Philosophy Now Forum

Ray Prebble argues that moral relativism is both incoherent and immoral. https://philosophynow.org/issues/124/Are_You_A_Garbled_Relativist A philosophical argument would have been welcome. Instead it was ad hominem - mostly ad hominem against a variety of straw men! - from start to finish. Rather t...

How dull you are. Of course you have to conceptualise to have a chair or to use the term sit. Everything we are doing here is using concepts. That's the whole point dullard. Indeed, I must be very dull, or you too clever to be understood. I've managed to frustrate you into repeating yourself while ...

Sam found more fertile ground.

One cannot even sit without conceptualising sitting. The chair is secondary to this. This is either bunkum or you mean something quite odd by "conceptualising"; since I, and I suspect most of us, do not have to undertake any ratiocination in order to sit. But then, you cannot see the dist...

No we can sit on whatever we like, and we can call what we sit on whatever we chose, but sitting is not simply taking the weight off of your feet and distributing it across your bum, otherwise we could sit on a bed of nails. Sitting is a concept, the main idea behind it being comfort, therefore one...

Complete this syllogism: The word "chair" refers to an object which has been designed with the purpose of sitting in mind. Therefore chairs are only concepts, and exist only in the presence of people. The use of word in the sentence above implies the redundant quotation marks. Thus: the w...

Complete this syllogism:

The word "chair" refers to an object which has been designed with the purpose of sitting in mind.

Therefore chairs are only concepts, and exist only in the presence of people.

The word chair refers to an object which has been designed with the purpose of sitting in mind. A statue designed suitably for sitting on, would be both a chair and a statue. So chairs have a conceptual existence, and physical existence only when in the presence of man. No people means no chair, ev...

Hobbes' Choice wrote: What do you mean by the word chair?
I think you are confused.

I think I mean much the same as you mean. I do not think the confusion is mine.

I am sitting on a chair. "Chair" is a word. Do you agree with me so far?

Again, by your argument one cannot say that the Spanish word for "chair" is "silla". But obviously we can; therefore your argument is in error. Obviously I have already said that Spanish Silla is the equivalent to the English Chair and so prove my argument fully. They are both l...

Again, by your argument one cannot say that the Spanish word for "chair" is "silla".

But obviously we can; therefore your argument is in error.

angrysoba wrote:...my main philosophical interests are Austin, Searle, Grice and Wittgenstein.

No one else is important...

Except maybe Davidson?

The quotes are functionless in this instance. As by their use you are implying an objective reality for chair. This misses the whole point. An object we call a "chair" is still not a chair in China. It is a cleverly constructed wooden object designed for sitting on. All of which sentence ...

Time passes, whether there is someone to notice, or not. Sure, our notion of time is a concept - call it that if you like. But time is not a concept. It's real.

A physicists idea of an atom may be different to a chemists idea of an atom. The reason they are not free to apply names to things is because the physicist and the chemist work within different paradigms. Are you suggesting that the physicist and the chemist cannot understand each other? That's not...