Is 'honest' a noun or a verb? — YiRu Li

Neither. It's an adjective: — Vera Mont

I hope to live up to it and contribute good things to the forum. — JuanZu

Have you met the devil yet? — Sir2u

Regularly. — RobTAS

What, like lunch at the club every Tuesday? — Vera Mont

Works of art are things of imperfect beauty. If ever a work of art is made perfect, it becomes a crime. — Yukio Mishima

To be happy is to see the world of facts as a whole with expanding limits, whereas an unhappy man feel that the same limits, enclosing the same facts, were pressing on him.

'quickfix' experimental vaccines — Tzeentch

but I can talk a little about this point and see if it helps. — 013zen

A statement is a tautology if it's always true. — 013zen

so the analyses will take the form of a statement which has no factual content, and is in that sense empty. For example, the analysis of the phrase 'material object' will take the form, 'if anything is a material object, then the following requirements will necessarily be met...' And this will be an empty tautology.

A tautology, however, has no content because it doesn't tell you anything about the world.

Consider:

"It's either raining or it's not raining"

Etc

This is empty of content, as it tells you nothing about the world. — 013zen

From the Tractatus... — Fooloso4

In one of these cases the proposition is true for all the truth-possibilities of the elementary
propositions. We say that the truth-conditions are tautological. — Fooloso4

China has the largest buddhist population in the world, but this doesn’t seem to have prevented them from also being the world’s highest emitter of carbon, surpassing the U.S. So much for ongoing responsibility for deeds. — Joshs

There is only one solution: the acknowledgement that personal Identity is a concept, a heuristic, not an objective feature of reality. — hypericin

What is the name of this study? — Saskia

Indeed, to Goodman, aesthetics is but a branch of epistemology. Paintings, sculptures, musical sonatas, dance pieces, etc. are all made of symbols, which possess different functions and bear different relations with the worlds they refer to. Hence, artworks require interpretation, and interpreting them amounts to understanding what they refer to, in which way, and within which systems of rules. — Goodman

I assume there must be dedicated forums where minority groups discuss the issues that effect them particularly? — TiredThinker

I think the Greeks' different words for what we have subsumed into 'love' made some kind of sense, though. There is storge towards Ma and Pa; philia for the like-minded; eros for individual fierce attachments (though Plato had Diotima make this the fulcrum of everything) and agape for spiritual love. It would be an interesting enquiry as to how we have come to merge these different strands of feeling into the one word, which seems to me to burst at its seams to contain them all. — mcdoodle

Should there be a licence to have children? Short answer: yes. Will such a legislation ever be established in a nontotalitarian regime? No. — Janus

What personal characteristics would you look for in approving or disapproving parenthood? — BC

Do you think you are a competent prospective (or actual) parent? Why? — BC

But hasn't it been failing off and on for like 800 years? — frank

Would this be the right interpretation for Kant? — Corvus

My answer to that question was, when I am not perceiving the world, there is no reason that I can believe in the existence of the world. I may still believe in the existence of the world without perceiving it, but the ground for my belief in the existence is much compromised in accuracy and certainty due to lack of the warrant for the belief. — Corvus

A thing in itself is in fact the object = x which stands outside of our knowledge, over and against our representations, and which in some way we suppose corresponds to the knowledge that we have of it. That would be the straightforward Cartesian view of things. In Kant's theory, however, all those functions of an "object" have been taken over by the object-forming functions of synthesis, and Kant's own awareness of this is evident enough in his conclusion that things in themselves are not known by us and so do not, in any familiar fashion, correspond to our representations after all.

It is essential, therefore, that just how "realism" and "phenomenalism" are going to be distinguished from each other be pinpointed, both in Kant and in the larger picture of knowledge. Let me do this now by saying that the defining criterion for the difference, and the origin and essential feature of the whole matter, is as a question of existence: that we are all distinct, separate, and independent in existence from the things (except the body) that we know through perception. They can exist when we don't; and we can exist when they don't; and our veridical perceptions are supposed to represent them.

The difficulty of phenomenalism, where "the representation alone must make the object possible," is that this feature of existence is easily lost. Indeed, if what phenomenalism means is that the reality of an object is exhausted by its features in the representation of a subject, then it is hard to see how this differs from solipsism or subjective idealism

There's no doubt that the meaning of "cricket" is being extended but I don't think it is being transformed in quite the way that a metaphorical use would extend it. "Cricket" is defined as a noun and we understand how it is constituted. But "cricket" in Austin's example is being used as an adjective, in a different category. This change, or stretching, is different from a metaphorical use. — Ludwig V

He was certainly influenced by Wittgenstein; I'm not sure how much Austin was present in his thinking, although the separation of literal and pragmatic meaning can be traced to How to do things with words. — Banno

Are you studying pathology? — Vera Mont

You kind of reminded me to give more play to sunsets in the novel I've just started. — Vera Mont

this one takes place in the north-west of England - lots of hills and water, and no city lights. I wish I could go there to see what the light is actually like, but will have to settle for pictures. Don't we just love Google? — Vera Mont

t's a good read, showing that understanding a metaphor involves understanding its literal meaning. — Banno

A metaphor makes us attend to some likeness, often a novel or surprising likeness, between two or more things. This trite and true observation leads, or seems to lead, to a conclusion concerning the meaning of metaphors. Consider ordinary likeness or similarity: two roses are similar because they share the property of being a rose; two infants are similar by virtue of their infanthood. Or, more simply, roses are similar because each is a rose, infants, because each is an infant

Perhaps, then, we can explain metaphor as a kind of ambiguity: in the context of a metaphor, certain words have either a new or an original meaning, and the force of the metaphor depends on our uncertainty as we waver between the two meanings. Thus when Melville writes that "Christ was a chronometer," the effect of metaphor is produced by our taking "chronometer" first in its ordinary sense and then in some extraordinary or metaphorical sense.

I cannot always leave the building in time so that I am there to witness the explosion. It's a grand show, no tickets needed. — L'éléphant

Not surprising, then, they figure so largely in painting and literature. — Vera Mont