GENIUS FORUMS

EI: So he failed to prove anything? Why are you considering him important, then? Did I say he was important? I just brought him up to show David that analytic philosophers aren't against the notion of certainty by default. That's all. Moore was an important philosopher but I don't believe he was. R...

Dan, Such is our prejudice towards the empirical. A dream hand is actually just as real as an empirical one; they just have different secondary characteristics. That all depends on how you want to define certain terms. If the proposition we seek to prove is "I'm looking at my right hand",...

David,

Are you saying that he was absolutely sure his hand was there? He wasn't dreaming it?

That's actually the very reason why he's considered to have failed at his attempt to prove that one could be certain of things. He had to admit that he couldn't know that he wasn't simply dreaming it.

David, I don't find any of this very believable. What does it mean to prove that various common sense notions are absolutely certain? It means the Moore held up his hand, and then asked himself if he could be certain that it was there. He tried to demonstrate that he could. Did Moore consciously gr...

Katy, I think the point is that QRS "masculine" and "feminine" actually are how things used to be used by the general public. I mean, if you look at anthropological literature for non-western cultures, or archaeology or history, the patterns described by QRS as "feminine&qu...

David, This is still a case of upholding the all-important religious principle of uncertainty. By tailoring one's thinking (via the study of "analytical philosophy") so that it can automatically dismiss all statements of certainty as being "trivial" by default, one is affirming ...

Dan, That is demonstrably wrong and defies both common sense and everyday experience. Do you seriously, for example, believe that the attraction one gender has for the other is purely based in physical differences? That's the problem with responding to posts sentence by sentence. You often take a s...

Kevin, All I was saying was that "rebirth in the animal realms" doesn't mean actually being reborn as, say, a cow. It only means that a person becomes more animal in nature - more unconscious - more concerned with things like food and sex. Wow. I totally missed the point of what you were ...

Eliza, Since coming here I've learned of the underlying disgust that most men have for women, and recognize a strange kind of wisdom in these women's unethical treatment of men. This board is hardly a proper sample of the general population. In fact, I find many views that are held by many at this ...

Bryan, A thing has boundaries (i.e. beginning and end). For anything to exist it must be perceived, as an image before the mind. A perception is an appearance before the mind. In truth, we only ever know with absolute certainty what is seen of the mind. A priori all things are mental by definition....

Kevin, All the realms are mental. The common Buddhist belief in realms of existence that aren't mental is an erroneous belief. I really don't see the difference between calling all things mental or physical. A monist outlook is a monist outlook. You can, of course, reduce all knowable things to men...

Diebert, So then you'd get a strange inversed type of world where the most important is reduced to triviality, not worthy to stand still for and the trivial has become our full-time obsession? The importance of any given notion is purely a matter of opinion. That's not even to mention that Quine's ...

Carl,

Such sarcasm born of anger.

A right postmodernist rage really. :)

Kelly, I don't regard rape as violence much at all. It is just the body, after all. What i do regard as violent is the willingness of the mind to submit to animal-like stupidity. I'm guessing that you're using "violence" as a synonym for "bad" or some such here. Thus you're maki...

I figured that might be what you were getting at, but I felt like being randomly contradictory. Although, I'm not so sure what sort of device you'd use to measure the amount of truth in any given thing. Huh... actually, I'd say that everything has about 100% truth except for those sneaky proposition...

Wait... are you suggesting that Sports Illustrated isn't utterly riddled with profound insight? You obviously haven't realized that baseball isn't really a sport, but simply a giant metaphor for everything in existence. It's true(ish)! Although really, is the degree to which something is profound ev...

At least that is how the mob over at "Common Ascent", which is essentially a cult of uncertaintists, interpret it. CA is hardly a "cult of uncertaintists". If you'll note, the thread that PK/Carl linked to has very few folks who attacked the notion of certainty. Rather, they att...

Carl, Interesting, that's who I must have conversing with, three postmodernists, recently at another forum: Me? A "postmodernist"? Uh... maybe. I'm about as "postmodernist" as Hume, Kant, and Wittgenstein. Regardless, I eagerly await whatever rebuttal your going to provide to my...

David, "Do not feel absolutely certain of anything." ~ Bertrand Russell, In other words, avoid truth. I'd interpret it as saying "question everything". Seems like good advice for anyone interested in truth. What do you think the term "absolute certainty" points to anyw...

Who cares if first ladies influence presidents? I imagine that the president's friends also tend to influence him. Maybe he's also influenced by newspapers, magazines, television, radio, odd comments he overhears from white house staff, etc. Eleanor Roosevelt seems like a particularly upstanding ind...

Dan, Morality is for people who believe in free will, which is ignorant. I'll assume that you're talking about the magical conception of free will which is obviously incoherent. Nevertheless, there are much better ways to understand free will, that don't fade with a reasoned examination. I'll ask y...

David, After reading what you've written on causation at your site, it seems that you've ignored a very important distinction in terms. There's a difference between "random" and "arbitrary". Random events operate according to probability distributions. If phenomena P can be said...

The rationality of a thought can only be judged from logically examining it and probing it for faults, dismissing a thought as irrational based on how quickly it was thought of is irrational. "Hasty generalization" is just the common name of the logical fallacy. It has nothing to do with ...

"If you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon." -Bokonon (or actually Vonnegut) You folks all realize that hasty generalizations are a logical error right? Just because you know twenty folks from group Q that all think P, doesn't mean that everyone in group Q t...

Given the definition of "enlightenment" I've seen 'round these parts, I'm pretty sure I'd hate being enlightened. I'm oh so attached to my love and happiness. Plus, I occasionally like to talk to my dog. He's a fantastic listener. Well, save for the whole comprehension bit.