucidat...
March 08, 2024 at 17:23
I think this is precisely where indirect realists make their hay. When you hear a foreign language you don't know, you hear sounds, not words. If you ...
March 08, 2024 at 15:45
I would disagree that populist movements are only ever responses to corruption. The backlash against the Democratic party in the South over the end of...
March 08, 2024 at 13:48
I'm not sure I understand you. What is different, Nature versus Mind or science vs a Nature/Mind distinction? IDK, science seems to make mention of th...
March 08, 2024 at 13:23
Right, that was the first question, but you ignored the rest — "what would be a property that exists "in-itself," i.e., exists in a way that doesn't m...
March 08, 2024 at 01:57
Everything is "shit posting" and covered in multiple levels of irony, but I've seen enough of these spaces to be quite confident that there are a dece...
March 08, 2024 at 01:26
I don't see how this is the case. What would be an example of a property that is known without interaction? Moreover, what would be a property that ex...
March 08, 2024 at 00:43
Right, and this would be the work of reason, transcending current beliefs and horizons. But we need not stop at Gadamer's "fusion of horizons." Since ...
March 07, 2024 at 19:44
Well, I assumed I was talking about the telos of governance in general, as defending/empowering freedom, ensuring justice, etc. I don't think the func...
March 07, 2024 at 18:57