Hi, I don't think we debate whether absolute truth exists. If you look at the premise of the archaeological method, there is an assumed ground for thought beyond logic, grammar, and beneath consciousness. I question whether such a ground for thought exists. What conditions satisfies its possibility? — jkop

My understanding would be that there is an assumed ground for understanding the history of thought beyond the rules of logic and grammar and beneath consciousness. This is Foucault and he later called it 'genealogy', but to me it amounted to the same thing, perhaps someone will correct me if there's a major difference.

3) Within language, rules matter. We can start with the rules of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle. Call it logic, for that's what it is. — tim wood

You write about presuppositions and here to my mind is one of yours. These three rules are about formal language. They aren't about ordinary language. We all talk about excluded middles, contradictions and non-identity in our ordinary language. The purported rules of logic don't just arise out of 'language'. They are part of a deliberate and brilliant exercise by logicians to use less unruly languages than the ones we actually ordinarily use.

Then in formal language the steps of logic bear truth boldly onwards. Meanwhile I pop round to the Square Orange cafe for tea, to discuss a friend who both is and isn't married to a transexual who goes under many names, including a professional one.

True? :)

Roland Barthes, for example, quite literally argued against clarity in language and of having a natural prose style. — Thorongil

I've been a professional writer most of my working life and pride myself on my clarity. Nevertheless I think there's something to be said for Barthes' argument, which in my opinion and slightly dim memory is not exactly as you put it. 'Clarity' for Barthes is one of those rhetorical tricks of 'realism' in fiction, used by the bourgeois novel and Soviet socialist realists alike: a pretense of fidelity to how life is, that sought through its very style to persuade its readership of the 'reality' of its portrayal. I've certainly used such rhetorical tricks in creating fiction. TV or cinematic realism, for instance, which I've scripted, apes the purported 'clarity' of the documentary or news genres to persuade the viewer of its fidelity to life as it's lived. But woven through such 'realism' is a web of lies, masked by the pseudo-clarity.

Once you've understood the tricks you can play with writing, what then? Oddly enough much analytic philosophy seems written in the way that Barthes himself sometimes seemed to argue for: that you should know how difficult the ideas are by making the very sentences difficult to read. Have a read of Robert Brandom, for instance, who often reads as if ill-translated from the German. I can't tolerate that myself. I gather Barthes came to advocate a version of the 'simple' later on, though I've never read whatever that's in. All the same, I think his analysis of clarity-as-rhetoric is illuminating, and not at all wild or outrageous. You can emerge from it a clear - or simple-sounding - writer all the same.

She agrees that she does not know what it is like to be black in America, but she said she does understand what is to be a mother. — Cavacava

I suppose all work about the facts of other people's lives is exploitative, but this one does look, well, exploitative, in the context of an artist who doesn't usually do politics, and whose justification is as banal as this. I liked the protester who stands in front of the picture several hours a day in a sweat shirt saying BLACK DEATH SPECTACLE.

As an ex arty-farty myself and something of a libertarian I'm also appalled by a fellow-artist suggesting the work should be destroyed. Countering exploitation by destruction seems deeply unpleasant and uncreative to me: better the man in the shirt.

I understand socialism to be placing the interests safety and welfare of the citizens by a nation above all other concerns. That's about as concise as I can present the concept without idiotizing it. — Question

One old definition would be the collective ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange. While there are a zillion interpretations of this, as an old socialist I would divide the interpreters of such a definition into two strands:
- voluntarists, bottom-up socialists who believe in various mutual forms of organisation, whose 19th century origins would lie in Owenite communities and at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries as those who originally built up socialism through unions and the workplace, and took the parliamentary route
- Statists, Communists whose origins would lie in Marx and Engels, and by the early 20th century would be with leaders of the Second International, which at least notionally excluded anarchists, and who advocated and took the revolutionary route to power

I think these broad differences have remained, with socialist feminism, initially named I think by Marx's daughter Tussy in the 1890's, emerging as a whole new strand of thought in the West in the 1970's. Many of the parliamentarians became 'social democrats' who made their peace with capitalism while capitalism accommodated itself to the vote, workers' rights and pensions. The socialists of South America have had a foot in both libertarian and Statist camps.

If for example I would see something that I think is morally wrong, not because I believe in it, but because it makes me FEEL bad, I can't even act or judge the situation if I have no undeniable justification as to why that is bad — John Pride

Educated feelings are as good a guide to right action as any other. Reasoning is always built on premises: where are the premises for moral action to come from but feelings, developed through experience and reflected upon rationally? I read Aristotle as a guide to ethics only late in life, but can recommend them with a good study guide. It's a question, for him, of doing the right thing in the right way with the right feelings. All the best.

Meanwhile in Muslim countries, atheists are killed, children are raped, homosexuals are thrown from high places — tom

One difficulty for this line of argument is that from 1930 to 1970, say, some of which were the days of my youth, it was in atheist countries where by far the greatest amount of hideous butchering torture and rape were taking place. I don't think atheism was responsible then and I don't think Islam is responsible now. We need to be clearer in our terms and our historical and political understanding.

I'm an atheist, against all monotheistic patriarchal religions and societies. I doubt all our pontificating does much good, compared to what we just do in our personal and civic lives, expressing our values through what we do and say, and not being hasty in judgment whose lives we barely understand.

You want to read accounts where the balance of power is reversed. Bouveresse has written accounts of what it was like to be an analytic philosopher in France. — Frederick KOH

Well I am hoping to read some Bouveresse anyway, about language, though not in the near future as I have a reading list a mile long. What people have said to me though is that analytic philosophy is on the rise in France. Bouveresse himself was not without honours, albeit he may well have found himself paddling a lone canoe for some time. But I haven't read anything by him directly, only of him.

What about vague blanket criticism of analytic philosophy? — Frederick KOH

Yes, I'm against that too. You keep asking rhetorical questions as if they were somehow responses to what I write. I'm very happy to have a debate, but you need to put some cards on the table as I have. Do you think I'm wrong about 'power' for instance, and that analytic philosophy mostly isn't blind to the workings of power? If so perhaps you could explain why you think so. I have given the example of current bioethics.

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'.

I really don't like Daniel Pipes, but I think he has a point when he says there's medieval Islam and there's Islamism. Moderate Islam is mostly a resident of the imagination. — Mongrel

I don't understand what you're saying here. Most Muslims are moderate people, just like the rest of us. Perhaps you mean that there aren't prominent Muslims who are widely quoted as being moderate. Well, I live in a town in the north of England, and here and across the north from Liverpool to Manchester and Leeds and up to Newcastle, there are atheists, Christians, Muslims and all sorts mostly living quiet lives.

Of course terrorism alarms me, I used to walk every day in Leeds past a house that turned out to be a bomb factory. And many terrorists are acting in the name of Islam. The UK police are doing a brilliant job in anti-terrorism. I think long-term progress though involves ordinary people not Othering someone else's religion, as if it were somehow more unreasonable than one's own. Let us judge our neighbours and colleagues and co-residents by their actions and words, not by what we imagine from our reading to be their thoughts.

In UK Muslims comprise ~5% of the population, but 20% of inmates in high security prisons. — tom

Muslims make up a little under 15% of prisoners overall. Most of them are in jail for ordinary crimes. It's a puzzle, but it seems more likely to be connected to socio-economic factors than to religion.

You're willing to stake your life on contiguity. The question is: why? — Mongrel

The Janus principle. I'm reading about 'mood' which I'm writing about. Oddly enough this very issue comes up there; I suppose it comes up everywhere sooner or later. Ed Tronick, writing about infant moods, says:

I hypothesize that moods fulfil the Janus principle of bringing the past into the future for the infant... — Tronick

He argues in a footnote:

The Janus principle states that we use the past to anticipate the future; that we look backward in order to look forward. Looking back requires that there be some form of representation that carries the past and the present into the future in a meaningful way to guide thought, action and emotions. — Tronick"

His argument such as it is assumes contiguity, I know, but if there is indeed 'some form of representation' common to memory and now, and now again, then it would be surely quite a feat to argue that this form of representation doesn't necessitate contiguity.

How would works like "The Two Dogmas of Empiricism" or "Naming and Necessity" be rewritten if their authors weren't blind in the way that you say? — Frederick KOH

To recap. I'm against vague blanket criticism of some body of work called 'postmodernism'. I've stood up for Foucault and partly justified that by remarking that analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power. I've made a mild critique of current analytic practice about bioethics that it disregards the socio-political, and therefore exemplifies my charge.

I don't want to rewrite the brilliant work of Frege, Quine or Kripke. Just as I defend some of the work of Heidegger despite his Nazism, I don't for instance think Frege's appalling behaviour towards his academic fellows or his anti-semitic beliefs count against his philosophical work in the slightest.

I'm practising analytic philosophy, in a low-level grad student fashion, albeit in my sixties, so it's not as if I think it's a foolhardy exercise. I'm really only arguing for reasonable precision in argument - e.g. be wary of criticising authors you haven't read - and open minds towards the strange. There is some coming together between analytics and Continentals these days and it seems only positive to me.

It seems as if people still remember mild culture wars of the 90's, when Quine was among those who opposed Derrida's honorary philosophy degree. Here's an interesting recent retrospective blog post by Eric Schliesser: the below the line comments are interesting too, including one of the signatories of the original anti-Derrida letter.

Like lots of these questions, to me certainty depends on who wants to know and why. In that sense, propositional certainty just has degrees. Are you certain you're going to the theatre on Tuesday? Are you certain the rope from which I'm dangling is securely fastened to an immovable rock? 'Certain' seems entirely useable in both these contexts but to have rather different meanings.

Spinoza defended a form of neutral monism? Interesting. — Marchesk

The Stanford entry on neutral monism suggests that, rather, his was double-aspect monism, and that's how I understand it. (Stanford entry)

What about the world of mathematics and the hard sciences? The dialectic may be rhetorical but the physical world does what it wants. — Frederick KOH

You juxtaposed this to my remark that analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power. I'm not clear what point you're making. Philosophers aren't scientists and obviously shouldn't be mistaken for them. Scientists explore the (physical) world following their own interests and those of their peers and their funders. Philosophers ask questions of them that seem to them appropriate. It's the appropriateness of the philosophers' questions that seems to me at issue.

This last term, for instance, I went to a very well-delivered course of lectures by a leading bioethicist. For him, however, all the ethical questions were individual, a weighing of personal potential choices. I think that is being somewhat blind to the workings of power, which deeply influences ethical choices through our social and political institutions. The ethics of hospitals, hospices, pharmaceutical companies and governments, sugar-purveyors and word-of-mouth custom all matter in the bioethical mix. But that's how the analytic approach sometimes works: these social implications are to do with sociology, across the campus, whom some analytics then sneer at because they're supposedly overrun by postmodernists.

Not that everyone's like that of course or I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing. I'm a fan of Nancy Cartwright, for instance, who has largely moved over from the philosophy of physics to study how social scientists use causation. She nonplussed me last year by her views on the grave weaknesses of 'gold standard' random controlled trials, which just hadn't occurred to me before listening to her speak.

First of all, what would it mean for everyone to be bad at philosophy? It would mean that even our most celebrated philosophers make fundamental mistakes, and — Marchesk

I think the Wittgenstein answer would start here. Is to say that 'everyone is bad at philosophy' meaningful? How is it meaningful? To what or whom are you comparing 'everyone'? - This 'what or whom' needs to be better at philosophy than us. And who is doing the comparing? This 'who' needs to be independent of 'everyone' and accepted as capable of judgment.

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Instead I am criticising claims ascribed to Foucault, his method, and the deplorable influence they have on the quality of thought (for example, in our universities) — jkop

I'm glad the conversation has shifted to an actual writer. What you say, jkop, sounds quite like what a lot of students and teachers of analytic philosophy have said to me since I've gone back to study (mostly analytic) philosophy in my 60's. Not only are they against postmodernism, they do indeed have some sort of disdain even to read the people they believe they will disagree with profoundly. More than one told me it was sufficient reason not to read Heidegger that he was a Nazi, for instance, and many resist Badiou, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucualt...

This puzzles me, but I'm an incurably curious person. My reading is a bit scattered and so are my opinions: postmodernism seems to me a very mixed church, once you read in it. On second reading for instance I thought parts of 'Being and Time' were/are brilliant. I started off thinking Derrida was witty and clever in his deconstruction; now I think he's indeed clever but a terribly, at heart, negative writer.

I would like to stand up among this for Foucault. I read him first many years ago when I was trying to understand the history of mental illness and the growth of institutions that deal with the mentally troubled. I've since read two more volumes. I think his method is tremendously powerful and is firmly in the philosophical tradition. He reaches back to Plato and Aristotle to begin to understand the history of sexuality, for instance; constantly questions received certainties but is clear on what he is proposing to put in its place; his notion of genealogy as a self-written history seems strong to me. Analytic philosophy is largely blind to the workings of power, it is mostly conducted in an imagined world of equals engaging in unrhetorical dialectic. I enjoy that myself, but it can't be the whole picture. Foucault to me excavates how power-relationships, including our own self-discipline, help to form and reinforce the boundaries of our thinking. You don't have to think he's the bees-knees to get something out of him. That's my experience.

Someone should send for Banno and ask him to argue for Davidson's view: Here is Davidson's paper: On the very idea of a conceptual scheme.

His argument - that the very idea of a conceptual scheme is found wanting - is founded on translatability. His analysis seeks to show that as soon as we communicate, with any success, the very idea of a separate conceptual scheme fails.

Thanks un that's a thought-provoking piece. I've said I'm on a uni course. Last year I proposed an essay based on some wacky ideas about language. My tutor, a good-hearted man, said, Why not find a claim by a prominent philosopher to critique. So I did (it was by Searle actually, his spat with conversation analysis).

The tutor justifies this approach perfectly reasonably - it's the dialectic, it's learning rational argument. But in a system it will end up with a small number of people with ideas, feeling beleaguered, amid crowds of not always well-informed sceptics.

The blog also reminds me of one moment in my recent studies when I felt ashamed of myh ignorance. In a class on Heidegger the Chinese student next to me was able to engage in a discussion of the relative merits of the two English translations of 'Being and Time' when I had found one enough of a struggle!

The authors criticized in "Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science" for starters. — Frederick KOH

Well, that was 20 years ago, and quite a lot of ink has been spilt over it. Of course the Sokal hoax was brilliant. Still, I thought there was nothing intrinscially wrong with Lacan, for instance, using maths as metaphor, but that what he did with such metaphor tended to degenerate into pretentiousness, ideas in love with themselves. Nevertheless there's stuff I've learnt from Lacan, even if I wouldn't remotely go down the psychoanalytic path. Two interesting ideas of his would be that Descartes opened a subjective can of worms via the cogito, a subjectivity which we have yet to come to terms with; and that the belief that we can arrive at a 'language of truth' or metalanguage is impossible. There is no metalanguage. A formal language is not language like our language and the one cannot be assimilated to the other.

All academic language can be made to sound ridiculous. I'm studying analytic philosophy now, at a ripe-ish old-ish age, and immersed in that Anglo-American enterprise, it doesn't seem to me that French intellectuals have any kind of monopoly on pretentious bollocks, though they can be amazingly good at it. Among the analytics, arcane writing about knowledge and justified true belief, for instance, runs Badiou pretty close.

I am, to say again, arguing for clarity. Let's not just come here and pompously declare our prejudices. Let's get down to the details of what we think and discuss and argue over them.

Oh please. You have access to the Internet and Google. — Thorongil

My point is that the op and others also have such access. In a philosophy forum I would like to see specific remarks quoted and debated. That's the intellectual pleasure of it. Exchanging waffley rhetoric I can do just as well down the pub after a couple of drinks.

Postmodern "thought" is among the most pernicious anti-intellectual movements in modern times. — jkop

But my earlier point is, people are often saying this sort of thing, but not citing the apparent purveyors of it. Who are these postmodern 'thinkers'? What is the detail of their claims? How do they get to be so influential? Why is it so hard to name or quote them? It would be good to get to grips with them.

In education in the UK, for instance, we are currently moving - well, have moved - from a child-centred vogue following the 60's to a highly centralised school curriculum with more and more narrow testing and centralisation. This is not the spread of postmodern thinking, it's the opposite. Where is all this perniciousness coming from, and what is it affecting?

In my view, the modernist always win an argument based on truth. But I'd like to hear how this is argued out, by others. — BenignParadigm

This is quite a common view on this and the old pf forum. An odd thing is, the assertion is rarely backed up by an actual quote from an actual post-modernist, duly critiqued.

There are many analytic philosophers who have a 'deflationary' view of truth and the odd postmodernist who bangs on about it far too much; the more I've read, the less obvious does this supposed contrast seem to me.

Oddly enough, in the arts, my view has always been that modernism did the opposite to your claim; rather, it problematized 'truth'. If you take 'The waste land', Eliot presented a diverse range of voices with no clear overarching 'truth' at all (although later he became a Christian). If you take the novel, Woolf or Joyce or Dos Passos presented us with a plurality of subjective voices as against the Victorian era novel where you always knew what the author would think. If you take painting and sculpture, the Impressionists, Picasso and the Cubists inaugurated devastating assaults on old ways of truth-telling. Take 'The rites of Spring' and Schoenberg...where is the sanctuary of truth in all this?

But what if we doubt the accuracy of other personal experiences?

For example, it seems like most of the time I have conscious control over what I do. It seems like I have free will. — darthbarracuda

Like jkop I feel there's nothing to doubt about my personal experience. It happens...it happened.

As soon as it's in the past some doubt can reasonably set in. This might be the moment of waking: Ah, that was a dream. But then, it's just that a new experience clarifies the (memory of the) old.

And for me, any 'me', my own first person testimony will always trump scientific explanation, however much of a scientist I am. That's just the way a human is made. 'I don't care what your man Libet said, I know when I decided something.'

It's been a perplexing area for me, studying more 'metaphysics of mind': that a lot of the waffley sounds-like-science from Chalmers et al imagines that only third-person testimony, or a certain view of science, is going to 'explain' consciousness. There are perfectly good ways of thinking about first-person experiences in a scientific manner. They come from social science, however, and there's a certain strain of physical/biological science folk who just disregard social science.

Anyway: I think that as I've got older, I've become more and more aware of how 'I' inhabit a creature who often seems to be deciding things for me while my mind is busy with other things. There is a first person way of looking at the sorts of things apo cites. But experience loses its most personal meaning if we re-express it all in the third person for the sake of purported explanations.

I know you're interested in this interpretation of final cause, and I'm interested in different ways of understand the four aitia or causes, but I can't make the leap.

Where in this schema does 'contemplation of the One' fit in? That is the 'acme of reason' for Aristotle, as for all Platonists. It is at once aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual. — Wayfarer

I know this is a bit of a side road, but...I don't recognize Aristotle in this. The contemplation of the one comes later, surely, with Plotinus. Aristotle is careful not to say he's a Platonist.

What philosophical question gets under your skin? — csalisbury

The claims of philosophy of language, which I think needs a complete revamp.

There are other interpretations of why the pigeons might have behaved the way they did. The authors of this 2009 paper, for instance, say that 'these [pigeon] behaviours were later reinterpreted as behaviours that improve foraging efficacy (analogous to salivation in Pavlov's dogs), which suggests that the pigeons' behaviour does not correspond to Skinner's intended meaning of superstition.'

Their paper is interesting in that, despite discrediting Skinner's inferences, they then endorse a Skinnerist approach, rather bewilderingly.

Ever since the 1980's there's been a substantial minority of leading stock exchange investors using financial astrology. Amazingly enough, it sometimes seems to work.

What careful studies suggest, however, is that actually 'professional' financial advice on investment is just terrible, so an astute astrologer might well do better. What we believe to be empirically built on reason - and read avidly and often pay for - is no better than a chimp with a marker pen. Read an old 2013 article about it here.

Superstition is the irrational behaviour of Others. I'm just a guy who takes his chances :)

There are many cases of corporate manslaughter in the UK now, yes. You can browse them on this law firm's specialist website. The cases mostly focus on grossly negligent health and safety in the workplace. But there are also cases where an anesthetist and the hospital trust were charged in relation to a woman's death in hospital (found not guilty) and a care home where a woman died of ill-health brought on by malnutrition and neglect.

Hi mew, I was just musing on this in another thread. I'm no Aristotle expert but I've been reading a bit in the last couple of years. 'Essence' is a Latinate word and translation, Aristotle's phrasing sounds more like badly-translated Heidegger (no surprise as Heidegger was reaching back to Aristotle), what-it-is-to-be. Essence is form - with matter as substance - primary and secondary.

The essence of a thing then lies is constituted through its ergon, which might be translated as something like 'function'. Our human ergon is to seek eudaimonia, the good through virtuous action, which in turn we achieve partly through phronesis, which is practical reasoning.

There isn't just 'rationality' for Aristotle, he has a complicated account where the soul has appetitive and rational parts that intercommunicate, and indeed practical reason is how we learn to do that well. So we learn to be in tune with our ergon through practice and (rational) deliberation. It's clear from his many ordinary examples that he doesn't universalise indiscriminately over all humans. Part of the essence (sic) of the whole virtue approach to action is that the generalisations are loose enough to require judgment in individual cases, yet clear enough to gain general assent within a society - well, Athens in the 4th C BC anyway!

Ancient and medieval ethics, argues MacIntyre, relied wholly on the teleological idea that human life had a proper end or character, and that human beings could not reach this natural end without preparation.

I don't know if this is from Wikipedia, Wayfarer, but I just wanted to comment that to me this summary is somewhat inverted. Human beings, like every other creature or object known, have an 'ergon' in Aristotelian terms. This is sometimes translated as 'function' but it might be best left to its own devices since we know for instance how to call things 'ergonomic'. It corresponds reasonably well to 'ecological niche', in a modern revisionary version of neo-Aristotelianism. The cosmic order involves everything having a particular nature and place.

It is then part of this human ergon to have a certain telos or end. For Aristotelian humanity that's eudaimonia, a form of good achieved through virtuous living. The purposiveness, that is to say, comes second to the niche and flows from it.

This approach to Aristotle can with quite a bit of pushing and pulling be shaped into the sort of systematic 'new naturalistic' approach that apo favours, as I read it. It certainly has an ecological ring.

It's not easy to fit, though, for Aristotle's idea of order is not a 'natural order' but a social one, albeit one far from what MacIntyre calls the modern 'Weberian' view, which is what MacIntyre takes to be almost all-encompassing nowadays: a fragmented set of remnants from lost moralities re-formed one way or another by a managerial/bureaucratic ethos...greatest good as decreed by Taylorism, say...or greed-is-good individualism....or State benevolence with varying control and surveillance added for ill measure.

MacIntyre in turn contrasts the Aristotelian approach with the tragic approach of Sophocles/Euripides - that certain virtues inevitably conflict with each other, and in tragic circumstances one's commitment to one virtue does not shield one from the consequences of the other that one does not commit to.

It's odd to me that early on in the argument you quote (Law on evil) Law distinguishes 'moral' from 'natural' evil, i.e. human-initiated versus suffering caused by natural forces. Nevertheless he allows both categories to merge in 'gratuitous' evil, which I take to be evil without 'good' reason. This seems a shoddy argument to me: 'gratuitous' is too vague and contested a term to hold up as part of a premise.

Welcome, Victorie. I am an ungifted amateur when it comes to physics, so physicsworld.com is one place I go when more sciencey people here succeed in bamboozling me with stuff beyond school physics. Here's a 100-second video about regular scientific quantum jumping, for starters.

Here in the UK we have had 'corporate manslaughter' on the statute books for the last decade, being homicide by a corporation. The Health & Safety Executive issue advice on it If homicide is involved, then surely morality is too, if only as a 'failure of a duty of care'.

the Wittgensteinian conception of philosophy as the passive analysis of signs, language and human behaviour as they naturally occur in their respective forms of life, for the modest purpose of dispelling psychological confusion and misunderstandings relating to the ordinary use of language. — sime

How is an analysis passive?

Sometimes, also, language 'goes on holiday' - then I think other work comes into play, where we try and understand quite what has gone on vacation.

Also: 'There is not a single philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, different therapies, as it were.' The PI is pluralist.

Emotions evolved simply to reinforce the processes of sexual reproduction and the survival of the species. — Punshhh

This is a withered and partial account of 'emotions' in general. Who are we at this juncture in time to judge so definitively? How is any feature of our lives reasonably describable as 'simply' some speculative product of evolution? Emotions make us who we are. Grief, for instance, although generally and understandably characterised as negative, celebrates the lost, brings the dead back to life even as it faces the fact that they are dead, drives us to honour our fellows yet to know that it's too late, too late.

Philosophers get in a mess when they write about love, in my opinion. Best left to lyricists, poets and those who believe in the spiritual or divine.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth... — Song of Solomon

Read the full Song of Solomon here ! (I know, King James' version, I'm a sucker for its rhythm)

Should you follow passion/'destiny'/'purpose'/genes/strenghts or should you follow you think is needed/ fits with the market (meaning, there are jobs for that particular field) — rohan

Rohan, you sound like a thoughtful person with a lively brain, so my bet is you're going to do ok in working life.

I was a creative writer most of my working life, which meant that I did lots of other work to pay the bills. Even a minor tech skill helps get gigging jobs of one kind or another, so if I were you I'd get the tech qualification behind you. One hassle with tech qualifications is that they're often in yesterday's key areas rather than today's; you need to have a nose for what cutting-edge people are doing and emulate that, even though your teachers may not be au fait with it, so you may have to do that in your own time.

The other thing that's worth working at is combining your skill areas. I'm sure you will spot holes, for instance, in music software, and gaps in the market. That way you end up applying tech skills to stuff you care about, at least some of the time.

Your getting on with people in general is just going to stand you in good stead. Work not on YOuTube but on what you think is coming next after YouTube and be prepared to be the back office for other talented people. I feel that's where my life has developed best, when I've spotted talented people and tried to help them and work with them.

I don't get it either. I gather it was a Fodor proposal though I remember the Puttnam talk about how he didn't know an elm from a beech.

What, for instance, is a Labrador? If it's (a) a dog, (b) with certain specifiable features, then it is a concept with, within it, relation between other concepts.