Tom Storm

I believe that complex ideas can often be stated simply. :wink:

Sounds like you are saying that thoughts, objects, and values like good and bad exist in some way and are experienced directly rather than defined by ...

But picking great works is not a quota-based activity. My list would probably have more French writers than any others too. These are the books he has...

The idea of a “universally agreed upon” classic novel is probably seen as a bit outdated these days. Literary value is filtered through culture, histo...

Can you expand on this? Wouldn’t it be the case that all thoughts are IN the world - whether those about ethics or those about Harry Potter?

You’re probably phrasing this a little bit more strongly that I would but I think this frame resonates with me too. When I was hanging around New Age ...

Maybe tangential, but when I see people chasing forms of self-improvement (including certain strands of management theory), I often see nostalgia proj...

I think this passage assumes a false choice: that any statement about constraints must be either universally fixed or entirely contingent on current b...

For sure. And, perversely some take great comfort from the harm done - as an elderly woman said to my gay friend and his partner, "It makes me feel be...

Yep... time to move, I'd say. Best of luck and take care.

I wouldn't think it fair to call him verbose. My request for a few pointers was based on the fact that we had already been engaged in a lengthy, wordy...

Isn't it moral realism?

If that helps to make things clear, let's go for it.

nicely worded response and very interesting. Lots to think about.

I'm not very reassured by this answer. But I do accept the notion of intersubjectivity. I think point 1 is, at best, contestable. Whether abortion is ...

You raise soem important quesions. I have never understood what the idea of objectivity means. Surely an odd term that simply means that anything whic...

I feel that perhaps our conversation has wandered and become too diffuse. The original question was soemthign like: to what extent can we claim that ‘...

Cool.

Do you think my poor sketch has any plausibility?

Wow.... that's an interesting perspective. Hiding their AI light under a bushel.

But what if this particular form of determinism isn’t at the individual level, but at the level of reality itself? In other words, if I am not born, r...

Yes, that’s my position. What we call true is what makes sense or works in a given context. Does truth exist as a separate property outside us by whic...

Funny, you say this, I've speculated similarly. But it's getting a little into a strange form of determinism. :wink:

Yes, that could do it. What part of London are you in? Can you find a safer area? Sorry to hear about your experiences. I imagine that would be horrib...

Are you saying that if truth only depends on us, then we should already know all truths, but since we don’t, truth must exist independently of human p...

What are some examples? I imagine the London of 1890 woudl be tougher and nastier than today's? I live in a big city (5 million people) and there's st...

Someone can knowingly sell cigarettes or cancer causing products and be very successful and live a very happy life. Period. No. Gangsters, autocrats, ...

The point is you said this: I responded with reasoning why this is inaccurate.

I guess it depends on the nature of the claim, right? As a rule, I don’t think things are “true” in themselves, they’re just not false. Water freezes ...

No, I'm sayign precisely the opposite.

I don’t think this is accurate. People can sell harmful products that cause cancer, become rich, build a personal paradise, mistreat those around them...

As an Australian of a certain era, the cult of individualism hasn’t really held much significance, except in sporting excellence. We love our cricket ...

Yes, as I said - I should have said fragile rather than vulnerable, perhaps. Pragmatically truth serves a purpose which remains stable while a given t...

I think these are certainly popular tropes. Whether they are accurate or not, I don't know. I think this is a subject that could be teased out into ma...

I wonder if this kind of objection is mixing up intersubjectivity with instability. To say truth is intersubjective is not to say that it shifts with ...

I was wondering how long it would take. Hence my somewhat cuntish comment near the start of all this...

:up: :up:

I would struggle to see how we could improve on this. No doubt, we could introduce a lot of speculative, abstruse theoretical material into discussion...

I have gently pondered this question since I was a child. Answer: it would have been different, but not significantly so. If I hadn’t been here, someo...

This is an interesting take. Do you see this as a phase or the beginning of catastrophe?

I think you and I might agree that there are degrees of misreading. If you came away from Das Kapital seeing it as a guide for trusting corporations a...

I'm quite content to be superficial, to be honest. But I wonder if this inability to listen well has a contrapuntal echo in people’s inability to read...

Your solution here would appear to avoid infinite regress. As a general rule do you find infinite regress problematic?

Yes, it is difficult. And, as we both know, sometimes the quality of wisdom means different things to different people. It's a bit like the elusive qu...

Interesting. I’ve noticed a self-criticism within the West that has become more rancid over time. It used to be just a leftist posture but now seems t...

Nicely put. What do you make of the notion that morality is prelinguistic?

Out of interest, if you had to provide some 17 year-old students with a brief definition of wisdom (and not one quoted from elsewhere), what might you...

I wonder if it might be more precise to describe values as having a pre-linguistic dimension (in experience, emotion, embodied life), but that they on...

I’ve heard no good reason to accept this idea but if you want to provide some evidence please do. I don't know of anything timeless and absolute, do y...

I find that difficult to understand. Do laws which allow for the provision of abortion not themselves present a moral position? Are they not, in effec...