On a quick look, I'm not seeing much to commend here. Why would I care whether Quine was more like Aristotle or Plato, when Kripke, who is not mentioned in your article, gives a better account anyway?

That Quine's criticism of essentialism was misdirected doesn't much impact Kripke.

If you are going to reject the notion that essentialism is just about necessary truths in possible worlds, then you would best present an account of essence that is at least as useful.

Again, what is an essence, if not a property had by a thing in every possible world in which it exists? Pointing us to an article that doesn’t offer a decisive argument for why Kripke’s modal metaphysics is insufficient just doesn't answer that question. Without showing that Kripke’s system fails or that the Aristotelian alternative can do the same explanatory work, it amounts to special pleading. Unless Spade can do the work Kripke does, the conversation will always favour the more robust, explanatory, and precise framework.

Meaning is in your head. — Hanover

Nuh. Instead of worrying about meaning, worry about what folk do. I'm not asking folk to burn their book, just that they not to use it as an excuse for abominations.

Meh. This just looks lazy. "I'll only consider stuff that reinforces the views I already have".

Is wisdom found in the book, or in the conversations and interpretations of the book? The alternate story might be understood as a way of showing how not to misread the story of Issac as advocating extremes of faith.

Would it be ok if Isaac were an adult? — BitconnectCarlos

What do you think? Should we allow the sacrifice of willing, compliant adults?

And what do you think of this? Will you be off to join an exclusive religious community - or are you already a member?

Do you think this an admirable way to live?

Kierkegaard's focus wasn't as much on Isaac's acceptance of his fate as it was on Abraham's pure faith in not resisting or questioning God. — Hanover

This is a reading of the Binding that is told in parallel to reading it as an admonition against human sacrifice. It's the target of much of my argument. In an alternate story, Abraham says to god "This is an evil thing you ask, and I will not do it, even for you", and then god comes clean and says that it was all a test, solving the Euthyphro by showing that god wills what is good, not the good is what god wills.

I read Banno as referencing the Akedah story as he has often done, and equating the institution of sacrifice with murder. — BitconnectCarlos

Pretty much.

, the case I referred to and I've been using throughout the argument is that of Elizabeth Rose Struhs.

You might think that a father trussing up his son and holding a knife to his throat is fine if the child gives consent, but both I and the law disagree.

But will you happily judge a faith sufficient to risk one’s life to save another as good?

If so then there is nothing good or bad necessarily involved in acts of faith qua acts of faith.

So your argument’s reliance on child murder is smoke.

You are avoiding. — Fire Ologist

What are these sentences? Not a syllogism. Yes, we might judge a faith that is sufficient for self sacrifice to be good. And that faith of itself is neither good nor bad is one of the consequences of the argument I presented, and is meant to be contrary to those who insist faith is always a virtue.

So we have agreement on these issues?

Somewhat. The text is a bit too much of a list of disasters, somewhat ordinary.

You didn’t address the more substantive parts. — Fire Ologist

The most substantive part was where you agreed with my general point.

...believing something without good evidence is fraught with peril, and then acting on what is already perilous is reckless, and further, we’ve seen horrible atrocities committed based on such perilous recklessness. — Fire Ologist

That'll do.

Acting without sufficient evidence is a good now. — Fire Ologist

An odd thing to say. A lesser evil, sometimes.

Good and bad things follow from acts of faith, but not

So if both are true, we can’t use good acts or bad acts as some kind of measure of the faith those acts were based on. — Fire Ologist

A non sequitur. I will happily judge that a faith sufficient to murder a child is not a good faith. If you can't do likewise, that's on you. Your argument is invalid.

Well, thanks.

My fourth post here, but not for a while.

But since you showed interest, also reading Norman's The reluctant Beetle, Frankopan's The Earth Transformed, New Scientist How to think about Consciousness (good read, a bit introductory and scientistic), and Pete Brown's coffee table book The ultimate book of blues guitar legends.

I'm using this last as a listening guide, reading a page and listening to the commendations.

Interesting development.

The Nats have split from the liberals.

Nationals leader David Littleproud has confirmed his party won't be re-entering a Coalition agreement with the Liberal Party. — ABC

A waste of my time and yours.

I'm not trying to convert an atheist. — BitconnectCarlos

I didn't think you were, and couldn't care less anyway.


I've really got no idea what you are attempting to do here.

It started with

A few questions for the atheists: — BitconnectCarlos

...which I answered, then a long pause filled with empty posts, now

if we were to start with, e.g., Ezra-Nehemiah and work backwards, when would the atheists start taking issue? — BitconnectCarlos

Have you a point, or are you just trying to running a bible study group for atheists? 'cause I'm not keen.

Fuck the logic, it doesn't qualify as wisdom so why waste time trying to understand it, when all that has ever done is produce faulty interpretations. It's best to leave logic as it is, impossible to understand. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, then, best you stop posting about logic, don't you think?

I don't need to demonstrate there is an OG to someone who already believes there is one. — Relativist

Ok. I do not.

Truth and Predication. Donald Davidson 's last book.

I don't see what's at stake here. Why would it make any difference? — frank

He has presented a few bits and pieces as if he had presented an argument.

, have you a conclusion for us? A page later?

Can you show that there is no OG? — Relativist

I don't know. What's an OG? An ontological grounding...?

And wouldn't it be incumbent on those positing an OG to demonstrate the need for one?

I gather it's some form of foundation on which things are, in some fashion. ut as I said in my first post in this thread,

Perhaps some things just are the case, unexplained and unexplainable. — Banno

All propositional, predicate, or classical logic can be expressed as modal logic. — Metaphysician Undercover

No, that's not at all what I said.

It really would help if you were to read about and try to understand logic rather than just dispensing your wisdom.

Plenty of good and reasonable outcomes follow many acts of faith. — Fire Ologist

I have not said otherwise. I've just pointed out that the opposite is also true, that obscenities also can be acts of faith.

I see your general point — Fire Ologist

Appreciated. Would that we could have started here.

I never do anything based on insufficient evidence. — Fire Ologist

Really? I do. I've found we often must act despite not knowing the consequences. Seems to be part of the human condition. But such leaps of faith need to be mitigated by other considerations.

That's pretty much the whole of what I had to say on the issue, pages back.

you can’t just conclude that because you don’t see the evidence doesn’t mean it is not there. — Fire Ologist

Sure. And there is also the other option, that we can withhold consent. We can say "I don't know".

what I am saying is that modal logic is not consistent with classical logic. — Metaphysician Undercover

Trouble is that modal logic includes propositional logic and predicate logic. Every valid proposition in propositional logic and in predicate logic is valid in modal logic. And for every valid syllogism in classical logic there is an equivalent valid formulation in propositional or predicate logic.

So again, you are just mistaken about this.

And your other errors follow on from this.

Ah, so you want to find out the implications of a mistaken idea. Cool.

@Tom Storm, Leon is talking about you behind your back, again. Seems he wants everyone to agree with him. Except you.

Not sure why he singled you out.

Carlos is playing at Socratic Argument.

It's tedious. And we all know the game plan.

Just spit it out.

Presumably, on other evidence. Or we withhold judgement.

Do you have a point? Otherwise, I'm out.

Added: the graph appears to show that Boomers have a disproportionate share of whatever the vertical axis is... "national wealth".

What if there were a group of folk, who are a subset of the Boomers, and who indeed have a vastly disproportionate share of "national wealth". The richest 1% control a substantial share of national wealth, sometimes exceeding 40%. And they tend to be older. More of them are counted as Boomers then as millennials.

The graph hides the fact that "national wealth" is disproportionally had by the ultra rich, peddling the distortion that blames Boomers.

The top 1% own about a third of the nation's wealth. If most of the top 5% are Boomers, that explains much of the disparity. It's not boomers per se, but the ultra wealthy, who have the disproportionate wealth.

, , before you get carried away, give some consideration to your terminology

Terms like "Gen Z", "Boomer" and "Millennial" are popular, but they have no basis in science. Demographers and social scientists are now pushing back. — ABC Future Tense

In particular, 's graph needs some critical appraisal. Where is the data for boomers when they were twenty? What year is taken as the median for each "generation" - if it is 1960 for boomers, that would be odd; most boomers are considered to be older than that. And the difference between 1960 for boomers and 1992 for gen x is thirty two years, while that between 1992 and 2008 is half that.

Be more sceptical.

That koan you refer to, incidentally, is extracted from the voluminous corpus of Sōtō Zen literature, and taken out of context, can easily be misinterpreted. — Wayfarer

The way I used it, it does just what I wanted it to do.

Curiously, I just wrote:

Does "are-ness" or "being" admit of degrees?
— @Moliere
If an answer is given, be on the look out for a crossing of the floor here, from ontology to morality. "are-ness" and "being" (?) are ontological terms. Degree usually involves some form of evaluation. Now we probably can't say outright that such a move is a mistake, but it will be worth keeping an eye on how the evaluation is done. — Banno

Same applies here. Both god, and the devil, will be in the detail.

That sentence isn't meant to be a definition of essential properties. It's a response to representationalism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ok. Good.

So, what is an essence, if not a property had by a thing in every possible world in which it exists?

I think I've asked you that before.

Does "are-ness" or "being" admit of degrees? — Moliere

If an answer is given, be on the look out for a crossing of the floor here, from ontology to morality. "are-ness" and "being" (?) are ontological terms. Degree usually involves some form of evaluation. Now we probably can't say outright that such a move is a mistake, but it will be worth keeping an eye on how the evaluation is done.

Ok. So what.

Because there are truths that only the wise can grasp - grasping them is the hallmark of wisdom. — Wayfarer

:wink:

The obvious retort is to ask how you could know this. If you cannot know these truths unless you are wise, how can you know that someone else knows these truths? How can you know someone knows "p is true" unless you also know that p?

And the answer must be in what the wise do. But before enlightenment, gather wood, cary water. After enlightenment, gather wood, carry water.

In my observation the main change in behaviour after enlightenment seems to be having sex with noviciates.

The problem with Plato's line is that it renders differences in kind as if they were differences in degree. Another thread, maybe.

More Socratic gameplay.

Ok, so if there are stronger and weaker forms of evidence.... what?

Can we agree there's a first cause and an irreducible bottom layer of reality? — Relativist

Why?

At the risk of sounding condescending, you've a good understanding of the issues

Lewis was a somewhat eccentric chap. From what I can work out he thought that possible worlds were no different to the actual world, but to the extreme that he concluded that they must therefore also be actual. It's an interesting idea, but I don't agree with it.

Instead I think there are a multitude of possible worlds, but that there is one possible world amongst them that is actual. I take this to be the most common view, almost to the point of a consensus.

In this possible world we can discover things - like that the table is red. We get to talk about other possible worlds by stipulation. So "what if this blue table had been red" stipulates a possible world in which this very table - the blue on - is instead red. The possible world comes about in virtue of the stipulation. That's how I think of them.

An alternative is to think of a logical space containing all the possible worlds, and understanding "what if this blue table had been red" as picking out some world in which this table, which is blue in this world, is red. This is probably the way most logicians think of possible worlds.

My reason for preferring stipulation is simple parsimony. Where the logical space folk list uncountably many possible worlds, I list only those that are explicitly stipulated.

You may be right that Lewis would have a problem with counterpossibel worlds - an interesting point. A counterpossible world cannot be actual. Good argument. The world in which you wear a green hat and not a green hat cannot be this world.

The fun here is in taking "hopelessly confusing notions" and un-confusing them. Something I take as central to the whole enterprise of doing philosophy.

There's a renewed interest in odd versions of essentialism, which I've tried to discuss here - see Essence and Modality: Kit Fine

My cynical self says that, having been unable to provide a suitable account of essences in ontological terms using modal language, Fine moved essentialists over to epistemology and now seek to give an account of essences as how we know (understand, conceive, etc.) that something is what it is. It pictures essence as a lost soul looking for a home; or as a misguided picture of how things are, looking for a way to fit in. — Banno

The motivation seems to be at least in part a desire to make use of essences in ontological arguments for god.

, Ok, so you both will ignore the limits of Aristotelian modal logic becasue understanding the wider formal modal logic would require some effort.

It might be worth pointing out that modal logic is not speculative, but an accepted part of formal logic and of mathematics. It's as accepted as studying topology.

So be it.

Very few folk agree with Lewis. But explaining why he is mistaken is what is so interesting. We do not need to say that possible worlds are also actual.

I won't know if you have understood until you tell me what it is you have concluded. So out with it.