Bonnie Honig - Public Things: Democracy In Disrepair
Raymond Geuss - Public Goods, Private Goods

Cheers! I see the allure of the alleterative afflicts you too!

I wrote a thing:

I wait for a blinking light
Around which now this day does spin,
this tiny pulse of white.
Like a planet plucked
from out of space,
to cruelly warp both time and place
So that every glint and every glow,
rakes this heart to race.

But more than heart
so too does skin,
the knots beneath
which arch and spring.
And while the world around does dim,
become a foil for that flicker and flit
It's upon that gently blinking light
- your light,
I wait.

--

My first time writing a thing.

Giorgio Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory is one text that comes to mind, although you have to read about 3/4s of the book to get to where he starts discussing glory (its worth it tho). Otherwise I'd imagine you'd probably find the classic discussions in either Augustine or Aquinas, but I would have no idea where.

Two things you need to remember to properly understand the analytic/synthetic distinction (along with the a priori/a posteriori distinction). First, is that Kant mobilises these terms in the context of the problem of causality, and they cannot be understood apart from that context. Specifically, remember that Kant is responding to Humeian skepticism about causality: qua Hume, the constant conjunction of events does not guarantee the universality of causal connection. In other words, causality does not admit of the order of logical necessity. And connection via the force of logical necessity is just what Kant refers to as an analytic connection. By contrast, synthetic connections - in this case causality - are those that admit of extralogical reasons to explain their connection.

In Christian Kerslake’s terms: “Whereas an analytic connection contains its reason solely in the logical explication of the presupposed meaning of a concept, a synthetic connection must involve an extralogical reason. [For Kant,] the concept of a causal relation must be synthetic… [Hence,] Kant’s notion of the synthetic a priori simply names a problem faced by eighteenth-century philosophy – that of how to account for any possible nonlogical a priori connections”.

The second thing to understand then is that the above means that Kant here is dealing with the problem of how to move from the sphere of logic to the sphere of existence. Insofar as analytic statements are those driven by logical necessity, synthetic statements by contrast involve a measure of reality. It is this move from logic to existence that in turn - for example - grounds Kant’s famous response to the cosmological argument: it is not enough to argue - as the cosmological argument more or less does - that God is perfect and that because existence is a perfection He must exist: for this simply begs the question of God’s existence to begin with. Essence - or analyticity - cannot ground existence - which belongs to the order of the synthetic.

So just remember: at stake in the analytic/synthetic distinction is the question of both causality on the one hand, and the move from logic to reality on the other: both of which turn upon the question of logical and extra logical necessity respectively.

Intuitively, I'd say negation is generally predicated of the 'same' thing, as in 'negative charge' and 'positive charge', or 'positive spin' and 'negative spin', while two things which are opposite are so with respect to some third term, as in 'green and red are opposites on the color wheel'. There is, in other words, a closer 'fit' of identity between negatives (think of the inverting colors on a black and white picture, where black is substituted for white and vice versa, but the 'picture' remains the same), than there are between 'opposites' (sweet and sour, say). Perhaps one can speak of a quantitative and qualitative difference in kind (corresponding to negation and opposition respectively).

But one is free, as usual, to use terms as one sees fit.

Not necessarily - one would first need evidence that medicine has significantly altered the human genotype to the point which such alterations have become transmissible between generations. But the point is to not rule out such alterations, and to warn against conceptually fraught notions of such alterations making the species 'weaker'.

There have been people who would say humans should be looked at in the same way we look at sheep. Medicine provides artificial robustness. Take away the medicine and nature would reveal the hidden weakness, devastating human populations in the process.

How would you answer that? — Mongrel

By recognising that there is no absolute standard of capital-N Nature by which to measure 'robustness' by. That is, species fitness is always relative to it's environment, beyond which the very notion of 'robustness' simply no longer makes sense. One could ask in a similar vein if water is making fish less fit as a species because if they were to be on land they would totally die. But this is already to ask a wrong question.

Linda Zerilli - A Democratic Theory of Judgement

I understand socialism to be placing the interests safety and welfare of the citizens of a nation above all other concerns. — Question

Mm, but I would say that fascism inverts this formula: it's about the interests of the State over and above the welfare of individual citizens. Exactly how to articulate the limits of both the state and its citizens (along with other interests) is, I think, the very political problem that is grappeled with in both instances.

It would be more accurate to say that, on an ideological and ideal level, it totally wants to be the state, but, since that doesn't really pan out (it always finds itself forced to cater to - or at least cut deals with- entrenched powers) there ends up being a de facto dual state. The fascists fail to live up to their fantasy. That's where the mobilization thing comes in. If things settled, it would become clear the fascist state was not the unified absolute-everything it's claimed to be. — csalisbury

This is great. Just thinking with regard to the cultural revolution - which I'm more farmilar with - I feel like there's the same mechanics at work here but in the oppositite direction as it were; where Mao wanted to decalcify the Party so that it wouldn't become an entrenched, all-too-comfortable state apparatus - to set the people (the 'Mass Line' as he called it) in motion, Fascism wants instead to set the State in perpetual motion; and in both cases this motion - revolution and mobilisation, respectively - encounters it's limit in what 'drags behind' - The Party for the Chinese Communists, and everything-that-isn't-The-State for the Fascists. The neatness of this symmetry makes me suspicious, but it's a fun thought to have.

One of Paxton's big talking points is that the self-explanations offered by fascists should be taken with a grain of salt. What they said isn't always in line with what they did (in fact, it usually wasn't.) It's a familiar historicist point, but one that is somehow often overlooked in this particular case. We're eager to deconstruct the self-narratives of the guardians of western democracy, but willing to take the statements of fascists at face value. — csalisbury

Yeah, that's fair enough. It's probably a matter of distinguishing between fascism-as-idea and fascism-in-practice, depending on the kind of discussion at stake. The notion of fascism as a kind of permanent mobilization is very interesting - it seems to resonant very strongly with Trotskyist or even Maoist strains of communism (permanent revolution...), while making the state a kind of kind of permanent Vanguard (a la Lenin without the 'withering away'). But again, it's this focus on the state which I think really distinguishes the two, where, to paint it broadly, the state works for the people, and not the people for the state.

Strangely enough, I don't see that as a distinct form of socialism. Like I said it is socialism taken down to its most extreme and logical form. — Question

What do you understand by socialism?

I always thought fascism was socialism taken to the extreme. The most efficient use of public funds has always been in my understanding spent through infrastructure and the military along with 'taking care of the population'. — Question

You should check out Moussolini's rather lucid writings on fascism, where he explicitly ditinguishes fascism from socialism along the lines of the emphasis on economics, as well as the primacy of class warfare:

"Such a conception of life makes Fascism the complete opposite of that doctrine, the base of the so-called scientific and Marxian Socialism, the materialist conception of history; according to which the history of human civilization can be explained simply through the conflict of interests among the various sodal groups and by the change and development in the means and instruments of production ... Fascism, now and always, believes in holiness and in heroism; that is to say, in actions influenced by no economic motive, direct or indirect. ... And above all Fascism denies that class war can be the preponderant force in the transformation of society. These two fundamental concepts of Socialism being thus refuted. nothing is left of it but the sentimental aspiration-as old as humanity itselftowards a social convention in which the sorrows and sufferings of the humblest shall be alleviated."

The differences become sharpest however, where Moussolini discusses the function of the state, which is totally alien to any socialist conception of it:

"The foundation of Fascism is the conception of the State, its character, its duty, and its aim. Fascism conceives of the State as an absolute, in comparison with which all individuals or groups are relative, only to be conceived of in their relation to the State. ... 'For us Fascists, the State is not merely a guardian, preoccupied solely with the duty of assuring the personal safety of the citizens; nor is it an organization with purely material aims, such as to guarantee a certain level of well-being and peaceful conditions...

The State, as conceived of and as created by Fascism, is a spiritual and moral fact in itself... The State is the guarantor of security both internal and external. but it is also the custodian and transmitter of the spirit of the people. as it has grown up through the centuries in language, in customs, and in faith. And the State is not only a living reality of the present, it is also linked with the past and above all with the future, and thus transcending the brief limits of individual life, it represents the immanent spirit of the nation." (Mussolini,The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism; this particular document is only a couple of pages long. Well worth the read if you're interested).

I wonder - would there be anyone here who doesn't believe in God, yet want one to exist? Or vice versa?

I don't know how calling you out for literally not knowing what you are talking about comprises 'low quality argumentation'. For instance, you seem to have now dragged in, out of nowhere, this equivocation between power and violence that not only simply doesn't exist in Foucault's work, but that he has at points explicitly dissociated ("In itself the exercise of power is not violence" cf. Discipline and Punish). And given that I've already quoted from Foucault explaining how power is not 'beyond' truth but part and parcel of it - a quote which you have simply ignored in order to continue to wrongly assert otherwise - one wonders what is left of any argument you have put forward whatsoever.

I could also mention that you have also ignored where I pointed out that the equivocation between argument and epistemes is something you also have not argued for (as I asked before, where does Foucault speak about argumentation as such? - it's not in the Archaeology which you off-handedly referenced), but I imagine it too will fall on deaf ears. And as for this: "But violence won't change the truth of words, their conclusion, nor the explanatory power which arises from a conscious use of grammar and logic." - again cite a reference where Foucault says that violence will "change the truth of words, their conclusion, etc". Show me evidence of your work beyond the charlatanism of these made-up charges.

So don't tell me that I'm not engaging you on substantive points - what would be nice is for you to actually make one with reference to the relevant source material. And if I'm being harsh it's because of the sheer hypocrisy of people like you. You harp on about the lack of coherence about postmodernism, while committing yourself to falsehoods, bad readings, a lack of attention to either detail or rigor, or even basic reasoning. It's a breathtaking lack of intellectual consistency.

In a later remark in the Mechanics, Kant explicitly objects that “the terminology of inertial force (vis inertiae) must be entirely banished from natural science — Wosret

This is a pretty Newtonian declaration actually, insofar as Newton himself famously refrained from 'feigning any hypothesis ('hypothesis non fingo') regarding what force is. It could be said that Kant was just trying to carry though this declaration to it's end.

--

Otherwise, the early modern debates over causality are actually really interesting. Christian Kerslake has a great book which covers alot of these 'contextual' issues, and one of his most important points I think is that the model of causality which we reflexively think of today (efficient causality) was, as he says, the least popular of all the available models of causality. Some excerpts:

"Both Hume and Leibniz are sensitive to the problems of justifying the concept of causality. This is in part due to the conjunction of available theories of causality in the eighteenth century: the notion that now strikes us as the most sensible approach to causality, that finite substances are responsible for the changes they cause in other substances (then called the theory of physical influx), was at the time the least popular. This was because the only way available to conceive the idea that a substance with a set of properties caused a change in another substance was through the explanation that there was a transmission of properties from the first to the second, which was held to be inconceivable. Therefore, the notions of occasionalism and pre-established harmony became popular among philosophers as elaborate avoidances of physical influx.

On Hume: "...Hume’s philosophy can also be seen to arise from the failure of the physical influx theory: he can find no evidence from the senses of any ‘transmission’ of properties, given that all the senses provide us with are distinct impressions. Given a lack of objective ground for the order found in the world, Hume turns to custom, and, ultimately ... to the notion of a pre-established harmony."

On Kant, "One of Kant’s most celebrated moves in the Critique of Pure Reason amounts to the construction of an abstract formalisation of the problem facing notions such as causality in the eighteenth century... . The concept of a causal relation must be synthetic: Leibniz, Kant and Hume all agree on this, if not in terminology. Furthermore, they agree in principle that the problem about causality concerns connections that should be, if they are to exist at all, a priori. Kant’s notion of the synthetic a priori simply names a problem faced by eighteenth-century philosophy – that of how to account for any possible nonlogical a priori connections. How is one to synthesise a priori two or more elements, whether they be Humean sensations, or Leibnizian perceptions?

...Kant will often address the situation functionally by simply saying that synthesis requires a 'third'. As Kant says in the Critique, ‘where is the third thing that is always requisite for a synthetic proposition in order to connect with each other concepts that have no logical (analytical) affinity?’ (CPR A259). Kant’s answer as to what this tertium quid is will vary enormously, but the ‘triangular’ structure of a priori cognition will remain constant. As we will see, in the early writings Kant seeks the third thing between God and world (cf. LM 15, Ak. 28:52), whereas later time (A155/B194) and experience in general (A157/B196) are said to be third things".

On Newton and Kant: "To explain the interaction of substances, Kant appeals to universal gravitation, and this will remain as the extralogical formal principle for the reciprocal action (succession and coexistence) of his system right up to the ‘Inaugural Dissertation’. Universal gravitation, as the sphere of nature, is the ‘phenomenal eternity of the general cause’ (TP 405; Ak. 2:410). Any determinate relation between substances thus depends on the status of the ‘world-whole’ ... The principle of real, as opposed to logical, determination has its final ground in the whole. ... Against Leibniz, Kant wants both to affirm physical interaction, and also, with Newton, to shift the ground for the determination of forces to the whole field of forces. As we will see shortly, this provides the rudiments for a scientific theory that resolves the physical influx controversies".

I wish I could quote the whole chapter, but the whole history is just so long and fascinating full of twists and turns - especially because, as Kerlsake points out, Kant actually changed his mind multiple times in the lead up to the CPR regarding the status of time, causality and force - all of which complicates his relation to Newton (quotes from Kerslake's Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy).

That's not very nice. Corporations are people, too, y'know? — Luke

I laughed, but it was a morbid laughter.

Foucault's focus on power would entail "a widening of what an argument is". That's effectively a dilution of the significance of argument, — jkop

Can you provide a reason for this so-far unwarranted inference? Why would a widening of what we understand to be argument 'dilute it's significance' rather than amplify it? You're missing a line of argument and I'd like to see you provide it. As far as the literature goes, it's commonly acknowledged that such attention doesn't grant any sort of 'dilution' or 'amplification' either way, and that the whole point is that one must pay attention to the specificities of an argument in order to see, empirically, as it were, how power functions any one concrete situation. That's the entire point of Foucault's 'archaeological' method, which you seem to want to critique without even grasping the most basic of it's workings. So as it stands, your argument is both unsubstantiated and eccentric to received readings.

What I think is controversial, however, is the belief that powers beyond or beneath an argument would somehow compromise the argument or its outcome — jkop

Again, this is not an argument made by Foucault, and the fact that you keep bringing it up is only more evidence of your unfamiliarity with the position you're ostensibly critiquing. The 'controvesy' here remains one wholly of your own making, existing nowhere but in your head at this point. I mean, you know its OK to admit that you've simply never read a word of Foucault in your life?

My personal interest, rarely mentioned in this forum, is in philosophy of language, for instance. I'm interested in how speech act theory does not address the relationship of speaker and hearer in both an emotional sense and a power/status sense, and I hope eventually to do some work on that; I think coming to terms with 'power' would enhance that area of philosophy, and in doing so, we can usefully learn from several Continental strands of thinking, one associated with Jurgen Habermas, and one stretching back to Mikhail Bakhtin which on some vague criteria might be called 'post-modernist'. — mcdoodle

There is so much amazing work on this out there actually, especially in the sphere of political theory (where Habermas especially is routinely called out for ignoring questions of power). Chantal Mouffe's The Democratic Paradox is vital reading on the question of power with respect to that relationship of speaker and hearer, and you can find some amazing stuff in Wendy Brown (her States of Injury), Bonnie Honig (Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics), Judith Butler (Giving an Account of Oneself/The Psychic Life of Power) and Denise Riley (Impersonal Passion). All address this nexus between power and language, and the ways in which power has been undertheorized in approaches to speech acts, especially in the liberal tradition of thinkers like John Rawls and Selya Benhabib. 'Tis one of my favourite topics.

Can we not discuss this on the ground, without superior vantage points, intimidation, and so on? — jkop

I did, and you didn't engage with anything I had to say at all. You simply reasserted your original point without addressing anything I said. So you can stop pretending like you're in any way sincere about this.

No, all this is just a thin excuse for not having made any earnest attempt to understand the work in question. I dismissed you as a reader of Foucault because its pretty clear from your comments that you've either never read him, or that what little you have read have has given you an incredibly superficial understanding of his work. You're a hypocrite who insists on truth while thinking that you can exempt yourself from it's standard when it come to your unstudied dismissal.

Moreover, the charge of obscurity in Foucault's case that you're making is similarly vastly overstated. Foucault is challenging, but hardly obscure in the way you're making him out to be. I've seen legions of first year students come away from class with better understandings of the man's work after an hour of class than your poor 'let me wiki it'-attempt that has characterised your engagement with him so far. It's telling that when challenged on actual, substantial point, you and your ilk continue to fall back on 'well it's so hard to read anyway so who cares if I'm wrong about it'. 'Postmodernism' has nothing on the intellectual dishonesty that you've so far peddled in this thread.

You animus about Kant reminds me of this wonderful passage by Raymond Guess - a political philosopher, in fact!:

"I think ... the Kantian system is a machine infernale of enormous dimensions and extremely intricate internal structure of innumerable elaborate gears, flywheels, sprockets, bell, and whistles. The system operates and gains plausibility by inviting the unwary in and exhibiting a truly fascinating internal structure so that one loses perspective on the project as a whole. To change the metaphor, if one tries to shake hands with the Kantian, one can easily find one has lost an arm. In my opinion one needs to see Kantianism at virtually infinite distance ... I also think that seeing it clearly in this way will make it difficult to find it plausible, although obviously not everyone will agree with me about this."

And I get how your lack of comprehension skills would lead you to that false conclusion.

http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/survival-of-the-friendliest

Nautilus recently had a very nice article discussing issues exactly related to this topic. It rightly points out that not just struggle but also cooperation plays a role in evolution, with the latter loosening the evolutionary pressures of selection in ways that foster variation. Technology thus ends up being an extension of this cooperative evolutionary mechanism, feeding right into the way in which we have evolved:

"As humans collected into ever larger groups, the discovery of increasingly complex technology was accelerated. In high-density settlements, artisans and innovators could specialize in their crafts and exchange ideas. Selection for tool development has had an associated pressure on our ability to co-exist peacefully in large numbers, and aggressive, uncooperative individuals may have been selected against."

The article refers to this aspect of evolution as the wonderfully named 'survival of the friendliest' or the 'snuggle for survival'. So again, the idea that technology somehow 'undermines' evolution gets things exactly backward: technology can be considered part and parcel of the evolutionary process no less than natural selection. The mistake is in thinking that evolution only ever involves selection pressure, and not modulations of that very pressure.

I'm not asking you to 'uncritically accept his doctrines', I'm asking to you get those doctrines right, which you are not. Your critique is inapplicable because it bears upon a phantom.

So long as you continue to oppose 'argument' with power - and conflate power with discourse - you disqualify yourself as a reader of Foucault.

Of course your use of words matters. You can't complain that some philosophers are too slippery with words then complain that others are being too pedantic about your own use of words. It just these types of equivocations that lead the the kind of misreadings which you're perpetuating.

In any case, your own second-hand quote deals with Foucault's work on epistemes, regimes of knowledge and truth, rather than the far more narrow practices of reason-giving and argumentation. These are two different things, and there needs to be some bridging work done to connect the two. Furthermore, even if if inference was legitimate - which remains to be proved - none of it would entail a 'rejection' of argument. What it would entail is a wider conception of what argument is, which, quite commonsensically, always involves questions of power, position, and influence.

Critics of Foucault often make the mistake - as you are - of thinking that Foucault pitches truth against power, argument against discourse or whatever. But at no point does Foucault ever set up such dichotomies. If Foucault is often badly misunderstood, it's precisely because he challenges these simplistic distinctions. The point is instead to demonstrate the workings of power in truth, discourse in argument, and so on. Foucault is explicit about how truth is not simply subject to power which manipulates it from the 'outside', but instead has a power of it's own:

"The important thing here, I believe, is that truth isn't outside power, or lacking in power: ...Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power." ("Truth and Power", in Knowledge/Power). This is hardly an implausible thesis, and from the Foucauldian perspective, it's precisely the power inherent to truth which can make it so effective in practices of giving and asking for reasons (argumentation). The idea that the focus on power and discourse somehow undermine truth or argument is simply a bad one - Foucault himself never makes this claim, despite the frequent projections of it made upon him - based on sloppy misreadings that don't attend to the specifics of the argument.

I'm sure he did, but did he succeed, or just try, and thus failed to disentangle discourse from rhetoric? — jkop

But it could only be a complete and total failure of comprehension that would confuse discourse and rhetoric in Foucault. The intense focus on corporeality, institutions, disciplinary techniques, and historical events at every point undermine such a reading. Like, you'd literally need to have never read a single paragraph of Foucault to make this mistake. Not to mention his explicit understanding of discourse as "a body of anonymous, historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period, and for a given social, economic, geographical, or linguistic area." (Archaeology of Knowledge). Rhetoric would be one element in this entire ensemble of considerations.

Foucault replaced argument with discourse, recall, so, you don't get to argue at all. Instead there is discourse, and whatever rhetoric you can muster e.g. by word play, charm, bribery, populism... anything but words that refer to facts. Explain the benefit of that. — jkop

At no point in any of his works did Foucault propose that argument be 'replaced' with discourse, nor truth with power. Neither did he equate discourse with rhetoric (and indeed spent alot of time and effort trying to disentangle the two). These are prevalent caricatures of his work, but they are wrong.

It's not 'work' in the singular but works in the plural tho. Works that have made me explore everything from aesthetics to ethics, power and desire, religion and art. It's really not hyperbole.

The political just happens to be the focus imaginarius of all of it, as it were.

My experience teaches me differently. Some of my favorite works of philosophy are on exactly these kinds of questions, and I have learned immeasurably from them. With respect to these questions in particular, among the lessons I've learned are precisely that both politics and democracy and incredibly misunderstood notions, not simply among 'lay people', but even - and perhaps especially - by those who count themselves as mainstream political theorists.

Let me know if you do end up getting on it, I'm hoping to read it sometime this year maybe, it'd be good to have a reading partner : )

Have you read Mark Wilson's Wandering Significance? He's a college of Brandom I think (who wrote a glowing review of the book) and it's been cited in a few 'continental' circles that I know, so I'm pretty keen to get onto it.

What are the possibilities of democratic politics today? What is a demos? What is political action? How is each constituted, sustained, and undone? What are the forces that shape a society, and how can one think political agency in and amongst those forces?

All of my engagements with philosophy are oriented towards these kinds of questions, even if they lead me very far from them. They stem from my early interest in history and politics, and subsequently looking for the philosophical basis that underlie them.

I don't think they can be answered definitively - in principle - but there are definitely answers which are better than others.

But did you charge the flux capacitor?

What's the point of this question? Evolution doesn't abide by the banal disciplinary borders of institutional study. If you want to say: 'evolution is obviously biological because that's what biologists study', then you have the whole thing back to front. Anyway dude, I'm done here. When you can say, with a perfectly straight face that "Dams, nests, webs, cities, and genetic engineering are not evolution" - as though this sentence was even sensical to begin with - well, I'm sorry, but it's clear that you don't have the terms of evolutionary science down well enough for this discussion to be productive.

I'll simply request, by way of being constructive, that you take a read of the paper I cited on page 3. It explicitly lays out how evolution has nothing to do with - and actively subverts - the pseudo distinction between nature and culture.

The 'strict definition' of Darwin? Or the 'strict definition' of Susan Oyama? Or the 'strict definition' of Mary Jane West-Eberhard? Or the 'strict definition' of Massimo Pigliucci? Or the 'strict definition' of Jablonka and Lamb? or the 'strict definition' of Andreas Wagner? The modern synthesis? The extended synthesis? What? Don't just say 'oh just stuff I've absorbed from here and there'. The so-called 'strict definition' you keep referring to is, as far as I can tell, a completely made up object.

Look, I don't think you mean any of this maliciously, and I don't expect you to know the literature inside out - I certainly don't - but I do know that this 'strict definition' you keep citing is utterly contentious and it will not do for you to simply fall back upon it time after time - especially since it exists nowhere but in your head at this point. It doesn't even have the honour of being an argument from authority - you haven't citied a single one. Just please do better than this ignorance-spreading non-definition.

Well as far as I can tell, Marchesk wants to limit the scope of evolution to - variously - that which is 'biological' (and not 'technological'), and 'natural' (rather than what I assume is 'cultural'). But why? What do these distinctions mean with respect to evolution? What motivates these claims? If this is just a dispute over terminology, then why say that these distinctions are needed to make evolution 'meaningful' - as was M's original claim in his opening post? That's what I'm asking.

Ok, and with respect to evolution, their significance (as distinctions) is....???? What difference do these differences make with respect to evolution? If that isn't stated that he might as well be talking about gufflefloomps and flufflehoomps. And it's not enough to groundlessly - and tautologically - declare that their significance for evolution is that only one side of whatever distinction is significant in evolution and the other is not. The question is why and how.

Yes, and gufflefloomps aren't flufflehoomps - so what? What's your point? You can't just sprout off meaningless distinction after meaningless distinction in order to avoid actually saying anything. Or maybe you can, whatever, if you can't state your point after this I see no reason to continue this discussion.

And an organism is? Or rather, again, don't just give me another distinction, give me the difference this difference makes. You could have said 'because biology is the study of gufflefloomps' - the question is - so what?

Personally, I think it's useful to make distinctions between natural and artificial, technological and biological, although there will be blurring of the lines at different points. — Marchesk

And what utility do such distinctions have when it come to evolution? In other words, what difference do these differences make, as far as evolution is concerned?