Philosophy Now Forum

When you hear, "Why squares are blue," does that suggest all squares are blue, or does that just suggest when squares are blue that there's an explanation for it? Different people interpret this phrase differently, but what happens when different interpreters coexist among each other, and ...

Soapboxes are generally made from the poorest quality wood and it is inadvisable for superior people to climb onto them for the purpose of lecturing the great unwashed who are so obviously their intellectual inferiors. Preachers have been known to fall off such insecure platforms and get splinters ...

I don't know about that. Philosophers are supposedly intelligent people, so they're more likely to be malicious than incompetent. It seems more that they let things rot in silence because they don't discuss what they don't want to. They figure if they don't pay attention to things that things go awa...

I guess nobody has an answer? Perhaps it's because modern philosophy has an ulterior motive at stake in being empirical because it overgeneralizes the abstract nature of religion, and it seeks to replace religion as a guiding force in society? Therefore, it keeps quiet on purpose whenever empiricism...

Lately, I've been having trouble explaining the problems of empiricism to empirical authorities. It seems to be a problem of incommensurable values. Not only do our values differ, but our values differ in such a way that merely discussing values doesn't work. The problem is that the nature of empiri...

Does a study of facts in society necessitate a commitment to real power politics such that there is no such thing as legitimacy behind authority?

Instead, everything would be about power politics, and empiricism would literally be used to calculate the distribution of power within society.

Yep.

Sorry, but there doesn't seem to be much more to be said. Your article refers to what is, not what ought to be. It is what it is.

I haven't listened to the podcast, but there's something to keep in mind. Interruptions are not always bad. Sometimes, it's important to interrupt someone before someone carries on a tangent, or someone's ideas aren't well-founded. There's no point to listen to someone continue if someone's premises...

duszek wrote:Some like it so much that they seem addicted to it.
They will fight and fight no matter what.

Is it necessary to be right (all the time) to preserve one´s mental drive ?

Well if you're wrong, then you're doing it wrong, you know?

Gotta be right or else you should change what you're doing.

My first impression was it was more about philosophers handing down values to students like parents hand down values to children. I still need to read it again to get a better grasp of it though. Dalek Prime was actually more correct about what I meant, because although parents do hand down what th...

Part of what he's saying is that philosophers, in his experience, are becoming more accepting of conventional views, unwilling to step outside norms. OK, so I reread it, and my impression now is that he's saying philosophers' attitudes change once they become parents, but I'm not sure it's the same...

Part of what he's saying is that philosophers, in his experience, are becoming more accepting of conventional views, unwilling to step outside norms. My first impression was it was more about philosophers handing down values to students like parents hand down values to children. I still need to rea...

It's really a matter of efficient thinking. On an intuitive basis, you appreciate the values that enable you to organize your mind and complete tasks so quickly that others can't even keep up. They'll ask, "How did you do that?" because it didn't seem feasible to reach a result with a limi...

Isn't modern philosophy really just an exercise in trolling? Yeah, I pretty much agree with what you said in your post. I notice that there's a ton of dogmatic academics out there defending their 'philosophy', pretending to be thinking intellectuals with their elitist attitudes (especially reading ...

I remembered reading the following, and think it fits in with this thread. Http://www.jehsmith.com/1/2012/11/must-philosophers-be-parents.html I'm going to have to reread that piece a couple times, but yea, I can see a connection between what it says and what I wrote. I'm just not quite sure what t...