There is no point in debating this issue with people who both have no genuine human emotions in the issue and who have no philosophical ability. I can tell from what people say on here whether they have or even can read a work in ontology and understand it. Saying this comes down to terminology is pure sophistry and reveals a mind that cant think philosophically and also doesn t really care about rational ethics at all

The great but imperfect Crowley said in his Confessions:

“I consider criminal abortion [all abortion was criminal back then] in any circumstances whatsoever as one of the foulest kinds of murder. Apart from anything else, it nearly always ruins the
health of the woman, when it fails to kill her. The vigour of my views on this point strengthens
my general attitude on the question of sexual freedom. I believe that very few women, left to
themselves, would be so vile as to commit this sin against the Holy Ghost; to thwart the deepest instincts of nature in the risk of health and Life, to say nothing of imprisonment. Yet criminal abortion is one of the commonest of crimes and one most generally condoned by what I must paradoxically call secret public opinion .And the reason is that our social system makes it shameful and punishable by poverty for a woman to do what evolution has spent ages in constructing her to do, save under conditions with which the vast majority of women cannot possibly comply. The remedy lies entirely with public opinion. Let motherhood be recognized as honourable in itself, and even the pressure of poverty would not prevent
any but a few degenerate women, with perverse appetites for pleasure, from fulfilling their function.
In the case of such it would indeed be better that they and their children perish."

We need to eradicate poverty to help resolve this issue. Abortion is the worst kind of second degree murder because you are deliberately stopping a heart beat, killing brain waves, and destroying an organism that very well could be a full human being. No linguistic gymnastics can get you out of this. See you on another thread

Waah - waah - waah - waah - waah.

This conversation is disturbing. I'd rather not carry on — Gregory

You should have stayed with this and worked on your comprehension of these issues on your own time. So far you've made petulantly clear how you feel, and any infant can do that. But you're not an infant, are you. So what is your excuse?

What's your excuse for wanting to kill babies? Are you an abortion doctor? Do you want to be one? Would you be one? Or are you just going to let other people do the dirty work?

What's your excuse for wanting to kill babies? Are you an abortion doctor? Do you want to be one? Would you be one? Or are you just going to let other people do the dirty work? — Gregory

One problem with your ignorance is that you have no idea what I or probably anyone thinks or how feels about the topic. But this "kill babies"! Please tell us about any babies that have been killed. And keep in mind that any such killing is punishable by law in the civilized world and most of the uncivilized as well. So what are you talking about? Do you know what a baby is? Because your usage betrays that you do not.

You have absolutely no philosophical abilities so I don't know why you are even on this forum. You are also very immature in how you avoid questions. It's been like arguing with the raging hormones of a teenager

What question have you asked? On the other hand I asked you to start with something basic:

Try this for starters. You aver the fetus has rights. What rights would those be, based on what? Keep it brief, simple, and clear and I will try to respond. — tim wood

And this:

The right not to be killed for starters.
— Gregory
Be careful here. What is it, exactly, that is being killed? — tim wood

And you are either non-responsive, or nonsensical. And this:

You have absolutely no philosophical abilities so I don't know why you are even on this forum. You are also very immature in how you avoid questions. It's been like arguing with the raging hormones of a teenager — Gregory

Write something reasoned and reasonable. Can you do that?

I already went over the argument in detail. You don't understand it. That's a lack in your faculty, not mine

You have made no argument, just claims. The problem here, really, is not that you're incoherent or ignorant - we are all those things to some degree - but that you apparently think there is justice in your views. All I do is invite you to lay out that justice. And you cannot, and lacking that you cannot be just. Lacking justice and the ability to be just, you're a loose cannon, nothing more, and incapable of good.

We can start with "baby." Def.: a very young child, especially one newly or recently born. You've been writing about killing babies. Again, what babies are being killed?

You say I don't know what language is. I say you don't know what an argument is. This conversation is over. Thanks for your imput

The argument that clinched Roe vs Wade was the description of protected rights as covering those "born".


About all I can offer is a cultural value established upon honesty civility and reasonable responsiveness. The sequester of terms is a patent crime against philosophy.

As to the ACA (which covers reproductive rights). What if Congress passed a law defining what punishment apply to convicted criminals, and superseding all other such legislation. Its death penalty clause is then challenged and found unconstitutional. Could the bill then be declared unconstitutional in-toto? Releasing all prisoners sentenced under its authority? Do right to lifers support that principle?

Probably the most poignant moment in all of Plato is when Socrates' friend, Phaedo, despairs of the argument. Socrates warns of becoming 'logophobes'. The problem is that reason requires a synthetic term of which we become convinced as axiomatic to the ensuing analysis, but can only result in recognition of our differing. Is philosophy polemic or dissent? Persuading others of our convictions or testing our own? What if the most persuasive term is the one that frees us from our convictions rather than enforcing them on others? What could be more persuasive than being given reason to be emancipated from our convictions? And what could be more what truth is if we insist upon the highest possible state of rigor in this? And what could be more destructive of rigor, and so more conducive of ignorance, than supposing the end of reason is agreement? Consensus is the end of governing and establishing law amongst a people, but therapeutic dissent is the only justifying context of that consensus. The current state of this Republic is softball against canon fire. Civil war looms. Incendiary polemics can never produce genuine consensus, let alone recognition of the therapy of dissent that is the only genuine context of consensus. But those of us who do recognize that therapy are growing less intimidated by the canon fire surrounding us, and America's future is clearly with them. Those who oppose dissent in principle are losing, and becoming ever more frantic as a consequence. White supremacists and social conservatives really are being superseded, and they will end up subservient to the more flexible and open minded of us, but not because they are under attack. It is because they are attacking that they must lose. Because the future is adaptation to a changing reality, not preserving obsolete norms. While most of us adapt and gradually prosper, the dwindling remnant of logophobes languish in their incapacity to realize that we can only prosper by becoming more competent, more skilled, and more flexible. And this even while the rest of us are trying to help them develop those abilities and that prosperity. Charging us with undermining a way of life that clearly no longer serves their own interests is a lame excuse for resisting the future that so clearly lies ready to embrace us and offer the prosperity we all think we deserve. America has no future unless no one is left behind in that coming prosperity for all, and those who resist that future will themselves be last, and have no one to blame but themselves.

The problem is that reason requires a synthetic term of which we become convinced as axiomatic to the ensuing analysis, but can only result in recognition of our differing. Is philosophy polemic or dissent? Persuading others of our convictions or testing our own? What if the most persuasive term is the one that frees us from our convictions rather than enforcing them on others? What could be more persuasive than being given reason to be emancipated from our convictions? And what could be more what truth is if we insist upon the highest possible state of rigor in this? And what could be more destructive of rigor, and so more conducive of ignorance, than supposing the end of reason is agreement? Consensus is the end of governing and establishing law amongst a people, but therapeutic dissent is the only justifying context of that consensus. — Gary M Washburn

Well said, pretty dense, worth taking on. And yours the dining room presentation, but in the kitchen I think it's more real. Ultimately goal v. process; the agon-y in the agora to achieve some end. Or a ship at sea, the goal of the sailors being to maintain the process. Three metaphors: kitchen/dining room, the struggle in the public arena, keeping a ship seaworthy and on course at sea. Processes governed by goals that are themselves just waypoints in the progress of the process. Which is to say - that you said - that change is the governing dynamic. which by the brute fact of the matter means that no establishment of any kind can endure, unless itself able to change.

"Therapeutic dissent" is neat phrase (is it yours)! It rehabilitates Rhetoric and harpoons sophism. Rhetoric - persuasion - that process by which we take on and consider and weigh the contingent in order to determine a course of action. And just here we diverge in understanding. You seem to have as goal a freeing from convictions. Perhaps better a freedom within well-reasoned conviction, conviction being necessary. Persuasion a winnowing, if you will, to separate the good from the bad in seeking the best, and the best way by the struggle of ideas. Agreement, then, not the termination of reason, but instead its terminus - which appears to be also what you said: "but therapeutic dissent is the only justifying context of that consensus."

You're one of those who believe truth is what endures some sort of test? Worth is what does not endure, and worth is truer than truth. Time, of which the truest worth is its moment. What endures is what innures. Because we do not endure the moment of the worth of time. It is too real. And so we let ourselves fall into innured terms. But becoming estranged from those terms is more who we really are than received terms and what we feel we are given to be. But we can no more bring that moment of estrangement upon others than we can upon ourselves. The final term of "analysis", the reduction reason always is, is that estrangement from its originating term in some supposed synthetic term taken as axiomatic to it. In discourse, or dialectic, we urge each other to more intensive rigor. And if that rigor is indeed more intensive than we are capable without each other, and can only find its end in estrangement from its origin, then that estrangement cannot be untruth, and it cannot be entirely alone. And if the dialogue is honestly responsive, in which an act of engaging in it is responded to as effectively as that act, and that response is its own act also responded to, and so on in a recurring dialectic participation, always in some sense estranged us from our given terms, then we gradually replace those terms intimated between us in place of the world's terms given to us. Through estrangement form our world we become intimates. And yet the world is only persistence, whereas our participation in the intimation of the worth of time is only moment, but moment grown more real and completed than all the terms and time of the world.

I am not a pragmatist. I've no interest in finding methods for attenuating time, innuring our given terms to our dread of being real. My motive to to understand, and to be as real as I can. Time is the stranger it is through our rigorous estrangement from the world, not our mastery of or even navigating it. And each of us is the completing term in the intimation of its worth. Finding the means to endure our dread of being real is the last thing on my mind.

You're one of those who believe truth is what endures some sort of test? — Gary M Washburn

No. I cannot attach to "truth" any other understanding than it's being a generic abstract collective noun that signals that which individual true propositions have in common, namely being true. And in as much as individual propositions are true in different ways, the collective truth can have no - zero - particular meaning or significance. So much for truth.

I cannot quite make out whether your purpose is intimacy with an other, or in yourself bracketing away all meaning until you find the essence of whatever. you're looking for. They're not the same thing and seem incompatible - no reason not to try or both, though. But it leaves the question of reconciling them, if that is even possible. At some point the other becomes a problem in meaning, and then what do you do?

The real hazard in your quest lies in forgetting to live, and living concerns the meanings and concerns of living. Admittedly circular seeming, although I think spiral is a more useful image. But that is what living is, and if you get yourself out of it, that's a problem.

We seem to be leaving the topic, but you certainly deserve a response. It's weight hinges on some claim that truth is something we do or can aspire to have as a possession. But intimacy, as I understand it, is (willing) dispossession. Perhaps therapeutic. That word, which you asked about earlier, could have occurred to me from a number of sources, like Derrida, maybe. I have read a book "The therapy of desire", bur can't remember being that impressed. But Plato certainly presents the dialectic as therapeutic, and often assuages anger in an interlocutor by appealing to that notion. We heal each other of our reliance on an unjustified synthetic term taken as axiomatic to our convictions. But the intimation of that unjustified reliance is not a matter of synchronizing our terms and convictions, but of finding a complementary contrariety between us to them. We differ, and, if we are honest and competent in that differing, we find that complement we are with each other in that differing to received terms. In so doing we participate in freeing each other from the incompleteness of all synthetic terms, and yet distinguish each other in that participation. We always differ as much and complement to the differing we are to each other as to the original or received term. And if the rigor of that differing is the final term of our shared dialectic in differing our conviction in that received term, then we share in that differing more than we ever were in sync to that received term. And that sharing is more real, more rigorous, than anything we ever were endowed with by our world. We achieve this by realizing the therapy of being dispossessed of what otherwise would empower one of us over the other, or the world over us both. I am hinting at love, even, yes, Platonic love. But it is an intimacy in which we are willingly dispossessed of its terms. Neither/nor, not either/or, as classic logic would insist. We are willingly dispossessed of those terms that would possess us.

Plato's Lysis recounts a dialog in which one boy asks Socrates how to go about getting the most popular kid in class to befriend him. All sorts of ideas pass between them about how to entrap the friend. But this goes around in circles. In the end, the party breaks up, and Socrates shouts to the dispersing group "But we still don't know which one is the friend!" This is usually translated: "We still don't know what friendship is!", but I like my translation better. The whole point of the dialog is that neither is the friendship, and it is precisely the act of not being the friendship that makes the friendship real. But there is a world. And letting there be a world is part of the same intimation as deliberately excluding oneself as the friendship. That intimacy is more real than the world, but we come to know it as that differing we are to it as complementary in contrariety between us as to the world. And so our freedom from the imposition upon us of the terms of the world is our needing free of our own. We create the terms of the world precisely through our need of emancipating each other from our own. That dispossession is what truth is. And it is the worth of that dispossession that is its intimation. You're only right in you're criticism of me in the sense that that truth is ever only intimated and can never be explicit or explicated as in our possession.

Socrates says philosophy is practicing death. Maybe I'm not quite that dedicated.

If the final term of rational reduction is the ruin of its premise, and the most rigorous term in that ruin is the least term of contrariety as complementary between us as to the received term the world is, then by examining our differing we achieve the most coherent term. And merely receiving the given terms divides and isolates us from each other even as that delusion of unity, and that differing enjoins us in distinguishing each other as much from each other as from the world. And that distinction is the most rigor we can achieve. We need each other and can never be alone in it, whereas the world is the isolation of us from each other as it is inured us to our presuming it ours. Only in finding ourselves the stranger to the world are we overcome that isolation. Religion and science go hand-in-hand in that isolation. Religion, by securing terms which offer no alternative to that isolation within received terms, and science by protecting its original terms by securing all but its stated inquiry as its only "variable". That isolation, of course, also secures its victims in the absolution of any otherwise possible contrariety that might awaken us to the ruin of it in recognition of the distinct liberty right of women that the traditional role of childbearing tends to blind us to. If we do not recognize how much that liberty right is our need of breaking free of the isolation the received term is we never win the terms by which we recognize who we are ourselves, distinct from the world. Deniers of that right will, presumably, counter with a plea for recognition of the unborn. But in doing so can never be a real part of the life of either, nor free of enslavement to the world's terms.