Well, one of the options after looking down from a window and wondering if the people are automatons is that one could check it out in that moment. Run out on to the street and scare the crap out of one of your neighbors.
But Descartes did not do that.
He finished his bath and went to bed.

One way to look at the Descartes speculation about other minds is not to look at it as a matter of proving the viability of certain theses but a method of confirming what we are most certain of.

The viability of the power of math to solve problems is not anchored upon what that activity might be in some narrative of existence but because it does not care.

The certainty that is desired is not about confirming our personal existence. We are stuck with that. It is the least interesting thing.

1. In the state of nature, where power is divided roughly equally among all persons, it is most rational for the individual to engage with her fellow human being violently rather than peacefully.

2. Where power is distributed unequally, with enormous coercive power concentrated around a single person or agency, it is most rational for the individual to engage with her fellow human being peacefully rather than violently (this includes the persons comprising the State as well). — Virgo Avalytikh

My reading of Hobbes differs from your breakdown in two respects.

Any condition where people cooperate instead of fighting each other is a "state" of a kind. How this condition is brought about is not a product of "roughly equal" participants. There is no equality in the state of nature. Inequality and equality only make sense in the context of some kind of social contract.

The observation made above is separate from Hobbes's argument that Monarchy is the best possible state. Every other kind of social organization is a state but is inferior to monarchy because it introduces multiple agents. Hobbes argues that one agent is the best solution to the problem of conflicting interests. His argument stops there. That's it. The whole enchilada.

The terms of the wager are more of an invitation than an ultimatum.
Pascal is proposing one could start living as if certain things were the case before embracing the "belief" at the center of the activity.
In that sense, casting the die relates to how one's decisions relate to what results from them. But the measure is not something that can only happen if one accepts a particular metric before getting started.
While that is a country mile from Piaget's idea of moral order as a biological development, it is much closer to it than expressions from the Christian tradition before it.

Unlike killing a non-state actor, this one targeted a senior officer of a recognized state.
So, it is an act of war. Not only by whatever other nations may think of it but by our own rules set up to distinguish conflict by proxies versus the governments who show up to the UN and stuff.

The first question should not be whether this was a good tactical decision but whether we gave up something for this pound of flesh that cannot be recovered.

Like the outcome of the Iraqi Wars, it will take some time to see the results.

Oh wait. This is one of the results.

I am down with the fierce grip around the rabbit's foot.

The psychology of prayer may have nothing to do with this X you propose to be the deity. But maybe it does.
The serious attention given to what concerns a person is there or not. As that quality relates to the act of prayer was not suggested as a reduction to something that could be done just as well without the pesky religious stuff.

Consider specific prayers. For example, the "Lord's Prayer" asks for daily bread and to be forgiven for trespasses. You can "prove" the first happened if you ate something but the second?
And the one who prays this is not bargaining like Faustus to get a result but is doing something else.

I guess I am not sure what going to a place far from your concerns to piss on the fire you found there serves a greater rational understanding.

You may be interested in Gregory Bateson and the Evolution Of Mind.
But if you are going to bring in the biological in that way, it changes how one speaks of an "individual mind."
The perspective dispenses with a certain way to divide experience. If one accepts the new premises, one leaves behind the arguments that grew from the old. One cannot have the cake and eat it too.

I don't mean to say that the one toward whom prayer is directed is a "space filler."
What I am saying is that faith involves the act of being witnessed, that somehow a prayer is heard. How that is understood varies widely in different expressions of belief. But it makes sense to me to start with the conditions for being heard before talking about how efficacious speaking may be.

The matter of believing one is heard is also a matter of being a good listener to oneself. In the book of Job, for example, many of Job's friends tell him he is doing something wrong and that is why his suffering what is happening. The confidence Job has that they are wrong points to a relationship that is not equivalent to the exchange of goods model you are suggesting.

Ergo, it must be that our prayers to god will not only fall on deaf ears but may actually invite god's spite — TheMadFool

You are holding on to both sides of a comparison there when they are mutually exclusive.

Praying is not a quid pro quo. You open up what is most important for you and bring it into focus. That it is framed as an appeal to something outside of oneself is not like a letter where a person has to make it out to the proper address for the message to be sent.

I suppose the topic goes toward comparing different ways to express isolation and connection. Maybe it is easier to talk about that than approaching it through an activity that is understood and done in so many different ways.

I am not sure if my comments are welcome.
If not, I will stop.

Various narratives and traditions address evil.
I don't see any value in judging in advance how one or another point of view will respond to it.
By their fruits, you shall know them.

It might not be remiss to note that the idea of the "secular" appeared in a theological package. The introduction was not an argument against the morality established around different sets of professed beliefs. The register of the secular was a way to frame problems that did not fit the paradigms of congregations.

In works like the City of God by Augustine, the telos of the worldly and the godly converged and diverged in different ways. The resulting Ethics that became the shape of what was practiced was a combination or collision of influences, depending upon what expectation was being considered.

Now, some philosophers, such as Nietzsche, wanted to map the theological and the moral as historical moments that separated the development of various codes from each other so that we could see them as different results of some process. But even the philosopher of the future himself was careful not to publish an absolute divide between a worldview and a set of "facts."

I am not sure if the above applies to your thesis at all. It is only what I thought after reading it.

It would seem I was associated in some way with this body before it came into existence. Or else it would have been born without me. — Yohan

The first sentence of that statement suggests some kind of reincarnation.
The second sentence sounds like the automatons Descartes imagined were walking on the sidewalks outside his window.

Well, the selfish part of feeling the loss is not so very different from the way the friendship itself was selfish for both of us when it was happening.
My grief for my missing friends is not cancelled by that element. It draws us closer together.

What I would have liked to ask him is whether he saw the limits of speech in some parallel to Taoism where what cannot be expressed is the beginning of a journey and not a result after many attempts to the contrary.

Well, there is a lot of talk about preference in his book.
The talk about being commanded to love is different.
It would be interesting to hear objections to that point of view.
But casting it as a matter of a reaction to a failed romance is weak beer.

From the point of view of Kierkegaard's Works of Love the matter is not about the conditions that determine what brings about one kind of connection or another but whether one has a duty to love.
If one has a duty to love, then it is happening under difficult conditions.

It would help me if you referred to specific text of Islamic philosophers you have in mind.
They did not all agree with each other. Grouping them together is a thesis in itself.

↪Valentinus
I don't know. I haven't been able to follow your line of thought. It feels like you are only posting half of what you are saying. As if I am missing half of the conversation. — Banno

Okay. I will try to do better.

Kant objected to Hume's view of causality because it did not give a way to rank different explanations.
The objection on Kant's side was not so much about whether there were any way thinkers who could assign one agent or another as the cause of something but that Hume was cutting the enterprise off at the knees. Because every story as a story is just a story, there is no way to connect it to some kind of necessity that could provide proof of some explanation being more than that. A story.

So, on one level, the whole effort to object to an idea became a comprehensive theory of what could replace the disagreed thing.

As a matter of one thesis supplanting another, that is rather odd. The contestants are arguing about the rules of a fight rather than who has the correct view of a matter.

What does help look like?

↪Valentinus
I've no idea of what you are saying. — Banno

It is not very complicated. The work of critical thinking reveals how assumptions shape various arguments.

So, how does one separate those various arguments?

The starting place where one says this is the starting place.

In terms of context, it is a matter of much debate to say what that is.
From one point of view, that is the only argument. We cannot get past the framing of a question to try and answer it.
On the other hand, there are arguments that question why any arguments are necessary.
So, the notion that the nature of arguments could satisfy a bunch of of arguments may be a hope misplaced.

I am not sure where the knife is balanced between being a result of causes and being responsible for the choices one makes.
Basing an ethic strictly upon one or another method seems to be all mixed up with the topic of what the hell is going on.

Along similar lines, Philip K. Dick has parallel histories struggling with each other and individuals able to traverse between them. [Man in the High Castle]
One of my favorite books is Lem's Solaris where an alien entity keeps trying to replicate humans to see what they are about.

China is a Capitalist economy. The means of production needed to play a part in a global economy requires nothing less.

I don't understand how wanting to talk about any of that would be best initiated by a poll.

Good question. Our adaptability has lead to a crisis of stasis. The tools that have worked so far to extend control of resources now have their own inertia that now need correction.

It is pretty obvious that one is hearing what Yourcenar thinks during the book more than a transcription of what Hadrian thinks. I happen to be interested in what Yourcenar thinks.

I understand why the whole enterprise might piss off an actual historian who has read all the source material. I benefited from reading Mary Beard's SPQR.

I always took the pleasure of historical fiction without mixing it up with the real thing. Other readers' aesthetics may bring different results. I do think Yourcenar is a better story teller than Graves in regards to presenting a Roman character of the kind presented by Beard's work.

The first book I listed is a fiction, presenting an emperor musing on the best kind of Empire to shape.

The second is a series of essays arguing that we need to place the effort to oppose cruelty and the usurpation of publicly granted powers over the articulation of what is the best polity.

The third book explores the command to love one another in terms of personal responsibility. As a manual, if you will, it is not based upon establishing what is secular versus the sacred but having those distinctions come out of the awareness of what love requires. It doesn't oppose previous arguments from Augustine and the Scholastics but sort of turns them inside out.

So what oddly connects them are their interests in expressing what a community is or not. A desire to know what to do next.

I do not mean to question your sincerity. I was trying to take the Pilate reference seriously.
Now that you abandon it, I am not sure what it has to do with something.

I am taking the question at face value. It really doesn't matter why Pontius Pilate asked it, or whether he was sincere in asking it. — Bartricks

Face value. What is that?
I think Pontius was trying to ask that question along with the others.

From the Pontius Pilate question, it is presented in the accepted Gospels as an observation upon the process of judgement Pilate is carrying out. Something like:

I make decisions all the time so how would this be different?

So, if one was to present an argument to a question that is largely rhetorical, how would one proceed?

I don't know. What if your descriptions of what previous traditions expressed were incorrect?
How would one go about talking about that?

I will check Collingwood out. I am not familiar.
To be clear, I am not dismissing historical enterprises. For example, I think Hegel is really important to understand. His many descendants don't quite know what to do with the old guy. He has become a strange kind of patient zero to other events.

The second point is to understand how one consciously or unconsciously adopts these various positions and what social and cultural forces drive those choices. So if the first point is dialectical, the second is critical. That kind of approach underlay Kant's critical dialectics, and the later 'historicist' readings of philosophy that grew out of it. — Wayfarer

This is a good point to emphasize since so many "critics" of points of view did not own their observations as a part of a dialectic.

Compare, for example, the way someone like Plato is interpreted by the generations of people who have done it. Whether that be Plotinus or Strauss, they own their translations of what was meant by saying this or that.
But those who would make the narrative about what was happening then and now, in order to make those expressions a part of explaining one sequence or another according to some measure, that is a different activity. Our desire for an encyclopedia of events makes the latter more attractive at the expense of the former.

That is a good point. My only objection is that much of their wording stays out of the problems being wrestled with. It becomes too much of sports-like commentary upon how the contenders are doing.
The point of view is outside of the struggle being observed.

I agree that the context in which the different propositions take place in is the first step that is not taken enough.