Comments

  • The Human Condition
    I think "human nature" (re: aptitude) consists in two aspects: (a) h. sapiens species-specific functional defects¹ (i.e. physical & psychological vulnerabilities – needs – which can become temporarily, permanently or fatally dysfunctional when neglected or acutely deprived) & (b) our suite of evolutionary cognitive biases².

    On the other hand, I think "the human condition" (re: competence) consists in a plurality of ensembles, or repertoirs, of social relations-practices (like a habitus³) which generate various arts & kinds/degrees of knowledge (i.e. cultures).

    defects (e.g.) thirst-hunger, bereavement, insecurity, shame, mortality, confusion, illness, exposure, etc [1]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases [2]

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitus_(sociology) [3]

    And so I think of the human condition in sum as the struggle to preserve human nature while simultaneously striving to surpass (all of) human nature's inherent limits (e.g. immorbity ... immortality ... immateriality ...) :fire:
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    2August24

    IMO the best alternative to Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (from the short list of "six prospective running-mates" according to press reports) is Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker. Of course, the Harris campaign has nothing to worry about selecting her running-mate since almost any elected mouth-breather with a working brain will embarrass the hell out of MAGA Mini-me Vance ...

    :smirk:
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    "I love my black job ♡"
    ~Simone Biles, the most decorated Olympic Gold Medal & champion gymnast in history

    https://x.com/Simone_Biles/status/1819284274224173147
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    2August24

    A "Black job"? Madame POTUS ...

    Roevember is coming! :victory: :mask:
  • Tragedy and Pleasure?
    Pardon my ramble ...
    One concern of mine is how 'news in the media' can overwhelm minds to the point where their own creativity is affected ... How have you found your story-telling affected?Amity
    Grist for the miill. 'Stories' which reflect on or puzzle over questions raised by "news in the media" intrigue me most and inspire me to re/tell them. As far as 'the tragic' goes, my creative stance is much more attuned to 'absurdity' – the distorted lenses through which I watch the world turn my stomach while I laugh to stop from crying. It's almost impossible to create at any level out of ashes or raw sewage of the daily bilge of wanton cruelty and duplicitous stupidity. And yet "You must go on. I can't go on. I'll go on" a master clown says more about 'making art', I imagine, than merely living. Nonetheless, I try to ground my story-telling in mere life (e.g. "Try again. Fail again. Fail better") without self-referentially – cleverly ironizing about – 'making art'. Maybe it's the social uselessness (ergo "sovereignty" someone said) of 'making art' that's 'tragic' today, and yet feeling the absurd compels some of us to try again and again and ... just in order to breathe freely. 'Well, there ain't no clowns in foxholes' – yeah but why effin' not (since that's probably where clowns are most needed)?! :fire: :monkey:
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    "Black jobs?"

    "And when [DJT] attacks, he reveals a bit of himself; and what we saw was an elderly, obese, orange-tinted racist with a comb-over." ~Steve Schmidt, Never Trumper & former GOP campaign official :up:

    Yeah, keep running your trashy, gutter mouth, DonOLD The Clown. :sweat:

    Roevember is coming! :victory: :mask:
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Re: DonOLD The Clown
    He was always of White heritage, and he was only promoting White heritage. I didn't know he was Orange until a number of years ago, when he happened to turn Orange, and now he wants to be known as Orange. So I don't know, is he White or is he Orange? I think somebody should look into that.
    :smirk:
  • Tragedy and Pleasure?
    I am reading, 'Why Does Trajedy Give Pleasure? by A. D. Nuttall (1996)Jack Cummins
    Interesting topic. (But why do you refer to "Fuller"? What does s/he have to do with Nuttall's book?)

    Anyway, fwiw, 'studies of tragedy' I've found most insightful (among the ones already mentioned and others) are Antigones by George Steiner and Joyful Cruelty by Clément Rosset. As an artform, 'tragedy' allows the audience/readers to play 'the game of death' – slip the mask of daily denial of mortality – and perhaps live on moved/wounded ... like Jacob wrestling his Angel.

    The "problem", I think, is that the "pleasure" of tragedy is much harder to come by, or fully experience, in our time than in premodern times because, by comparison especially in today's hyperconsumerist West, we are mostly urbanized – de-nature-ized – and thereby overstimulated (i.e. benumbed, anaestheticized) by hypersensationalized trivia continuously. Every misshap is now called "tragic"; ubiquitous vidiocy trivializes 'the game of death' (i.e. the real).

    Pardon my superficial gloss, Jack, @BC has said it much better. :fire:
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Read Camus' anything but futilistic interpretation of Sisyphus (rolling 'the philosopher's stone' aka Life) – a mythic dramatization of Nietzsche's amor fati or eternal return of the same (Ja-sagen!) :fire:
  • A (simple) definition for philosophy
    a statement about another statement.Tarskian
    That's merely a metastatement (@Lionino)

    IMO, a "philosophical statement" is a non-propositional expression (i.e. proposal) of a presupposition or an implication derived from a proposed answer to a philosophical question or from a philosophical question itself. A philosophical question, OTOH, is a counterfactual supposition (or thought-experiment) that cannot be definitively answered by either empirical or formal means (i.e. propositions).

    Example:
    Is the world (i e. a concept of "the world") deterministic or indeterministic?

    If the world is deterministic, meaning that every event is caused by a prior event (i.e. non-random), then every person's choosing is epiphenomenal (or an illusion).

    However, if the world is indeterministic, meaning that every event is uncaused (i.e. random), then, yet again, every person's choosing is epiphenomenal (or an illusion).

    Suppose the world has both deterministic properties and indeterministic properties, meaning that any chain, or sequence, of events consists in alternating causal and noncausal relations, which therefore implies that every person's choosing is unconstrained-within-constraints, or compatible with the world conceived of having both deterministic and indetetministic properties.
    I'm not satisfied with this simplistic example but I think it works well enough. My point is that philosophy's sine qua non is her questions (even meta-questions) – the how what when & why of them – rather than any answers, or "statements". In Socratic manner, I think, philosophizing strives to reason to more probative questions (or more clear, precise formulations of a question) and not just the academic penchant for masturbating each other with cleverer and cleverer logical puzzles.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    I actually interpret Spinoza as a sort of 'acosmist', so not sure I would call him an immanentist ...boundless
    Well, fwiw, I see no other way but to interpret Spinoza as both an immanentist and acosmist sub specie aeternitatis (though sub specie durationis also as a pandeist, which (for me) ontically relates him to that other great immanentist Epicurus).
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Reality seems to have replaced God as a subject of transcendental hope.Tom Storm
    For Spinozists, reality (Deus, sive naturans) is ineluctably immanent – the encompassing horizon that reason necessarily cannot encompass (i.e. explain, or transcend) – and exhausts all of our other rational ideas, concepts & categories. Absurdists might say "reality is the subject of transcendental despair" (i.e. void, anicca, dao, sunyata). Also, faith (i.e. "hope") isn't needed because in practice denying or ignoring reality tends to be hazardous. :smirk:

    On the contrary, with all due respect, perhaps the world (naively) seems "imperfect" to us only because each one of us is "imperfect" ... Philosophy can be a practice – "spiritual exercise" (Hadot) – for learning (again) to see the world as perfect and thereby, like Sisyphus, always striving to perfect our communities and ourselves (e.g. ethics-as-tikkun olam).
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    Yeah, the favorite candidate of racists and nativists DonOLD The Clown made those deplorables "proud" today.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    The Party is not a democracy and has its own process for nominating the nominee and had every option available to it to not nominate Biden at the upcoming convention.Benkei
    :100: Exactly.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    :ok: The clarifications are appreciated.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    What do your questions have to do with either the OP or what I have written in this thread? I have not stated or implied that "mind" or "subject" "experience" does not exist, only that imo these terms have been misused by antirealists (immaterialists) such as Wayfarer, Gnomon, bert1 ... and now, it seems, you too.
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    Yeah ...
    The women are smarter
    Roevember is coming! :victory: :mask:
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    Consider ...
    "The mind is the subject of experience" is inept or even deceptive. Experiences are had only by minds [subjects], so what might seem profound is little more than tautology.Banno
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    31July24

    DonOLD The Clown – adjudicated¹ ra[c/p]ist, MAGA-GOP candidate for "dictator-for-a-day"– who is very afraid of a much younger & stronger, incredibly smarter, and charismatic black woman (who happens to be the current VPOTUS) and too chickenshit – must be them ol' "bonespurs" – to debate her in the fall.

    ¹1973 & 2023 respectively

    Roevermber is coming for you, Bonespurs! :victory: :mask:
  • Donald Trump (All General Trump Conversations Here)
    31July24

    DonOLD The Clown – adjudicated¹ ra[c/p]ist, MAGA-GOP candidate for "dictator-for-a-day" – who is very afraid of a much younger & stronger, incredibly smarter, and charismatic black woman (who happens to be the current VPOTUS) and too chickenshit – must be them ol' "bonespurs" – to debate her in the fall.

    ¹1973 & 2023 respectively

    Roevermber is coming for you, Bonespurs! :victory: :mask:

    :lol:
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    both obvious and centralWayfarer
    Philosophy reflectively-critically examines whatever is assumed to be "obvious and central" (e.g. intuitions, folk psychological ideas, values, etc) no?
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    :100:

    :up: :up:

    @Sam26 is dogmatic on this (spiritual / supernatural / o-dualistic) topic and, as I've found at length, his poor reasoning incorrigibly persists despite counter-arguments of the lack of public evidence, conceptual clarity & parsimony of so-called well-documented "NDE/OBE" (like "alien abduction" or "demonic possession") testimonials.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    It is that which discloses such things as gravity and raditation and sub-atomic particles, amidst innumerable other things. It is the subject to whom all this occurs or appears. The ‘unknown knower’.Wayfarer
    This "knower" (i.e. perceiver) Bishop Berkeley calls "God" which, not by coincidence I'm sure, is functionally indistinguishable from @Gnomon's "Enformer". An infinite regress-of-the-gaps. :sparkle: :eyes:

    [T]he mind is not ‘a thing among other things’Wayfarer
    Agreed. Mind(ing) is something sufficiently complex brains do – a (meta)activity, not an entity.
  • Is the real world fair and just?
    ... to head off the common notion that science seeks a "view from nowhere" ... Rather, science seeks a view from anywhere. A point worth making in a philosophy forumBanno
    :up:

    It is one thing to say that things unperceived are not the same as we perceive them to be and altogether another to claim that when unperceived they don't exist.Janus
    :up: :up:
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    Two women on the ticket is, unfortunately, a loser.Mikie
    IMO, not "a loser" versus two misogynists who advocate a National Abortion Ban (i.e. criminalizing women's reproductive healthcare) if elected.
  • The game theory against divorces
    The question is, why does he want to preserve that relationship?Igitur
    :up:
  • The game theory against divorces
    In your example, the husband is a simp if he doesn't go to the football match without her; in the long run, the wife will respect him more for ignoring her ultimatums rather than giving in. The reasonable choice is, imo, either they agree to go to an event together or each one goes alone to the respectively preferred event rather than either one trying to force the other to do anything.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    Survivor of an FBI entrapment case, more like it. It was planned by paid FBI informants. More deep state crooks elevated by deep state dupes.NOS4A2
    :lol: The only "deep state" is Project 2025 (i.e. The Heritage Foundation + The Federalist Society). Take your meds, dude. Roevember is coming! :victory:
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    I still think Gretchen Whitmer would be the best VP candidate: an attractive white woman, popular governor of a large swing state, target of a wingnut Trumper/MAGA-affiliated kidnapping conspiracy in 2020; very smart politician, pro-civil rights, pro-labor & pro-choice. Checks more boxes than the other prospects. Makes too much sense and that's why Harris & her team probably won't pick Whitmer.
  • US Election 2024 (All general discussion)
    Sleepy Joe is (again) a day late and dollar short. Here's more disingenuous grist for your MAGA-grievance mill, NOS: a late-2020 post of mine on equitable 'SCOTUS reform' ...

    https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/461370
  • Evidence of Consciousness Surviving the Body
    [C]onsciousness is the source of this reality, and probably all reality except base reality, which is consciousness itself. It could be that consciousness created something that then creates reality, but we don't know. Consciousness may be able to create reality by its own volition.Sam26
    (a) So if "consciousness ... creates reality", then what "creates" "consciousness"?

    (b) And if "consciousness" is not "created", then why assume that "reality" is "created?
  • Does physics describe logic?
    The rules of chess encompass all the possible games of chess without themselves being one, and a game can provide examples of the rules in action, without being them.tim wood
    :up: :up: