I have no idea whether Dewey used the good ole pencil/stick in water chestnut as an example — Ciceronianus the White

Confucius he say, "Stick in water chestnut make good party food."

You don't have to be in the Mafia's s pocket to know what's good for you.

Everything can happen, but on average, what does happen is pretty average, most of the time.

You may like subjectivism, but I think it's crap.

Unfortunately, subjectivism can accommodate my disagreement along with any argument I might make. So I wonder why it is even a subject for discussion, except that you are waiting for Mummy to smack your bottom and send you to bed. Consider it done.

Ethical egoism is like the race of giant dwarves.

It is part of the mythology that capitalists, (not capital) do all the hard work and deserve all the rewards. It is always liable to be popular to maintain that what you ought to do is just what you want to do, and feeling virtuous is one of the luxuries the rich like to purchase from moral philosophers.

Meanwhile, we peasants are used to there being a conflict between what one wants to do, and what one feels one ought to do. That is why we have a different terminology for them - wants desires wishes on the one hand and obligations commitments oughts on the other. Without this conflict, there would be no need for a separate moral language at all.

Much as I would like to continue pontificating, I have to go and assist with the washing up.

It is only what I deserve. I kill the king, and Hydra-like 4 more kings arise. *Climbs into sky grave, and pulls up ladder behind.*

What if you're in checkmate, but there is no way to move out a frame, and reinscribe the impasse as a resolved outcome on a new level? — csalisbury

Then the king dies. The player dies. Thought ends. When there is no movement possible, there is stillness.

What is the difference between enlightenment and depression?
Between carefree and careless?

Curious how thought aspires to the mechanical, to computation, as in chess moves. Curious how a thread on thoughts about living becomes a thread on thinking as living.

The ego cannot change itself — csalisbury

The wall. Ego is the thought of thought as actor. The thinker cannot change the nature of thought.
The thinker is the thought of thought as actor.

There is nothing there, but thought endlessly trying to fill the void. (Something here about holes, and stopping digging)

Heaven and earth are ruthless, and treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs;
the sage is ruthless, and treats the people as straw dogs. — Lao Tzu

Exercise: play chess with three players. Usual rules, take turns, but find yourself playing black and white alternately. Practice the presence; it's the move, not the goal. Everyone wins- everyone loses.

https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-godels-incompleteness-theorems-work-20200714

A fairly decent layman's guide I think, if anyone is interested.

It is alas the Christian tradition to rush to judgement, notwithstanding the man saying quite clearly 'Judge not, that ye be not judged.' (Matthew 7.1)

It comes of worshipping the Great IAM, and though we are nominally a secular society, the finger wagging Christian remains in the unconscious of the supposedly rational atheist. But let us comfort ourselves with the understanding that the individual is almost entirely helpless for good or ill, and everything one might achieve is with the assistance of the mass of society and the generations of the ancestors. Those traditions that venerate the ancestors have the more realistic view, for the ancestors have de-stoned by hand every arable field that grows our crops, and laboured endlessly to glean the little knowledge we have accumulated.

Literally nothing can be done without cooperation, we cannot even feed ourselves.

That there is no evidence that demonstrates the operation of Sod's law, is just an example of the operation of Sod's law.

Discuss, making sure to lay to one side the sods, so they can be replaced over the graves, or wherever the bad news is being buried.

Gaia is angry, and so am I.

The staff have to do it for you. A private message with your heart's desire should do it.

Theories of truth can be correct or incorrect. Just use the word 'correct' to describe a philosophical approach (or so-called 'theory') to addressing 'truth,' and the problem is solved. — Wheatley

What is the difference? If your post is correct, is it not true? It's as if a guilty man becomes innocent if he changes his name. ( and likewise good and useful)

'Subjective' is these days pretty much a term of abuse used by those who think they have the patent on logic and science.

Thus we see it being argued that there can be no subjective truth. In which case it follows that there can be no subjective meaning. But then there is no meaning to 'objective truth' or 'objective meaning' either; there is simply 'meaning' and 'truth'. Distinctions are only meaningful and useful if they distinguish this from that.

So here is the descent into madness: The only truth is objective truth, and there is no subjective truth. Therefore subjects cannot know things, only objects can. Therefore I am an object.

Thus far, the beginning philosopher has adopted the motivations of the scientist as such; these merely live on in him, since he was, after all, already a scientist previously. Fundamentally, he does not want to change anything whatsoever about this. As a philosopher, he wants to be nothing at all but a scientist, though of course a genuine, a radically genuine scientist. And like any other scientist, he is motivated by the love of wisdom, after which he is named and which at first is nothing but a scientific love of truth in the manner of a habitual devotion to the value-realm of truth, which is contained in the essence of the sphere of judgment. Through this love of truth, he too, therefore, allows himself to be defined by an abiding life decision aimed at what is greatest and best in this realm of truth, within the limits of what is practically possible.
And yet there is an essential difference here wherever we look. Undoubtedly, science and philosophy were originally one and the same, or rather, the special sciences were only living branches growing from the trunk of the whole, the one philosophy, as an indivisible living unity. But since then the two have become divided, and divided by nothing less than the ethos animating their entire working activity. The division has occurred because that spirit of radicalism has been lost which, under the title “philosophy,” wanted to go to the end in that which makes science science: that is, in the epistemological justification of cognition, and precisely thereby in the self-justification of the scientist in his entire cognitive accomplishing. — Husserl

First Philosophy: Lectures 1923/24 and Related Texts from the Manuscripts (1920-1925). Translated by Sebastian Luft and Thane M. Naberhaus. Springer, 2019. Edmund Husserl.

Not so much 'What is first?' and more, 'Why, at this stage, do you seek to start again from the beginning?" Philosophy has no foundation, only, with luck, a keel.

it's a passing moment. — ssu

Et voila.

Suicides on wall street aricle doesn't seem to be about the lower class. — Wheatley

Did you read the article? It exposes the myth; it didn't happen. Of course some people with money lost out, but mainly, the little people lost their homes and livelihoods and 'the banker is the man who gets it all', as documented in the mere fiction I cited. But by all means look up the stats on wealth distribution through the last recession, to check.

As if the money is more important than a person) — Johan2001

“If you treat making children as a for-profit business, suddenly the legal attributes of for-profit business starts to leak into child building.” — Arthur Caplan

Well that is easily dealt with. Ban payments for donations (as if it wasn't already a contradiction), and ban for-profit sperm banks.

But after that, I think it's a woman's right to choose what gets put in her body. That right might be outweighed by some disastrous effect on population that threatened human survival - like a drastic shortage of men or something equally terrible.

Have you tried the old-fashioned method of reproduction at all?

Yes, who cares about economics when we have great literature. — ssu

Shit. You really don't have an argument do you?

An economic depression doesn't suit the monied class. — ssu

Oh but it does. Read The Grapes of Wrath

Today that push for a more just US that would live up to it's values even better could be continued with opposing police brutality and the whole legal system, or what has become of it. Nonviolent means will be far more effective means to do this in a deeply polarized country bursting with guns and which is hell bent on transforming into a police state from a justice state as a huge security apparatus already exists in the country. — ssu

I hope you are right, but your post in general sounds like wishful thinking and fantasy national virtue. I very much fear there will be a blood bath, because economically it will suit the monied class.

using that method then is so also for someone pushing an agenda you vehemently oppose. — ssu

No it isn't. Why would you think that? Violence to promote injustice is not equivalent to violence to end injustice. That's ridiculous.

How do people in Hong Kong protest the Chinese authorities by burning their own property down? Why would the store owners be the culprits there? You genuinely think that Beijing cares about that? — ssu

So many questions. Why not pick North Korea? People in Hong Kong protest as best they can, and I am not going to second guess their tactics, any more than I am going to second guess protestors in the US.

(Besides, are there huge riots in the US anymore? — ssu

No. But some people seem to be terribly exercised about a couple of incidents. Otherwise, we could let the property damage thing go and focus on the real topic of what to do about systemic racism. I am defending the principle that damage to property is traditional and justifiable form of protest that has worked to change things for example in the case of the suffragettes. and in the anti apartheid movement in the UK. It's a way of making justice an economic issue, and economic issues always get attended to.

Yet actually your question is simply when should I take the law into my own hands? — ssu

Let me put it this way: if the law is that black people are slaves, or that black people are not allowed to use the same facilities as others, or that Jews have to wear a star and live in the ghetto, or some other inhuman and immoral law, then not to resist or protest or break the law is immoral and indefensible, and to seek to protect one's property at the expense of those who oppose and resist is doubly indefensible. Thus spake the Lord.

Well there are many questions there, and I do not want to argue them all to a conclusion; I don't know enough about the particulars. I am satisfied if I have made a space for a moral resistance to racism that does not necessarily respect property rights as absolute.

To be nonchalant of other people if they are private business owners because they are more easy targets (while trying similar tactics to the actual object of the protest would be more riskier) sounds strange, when you say it's all about human rights and equality. — ssu

Well let me take it somewhere else, where it might seem less strange. Like Vichy France. There is a National government of sorts, that is collaborating with the Nazis, and your average boulanger wants to get on with baking and selling bread as best he can, and protests his innocence.

But from the point of view of the resistance, there is no neutrality; you are part of the resistance or you are a collaborator. And the boulangerie may well be blown up as a diversion, to kill a few German customers, or simply to disrupt the ordinary functioning of life that is serving to transport and annihilate certain sections of the populace. A price worth paying.

Of course things are not that bad, but it is a judgement to be made, how bad they have to be before Joe Public's private property becomes part of the battleground. How many corpses does it take before your property is at the disposal of the resistance?

So as a white woman married to a black man and raising a biracial child I’ve had to unlearn a lot of things. I’ve also had to LEARN twice as much. I’ve had to become aware and start to notice things my mind never would have before. My husband, Walter, and I were recently discussing these things and here’s a list of all the things we’ve encountered:
-I have to drive basically anytime we are leaving the Dayton area. We don’t talk about it each time, we just both know that if we are leaving our general “safe” area and heading to smaller town Ohio roads I’m the one driving.
-I have to handle store clerks, returns, getting documents signed, anything with any federal building or administrative work, I get further with any type of “paperwork” thing that needs handled, people listen to me and are much more agreeable than with him.
-The chances that we find a Black or Interracial couple on a greeting card are SLIM. Unless you want to give the same Black Couple card every year, which we have . There are hundreds of white couples to choose from though!
-My husband goes out of his way to be nice and talk to EVERYONE. Not because he’s a people person, but because he has learned that a 6’5 Black man intimidates people and so he overcompensates by being overly friendly so people won’t be afraid of him.
- If Walter is pushing the cart I always have to have my receipt ready when leaving the store.
-None of our neighbors thought we owned our home, multiple neighbors stopped my father and asked him if he was the new landlord for us. Because of course, the old white man must have purchased the home. Not only do we own our home, it’s fully paid off, we have no mortgage and we paid for it BY OURSELVES.
-It took us YEARS to find a church without racist undertones and low key racist members, YEARS!
-When doll shopping our daughter gets 25 white options and 1-2 black or mixed race doll options.
-The same people who stop us daily to say how adorable our daughter is, are the same people who would cross the street if Walter was walking alone.
-We avoid all places with confederate flags.
-If we go to Bob Evans (or any restaurant that caters to “seniors”) too early we are met with a lot of stares, the old racists eat between 4-5pm.
-When Walter goes to a playground with our daughter he constantly stays by her side, if not he gets stares and people wonder what the “big black man” is doing on the park bench.
-Walter is concerned our Black Lives Matter sign by the door will make us a target when he is not home so he asked me to remove it
Now this post isn’t to make people say “oh poor you, I’m so sorry” etc etc. we have a wonderful life and are thankful for it. But...changes need to happen. This is just a small glimpse into the intentional and unintentional racism that happens everywhere, all the time. I want a better world for our daughter so I’m happy that things are changing. I know a lot of you are tired of the protests and tired of the changes and tired of people complaining. Well I’m tired of having to find a different gas station when the one we drive by has two trucks with confederate flags and 6 white boys in sleeveless shirts standing around outside. I’m tired of my husband having to talk to everyone and never complain even when they mess up his order 10,000 times, I’m tired of driving Damn near everywhere, I’m tired of the sick feeling I get when a cop pulls behind us, I’m tired of having to worry anytime my husband has to work OT and leaves in the middle of the night, I’m tired and I’ve only been on this ride 7 years, imagine a lifetime of this!
-edited to Add our Picture because I hope when you see those images on the news of riots and destruction you also remember that the majority of those protesting and fighting for rights are just regular folks like us who want our hearts to be seen. Peaceful loving families who just want a better world.

https://www.facebook.com/pamela.thompson.5030

My wife isn't a 6'5" man, and I am a white man not a white woman; but otherwise our experiences are remarkably similar. This will probably not count as evidence, however many times it is repeated. Don't ask me for evidence. Don't fucking ask me for fucking evidence. Don't fucking dare to ask me for fucking evidence.

Seems to me, and do correct me if I'm wrong, that you are talking about two different things whereas BC is talking about the same issue. — ssu

I wonder why I am so hard to understand. Can you perhaps let me know what two different things I am talking about and whether or not one of them is the same thing that BC is being consistent about? That will make it easier for me to correct you if you are wrong.

Do you consider this to be good/bad, or does it depend on something else? — Pinprick

Like being short-sighted - I'd rather not be; I try to compensate; I don't demand miracles.

but no one bothers getting upset at being judged favorably due to appearance, or whatever else that isn’t actions. — Pinprick

I'm bothered when I trust someone because they 'look honest' and they ain't.

It's not a fact that white faces are safer, and it's not an ideology for most people either. It's an unconscious prejudice that operates in our lives because it is built into our education and experience. Unfortunately it's a comfortable prejudice if your face fits, and many people don't want to see their own prejudice, or how they benefit from others' prejudice.

There is no first. Philosophy is reflexive, always secondary, always a questioning of whatever was first. Philosophy is always of something that it is parasitic on, and the question of the op, being a matter of the philosophy of philosophy, is not even secondary but tertiary a reflection on reflexivity.

Eh how is me breaking a ducks leg worse than me eating a cow? — Gitonga

I'd better declare a lack of interest here; I am vegetarian. Having said that, I see nothing wrong with eating dead animals; if humans don't eat them then vultures or worms or bacteria will. Killing animals to eat is what I would compare to torturing them. And killing I suggest is less immoral at least. The same can be said to apply to humans; there is a UN convention forbidding torture, but not war or execution.

But also the psychology of animals is different; animals do not identify with their future death, but live in the moment. The gazelle fears the claws and bite of the lion, but has no notion, and thus no fear of death. It is the innocence of the un-fallen, as the bible has it. A stress free death is no hardship, and no immorality to an animal.

Stanford is the philosophers' bible for expert coverage of most topics. But what amateurs and newbies need is something a bit more manageable, that will introduce technical terms, big cheeses, and the multitude of 'isms sufficiently concisely that you don't entirely lose the will to live. Something like this:

http://www.philosophypages.com/dy/

I would only caution that children and other newbies do not learn to talk by consuming dictionaries, but by being immersed in a language. This is because meaning is use, as Wittgenstein discovered. Thus if we use 'terrific' and 'awesome' to mean the same as 'fabulous' and 'fantastic', then they mean the same, despite technical historical differences. Also, the terms that philosophers have real difficulty with, are the little ones, like 'I' and 'thing' and 'mean' - terms which are too familiar and useful to be constrained by a definition.

I tend to refer people who get hung up on definitions to a favourite book that constitutes a reductio ad absurdum__ The Meaning of 'meaning', by Ogden and Richards. 400 pages of analysis of the technical philosophical meaning of one word may seem like cruel and unusual punishment, but it is an infallible cure for definitionism.

Did I say that making shit up was a bad thing? I've nothing against it, provided it is honest toil. But I will take issue with those who pretend the shit they make up is real. — Banno

You just made this up didn't you? I always pretend the shit I make up is real - life is more fun if you take it seriously.

I am so far from being post-modern as to not even to have attained mere modernity. Ancient and decrepit is where I'm at. Still, definitions are of very limited use. If I asked you to define 'post modernism', the best I could hope for is that you would explain the word with some other words. Hopefully, I would understand these words without having them defined, because if not, there is a danger that you will run out of words to explain the words to explain the explanations of the definitions of the words that define the word that i wasn't clear about.

So the ancient decrepit view of postmodernism is that it basically says that philosophy can never escape the text, and that the world of definitions is still a text, but a particularly vacuous, dull and above all circular text, called "a dictionary".

I disagree. I think one can act out one's philosophy.

Just to support this, here is some history of private institutions from my own neck of the woods. No doubt other places have their own history.

Part of the untaught history that Jane Elliot talks about in the second video above is the way the industrial revolution was funded by slavery - we tend to hear how the white man did it, and not so much about the black necks he was standing on at the time.

So just to be clear you're saying that these stores are the enemy, or at least a part of the enemy. — BitconnectCarlos

Yes. private property is not a natural phenomenon, it is an institution that is a major, indeed frequently dominant part of the state. As is amply demonstrated by the way the troops are called in to defend it. The state does not say, hey it's a private matter, don't bother to call out the cops.

I did try to give you the opportunity to say something intelligent. — Judaka

I don't need your help, but the condescension is amusing.

If the problem is with the state/the system why not go after them as opposed to random private businesses? — BitconnectCarlos

Hit em where it hurts, not where you get annihilated. Kind of like you don't punch your opponent's gun, but their face, even though the bullets come from the gun. Fuck me, and I thought i was the wimpy pacifist type round here. You lot are just so pathetically naive.

So you have no principle beyond might is right. Congratulations, you have achieved low-life status.

↪unenlightened
Why is there no legal recourse and what would a legal recourse look like? — Judaka

Start responding yourself. When is violence justified?

Why don't you try figuring out why the only recourse has become violence and working backwards. — Judaka

It's completely obvious, so no effort is required. It's even spelled out in my challenge to you that you have not accepted. The law is enforced unjustly. There is no legal recourse, and folks don't want to be the next arrested corpse.