Philosophy Now Forum

I consider myself as simple and I never studied philosophy. I had to make a fierce effort to understand your sentence consisting of two of´s and a participle. Have mercy. Philosophy is necessary for a farmer who does not want to get depressed. He needs to ask himself and to answer the philosphical q...

And I got yesterday a treasury of the contemporary human nature in Withens, as described by Stephen Booth in his thriller "Blind to the Bones", free of charge, from a package of books on the pavement, offered to passers by by a house owner doing feng shui. Mr. Booth smiles friendly from th...

I beg your pardon ? The concept of the ethical has at least some content by virtue of human nature ? Richard, honestly, by talking like this you discourage simple people from studying philosophy. And simple people SHOULD study philosophy because having reason is what distinguishes them from animals ...

What function of a stone do you mean ? If a stone falls down it is the gravitation which does it. Not the mass in kilogrammes or pounds but the force with which the earth pulls the stone towards itself. If a stone has neven been discovered by a human being it can only play with earth and the gravita...

Animals bred for food have miserable lives. It is only different if they are members of the family. An Italian teacher told us that many Italian families who moved from the south to the north took the family goat with them because they needed the nourishing milk and kept her on the balcony. It is al...

It is important to know what the bank does with the money. The state is also an option, especially if one wants to be on the safe side, because the money is secured by the taxes. A bank can finance weapon industry or environmental projects. I prefer the second one. Keeping the money under the matera...

Do you trust banks ? After the bankrupcy of Lehmann Brothers one can be suspicious and prefer to keep the money under the materass. Financial security can make one lazy and unenterprising, too relaxed. Quite a number of people who had won a big sum in Toto-Lotto became alcoholics and ended up in a g...

But why is the scene of yellow and blue pleasing ? Blue and yellow are in act, and the green is in potentia, potentially but not actually there, and green makes happy like anyone who walks in nature can tell. Money combined with wisdom could produce happiness. But money as such is nothing, it is onl...

When colours are complementary they produce something new together, for example yellow and blue produce green.

Freedom and safety produce ... happiness ?

I have never read the book about Robinson, I only remembered that he had an island for himself. He seemed to be the most free of men, unbound by social constraints. The desire for freedom could be complementary to the desire for safety. One wants to be free, but freedom without safety is not worth m...

So the desires are contradictory: I want exactly the same piece of cake as everyone else, but at the same time I want to get much more cake for myself and stuff myself with it. Robinson can have it both: there is nobody else there to compare himself to so he can eat all the cake himself, without sha...

I am not sure whether the desire for freedom and the desire for equality can be complementary. Is the extreme freedom is in the anarchy or in the jungle or in the world Hobbes describes ? The survival of the fittest means that you are stressed out all the time, worried and constrainted by the strong...

Maybe we should distinguish between close complementarity and remote complementarity. A hermit has a remote complementary relationship with society. He stays at a distance. But every now and then he is overpowered by the desire to go to the common people and to teach them some wisdom. Even if they l...

How about this:

There are all kinds of influences, infinite in number, between all and everything.
Some of them are special and deserve to be called complementary.
An influence can undergo a change from being a complementary to being an un-complementary one.

Now you sound enigmatic.
Like a magician who is going to take a rabbit out of a bowler hat.

I need clearness and accuracy.
An attempt will be appreciated, no matter how imperfect.
Have courage !