So it's just hypocritical cheerleading for the views that you want to be treated with respect, screw people with different opinions?

Here's an illustration of what happens when Bender spaces:

I think that religious beliefs are a combo of absurd, ignorant, and incoherent.

And I think that racist beliefs are a combo of absurd, ignorant and incoherent.

Would you have a problem with someone being treated with disrespect, treated in a condescending way, etc. if they were to post in support of racist views on a philosophy board?

I believe religious beliefs are special — T Clark

Why would you think they're "special" in this regard? (Unless that's an allusion to "special needs.") :razz:

You mean a philosophy forum, discussion forums in general or something specific to this forum in particular (that puts it in some other category than the two aforementioned ones) — DingoJones

A forum focused on "intellectual" subject matter, and where we can be anonymous/where there aren't verified prerequisites to participate.

And there it is - the problem is funding, in other words money. — Shamshir

Right. I'd restructure things so that they're not based on money in any traditional sense.

Why the question marks? — Gnostic Christian Bishop

Because knowing isn't an alternative to belief, it's a qualified type of belief.

I can see complaining about negative attitudes, disrespect, etc. towards posts or towards posters in general, but (a) that's not at all limited to religious or phil of religion-oriented posts , and (b) given the sorts of personalities a board like this attracts, it's probably impossible to avoid the problem without effectively just killing all activity on the board.

Boards like this attract people who tend to be big intellectual fish in whatever small pond they come from. Posters generally consider themselves intelligent and well-read. And probably most of them have had many people in their personal lives tell them as much more or less. That leads to at least a slightly inflated head.

But most likely everyone here is in a similar boat re background, and we have all sorts of different views. Unfortunately (almost) everyone winds up having a problem with having those views challenged, or having the influences of those views challenged--whether those influences are (in)famous philosophers or other authors, intellectuals, etc., or some well-established, consensus view or other.

Folks especially have a problem when something is challenged even after an attempt at a defense of what was challenged. It's like "How dare you continue to challenge this when I've responded with an explanation I consider good enough!"

Of course, that attitude has little to do with doing philosophy.

But this all rather quickly leads to disrespect, condescending attitudes, etc., because it's a defensive ego-protection mode and it's easier than dealing more in-depth and/or longer-term with a sustained challenge. And things just snowball from there. People hold grudges, they engage in tit for tat, they automatically respond disrespectfully to certain people who do the same right back, and so on. Even if it's someone who'll respond respectfully to someone who doesn't challenge their views too strongly, people know that they'll respond disrespectfully or at least not thoughtfully to a challenge, if they respond at all, so there will be disrespect due to anticipated problems.

You're not going to change the personalities of the sorts of folks attracted to a board like this, especially where we're anonymous, etc. You're not going to be able to enforce respect, thoughtful replies, etc. without effectively killing the board--and it's already relatively slow, with a relatively small collection of long-term regulars as it is.

So it's unlikely to change. But if it could change, it needs to change in general, not just with respect to religion-oriented posts.

Because the subject whose values constitute moral values would be a god. Moral values are not my values or your values, but they are someone's (as the argument demonstrates). And that someone would be a god precisely because their values constitute moral values. — Bartricks

Say what? This is a complete non-sequitur with respect to your earlier comments.

1. If moral values are my valuings then if I value something it is necessarily morally valuable
2. If I value something it is not necessarily morally valuable. — Bartricks

(1) needs a "to you" at the end. It's just like If you feel pain, then necessarily you feel pain. It's about what's the case in your mind.

Where is (2) coming from?

Re (1), otherwise, the move you're trying to make is akin to this (excusing using "pain/paining" as a both a verb and noun): "If my leg paining is my pain, then if I pain something it is necessarily a pain"--where you're trying to suggest a universal scope at the end (as if everyone's leg should be paining then), rather than keeping the scope as something about you.

I don't think agnostic atheists are unaware of the difference between knowledge and proof. It's simply choosing one side to live life by despite a lack of proof. Also, given there are so many proofs and disproofs one can and may weigh the situation and make a decision on which belief to adopt. — TheMadFool

Wait, you're missing "Empirical claims are not provable." ("Given there are so many proofs ..."--no, there aren't. Empirical claims are not provable. (And logically, proofs simply depend on the system we've set up. It's just a way of saying that it's the only thing that works under that system.))

There is an alternative to "belief". It is to "know". — A Gnostic Agnostic

???

Knowledge is a qualified type of belief: it's belief for which we have some justification and which we judge to be true.

I don't see a problem in saying there's no proof but I don't believe in God (agnostic atheist). — TheMadFool

A couple big problems with it:

* Agnosticism isn't a stance about proof.
* It seems to conflate knowledge and proof.
* It seems ignorant of the fact that empirical claims aren't provable.

But, in a world where higher order dimensions influence lower dimensions in a manner of totality, — Wallows

In other words, if we make up some incoherent gobbledygook . . .

That's possible right now, and not to much benefit. — Shamshir

If you wanted to work as an actor this year, an airline pilot next year, a marine biology researcher the following year, etc. that's not really possible with the way things are set up.

You can work towards those things, but you might not be able to get the opportunities, you might not be able to afford the schooling required, you might not be able to support yourself while pursuing various things, you can't just on a whim decide that you want to do something and begin to do it (at least as an apprentice).

I'd set things up so that you can do the job you want to do, on whatever hours you want to do it, with whatever time off, simply because that's what you want to do. That might not guarantee access to scarcer resources--that might require pursuit of particular work, at particular hours, etc., but you'd be able to do whatever work you want to do, changing as often as you like, etc.

I'd simply allow people to work whatever jobs they want to work, with there being no barrier to them being able to work those jobs. Of course, they'd need to be trained, but that would be provided.

What happens when space bends? Nothing. Space isn't a thing in itself that can bend. Space supervenes on the extensions of matter and the extensional relations of matter. It's not actually anything like a substance or a container or anything like that.

Democracy is often a goal that people reach for in itself. As I've often commented, though, I really couldn't care less what the structure of the government is. What I care about is what laws a government does or doesn't have. I'm no more likely to agree with laws just because they're decided by a majority.

Why do we have 2-3 threads per week on the same topics, over and over and over?

Quantification (numbers) is the problem and also the solution.

It's the solution because once we have the numbers we can understand. — TheMadFool

It's just the problem, because there's no reason to believe that time (or space for that matter) works just like our concepts re numbers.

The relationship between truth and beauty is the centre of the Platonic theory of Ideas. [For Plato], beauty cannot be known and truth cannot be seen—yet it is this very intertwining of a double impossibility that defines the Idea and the authentic salvation of appearances in Eros’ ‘other knowledge’. In fact, the significance of the term ‘Idea’ (with its implicit etymological reference to an e-vidence, to an idein) is entirely contained in the play (in the unity-difference) between truth and beauty. Thus it is that, in the dialogues on love, every time one appears to be able to grasp beauty, there is a return to the invisible; every time that one appears to be able to close in on the consistency of the truth through episteme, there is a return to the vocabulary of vision, seeing and appearing. — StreetlightX

Holy crap is that awful writing.

You don't seem a moron to me. You seem young. — Wayfarer

Me on the other hand . . . haha

Yes, that's the basic idea of negligence, but not the point I'm trying to make. The point I'm making is that the negligence is in intention despite not "wishing for bad things to happen" in our legal doctrines. Someone unfamiliar with our these legal frameworks would not immediately realize this, because society doesn't talk this way. We usually say "sure, you didn't intend for the crane to fall, but you were irresponsible in managing the crane, so much so it's criminal"; what's left out is that the determining of "irresponsible" requires intentional faults (cutting corners to save money, drinking on the job, or just laziness, the intention to provide minimal effort, at a level incompatible with what the task demands etc.). — boethius

I don't think that many people really intend to be lazy, for example.

It's not convoluted, I am trying to highlight the difference between the colloquial "I didn't intend that to happen" and the legal technical requirement to find fault in intention to determine criminal liability. If one can really show one's intentions where completely responsible and what seems like criminal liability is due to incompetence that oneself didn't have the competence to realize, it's possible to shift the liability up the chain to whoever hired you. — boethius

That's convoluted, too.

The basic idea is that if you didn't take normal, "reasonable" precautions, you're going to have some degree of liability due to negligence.

Yes, but it was written in such a convoluted way that I didn't catch that you were acknowledging negligence.

For instance, if someone really did not intend to cause the death of another individual, even if they physically did, it's ruled an accident; the intentions where good and so there is no liability. — boethius

That's not necessarily the case. The could be liable due to negligence. It depends on the situation. Basically, you're not off the hook no matter what just because you didn't intend to kill (or maim or whatever) anyone.

A line is NOT infinitely divisible. Numbers are. — TheMadFool

At which point we should try to figure out what the ontological facts about time are supposed to have to do with the concept of numbers.

I found a columnist claiming that "All politics is identity politics"--Eleanor Penny, in an article for New Statesman America.

She says, "But those who want to single out 'identity politics' soon run into a problem: all politics is grounded in identity. All politics requires that we build coalitions around a shared picture of reality, a shared image of the future, deeply rooted in our image of ourselves, and what justice or progress might look like."

So, first she's equivocating.

But even aside from that. Not all politics fits the description she gives above.

For example, there are monarchs or dictators who make laws. That doesn't require building a coalition around a shared picture of reality. Of course, one could also redefine politics as necessarily having coalitions built around a shared picture of reality, but then it's going to turn out that we're not really saying anything aside from announcing the unusual ways in which we're going to be employing terminology.

That's not the only counterexample. It's just one of many we could give, for every aspect of her description.

But the equivocation--which is straw-manning in context--is the bigger problem.

Identity politics isn't just politics, that's the point. — StreetlightX

You've seemed to have about 25-30 different points in this thread, none of which seem to be the same as anything you've explicitly said.

It's too bad we can't just directly speak with the "particularly well-spoken civil rights activist" in question.

Alot of people are under that impression. But the logic is exactly the same, and it's simply arbitrary to think identity stops at biology.

This is one of the reasons I explicitly tried to outline some other models of politics in the OP. People simply don't really have a very good grasp of what politics can involve other than claims underwritten by identity, and even those who say things like 'avoid identity politics at all costs' list nothing but identity politics as an alternative! — StreetlightX

Or as I said on page 2, "So this seems like one of those silly 'I can make moves to interpret anything as x' games."

"Well, if we define identity in this way instead, and . . . "

If change isn't possible, how are people responding to this thread?

<---wonders how we're still discussing this when he gave the definition a couple pages ago.

I thought this was going to be a thread about a pair of Indian ladies.

While this isn't the only option, laws are basically a way of describing observations. Then you set up experiments to further test that the descriptions are on-target.

You are of course free to "dismiss", in the sense of saying you have no interest in, or that you find no value in, any particular area of philosophy or any other discipline. But to claim tout court that there is no significant value or original insight in philosophers such as Kant, Hegel and Heidegger is something else altogether. If you don't find value and insight in them it is arguably because you are not interested enough to spend the time to understand, or because you hold some polemical view such that you reject or devalue the insight that others have found there. — Janus

This, as well as your paragraph after it, is something he already alluded to:

if you don't agree with me yet, go back and try harder". — Isaac

What's being agreed on there is whether Kant, Hegel, Heidegger et al are worth bothering with. Your stance if that if one feels they're basically garbage, so that one disagrees with you that they're worthwhile spending time on, one needs to go back and try harder.

And the future is an external to mind abstract. — Shamshir

Well, unless we were talking about an eternalist (re philosophy of time). Eternalism/presentism and nominalism (including conceptualist nominalism) have no implications for each other. In other words, you could have a (conceptualist) nominalist eternalist, or a (conceptualist) nominalist presentist, or an eternalist or presentist who isn't a nominalist as well.

Whether an eternalist or presentist (or any other possibility re philosophy of time), nominalists (including conceptualists) aren't necessarily going to think that possibilities aren't real. For example, I'm a conceptualist nominalist who thinks that possibilities are real--it's just that I don't think that possibilities are independent things (just as I don't think that space or time are independent things).

The same thing goes for the past.

And of course, even if presentists, (conceptualist) nominalists will say that the past was real, and the future will be real.

You said they reject the external to mind. — Shamshir

Are you talking about conceptualists? They reject that abstracts and universals (types) are external to mind. Not other things.

Internal to mind, meaning aspect, which includes retrospect. — Shamshir

What? What's internal to mind? What does the word "aspect" refer to in this context? And what does "retrospect" have to do with it?

But they ARE near universal. — Bartricks

Citation? (with info about how many people were surveyed and how they were chosen)

You're confusing, I think, the act with the purpose of the act. — tim wood

:-\ :-/

It's an ontological statement, about what (or rather who, in this case) exists at time Tx.

You can't perform an act on a nonexistent at time Tx.

How are you getting past/present from that?