Monday, September 25, 2006
[This is a weird hodge-podge I feel I need to explain before one goes on: I had written a post that was pretty good in explaining my views, but then ended up writing what I think is a more clear explanation of my views in a comment to Nate’s post, so I have decided to [...]
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Ethical questions posed in the comment thread of the ‘When the Levees Broke’ post have inspired me to compile my thoughts into a more cohesive form. In the following post my references to ‘The Social Contract’ pertain to the exemplar of the subject, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s text, ‘The Social Contract’, as it anticipated the character [...]
For whatever reason these last few months I have been accosted by a variety of different rational arguments seeking to disprove the existence of the soul. Sometimes I join in on the discussion but most times I have a strong aversion to the underlying principles of the discussion. I feel certain that [...]
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
I am always afraid of talking down to someone, and then when I try to simplify a concept, I get blindsided by an intelligent attack, and have to raise my game a bit, be more precise, keep to a fixed language… it is hard to modulate ideas, and I admit what I am actually trying [...]
[In a thread started at Madpercolator the issue of what constitutes sound knowledge was raised. Never a simple topic, the thread had got to the point where I felt it necessary to set aside a post entirely on this subject in the hopes of giving the proper attention to the question to satisfy all [...]
The mistake is to write in imitation of someone else. And yet I am fully aware that influence seeps into me without my prior knowledge. There is something of a contradiction between my commonsense observations and my mythology, and this is the decisive point, for anyone keeping tabs, where who I really am [...]
Imagine a belief in absolutes to be like a unified bed of ice on a frozen lake the boundaries of which are infinite. And imagine that the believer of absolutes is atop this bed of ice, able to move freely in any direction so long as he is certain of the absolute nature of the [...]
Saturday, December 10, 2005
I am going to post some open ended ideas about the grammar of logic in the hopes that some people may give some input on what they think occurs in their use.
I will use the previous example of “’Socrates is a man because he is not a woman’ is a logical proof’, which I will [...]
This is a continuation, perhaps a summation, of some strands of thoughts that have existed piecemeal in comments and philosophic posts recently.
In his ‘Philosophical Investigations’, Wittgenstein writes:
“(108) We see that what we call “sentence” and “language” has not the formal unity that I imagined, but is the family of structures more or less related to [...]
Monday, November 28, 2005
After hearing a radio program on the history of pragmatism I decided to read ‘The Metaphysical Club’ by Louis Menand. The Metaphysical Club at the center of the book consists of an array of intellectuals (primarily in and around the Boston area) who through a series of informal meetings at one another’s home came [...]
RSS feed
