Well, it took 60,000 words for me to state my position. Apologies that is beyond your interest.

This discussion often misses the point of absorption and emission spectra. the 'actual' color depends on the lighting conditions. Sometimes we know it should be one color in daylight conditions, so it appears different to our mind than it would otherwise be in other lighting, which explains one fascination with art. Moreover, our eyes use a different mechanism to see in the dark, and our minds combine the experience of different objects with known colors in the dark as they are perceived with visual purple. Finally, and perhaps most significantly. very low-level edge-detection mechanisms distort the actual perceived colors at boundaries, so one color really does look different to us depending on the color next to it.

Well, this started with a debate on another forum as to whether natural law exists at all. I read quite a bit of hostile and mostly ignorant remarks on it, and with continued criticism it got longer and longer until it reached its current length. There's a few bits I know are slightly off, but on the whole I think it is done, and ready for making as a book, and as no one else has contributions, I will publish it by myself.

I do find it ironic that we exist in a country which invokes natural rights on a daily basis throughout its culture, but there is hardly more than one paragraph of this I have ever seen written by any one person alive now on what natural rights actually are.

What? You are talking about a people whjo believed from childhood that there were Gods everywhere. There was a separate God for every single mountain and stream. Their world was run by Gods. Thats how they saw it. The real issue for faith, at that time, was not whether Gods existed, but how much Gods would ever care about humans, who were no different than ants as far as most Gods were concerned.

That was a discussion of the alchemical idea that the world was made of atoms, with coarser atoms making matter and finer atoms making the soul. It was not a discussion of whether there is an afterlife. I should add, if you genuinely wish to understand what people believed in 500BC, the first step is to consider exactly what knowledge they had at the time. And the most important text to them, Homer, was handed down orally for 500 years. You cannot use modern methods of text analysis to understand them. You have to put yourselves in their shoes and see the world as they saw it: full of forces controlled by mostly indifferent Gods. Thats what everyone thought. Most people had no reason to challenge it.

Well, I think it is obvious from reading Aristotle. He admires the religious traditions in the poetics, for example, but has nothing to say on the Gods or fate in the afterlife. He leaves that to faith, not to rational debate.

Aristotle was a traditionalist. He did not deny the existence of gods or fate in the afterlife and left the topic very much to religious faith rather than philosophy.

What I did, as this didnt go the way I expected, was start another thread, for which the prior paragraph in this thread will be a preface:

http://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/1168/natural-law-rights-and-the-usas-social-contract

Thank you for your thoughts.

lol, but that assumes you actually have a will in that which you learn, an assumption missing from Japanese thought. They have no concept of self. There is only a mask.

It strikes me as funny that everyone attacks the story and ignores the conclusion. The same happened on Facebook.

Philosophically speaking, the 'post truth' phenomenon is nothing new. It is just a label for something that has become more apparent to more people recently. The phenomenon is recorded in history ever since Alexander the Great ignored Aristotle's reasons not to invade persia.

I guess I should explain. It does not really matter what the motive is. Natural law is based on the idea of certain inalienable truths arising from the human condition. A post-Socratic social contract is based on those truths. It does not matter what the actual motivation of the participants is, even if different social contracts result from different assumptions about the purpose of life, the process is not actually dependent on that to form a social contract.

lol, you do like Schopenhauer, dont you? Well like all great thinkers, he has his place. But his place is not in social contract theory really is it?

Thank you for the thought. :)

Excuse the multiple posts, but also I think there is a fundamental myopism reflected in the topic title itself. Semantics tends to concern itself purely with the descriptive. Moreover, it is well known that this is probably the most boring aspect of communication, hence the many jokes of how boring a husband finds the answer when he states 'how was your day.'

There is also a pervasive myopism in considering there is only one mechanism at work. In some cases it is important to identify the ship as Theseus' but in the majority of communications about it, it is simply 'the ship' which is under discussion. So there could be Wittgensteinian and descriptive and causal theories ALL operating simultaneously, and in different situations, one or more of them provide meaning in different ways.

That is to say, it is one of the few topics which really remains fruitful in this field.

Well I disagree on that. The idea of 'dubbing' as an act of naming is extensible to naming many objects besides the assignment of proper names. I think the interesting issue is whether the same method could apply to abstractions, and it is too new an idea for anyone to have explored that properly.

I agree. I did write a comment in response to Trump's speech on Tuesday, which transpired to be very popular, so I published it on my blog. I hope you enjoy it. :)

http://www.yofiel.com/writing/essays/trump-budget

The lack of there being any underpinning to a floating morass of specious values explains how those with the talent to think are so often reduced to communicating their hostile spite, rather than to seek mutual understanding.

Well I put a year into writing on social contract theory. What you will find is that modern culture has very little tolerance for ideas such as natural law, and social contracts don't work without them.

Modern culture is only interested in optimizing power, in the simplistic objectivist way advocated by Rand. As a consequence the mere notion of a theistic contract is considered revolting. This is rather unfortunate, as the social contract in the USA is theistic, whether they like it or not. Hence values such as

'life'
'liberty'
'pursuit of happiness'

are repeatedly espoused on a daily basis by those leading the USA, without any integrity, and with total hypocrisy, frequently backed with naive notions of altruism, denial of learning as a source of authority, and militaristic revenge that only disguise a fear of death in the Godless and unconscious world they have made for themselves.

Well, I think now that different people, who have reached different points of evolution in their thought, have their own views, and it's rarely helpful to debate which is right and wrong, or to advocate one view over another. Kripke's view has a basic description in Wikipedia which is very straightforward and should not require further explanation.

Well I can't help you answer this question, after studying Kripke it appeared resolved to me. I agree it is an important issue to consider.

I was enjoying this conversation until I got to Colbert being quoted as authority, at which point I couldnt take it seriously any more.