Never mind, the question link is not available to the public. Here is the question: What Forums, Chat Rooms and General Hangouts Does Everyone Here Use?
But there have been many more un "orthodox" positions. The original word "heresy" simply meant those who walk another way; it didn't have the heavy censure it does today. So yes, over the first few centuries, the early church fathers dismiss those "heresy" one by one when measured by the "rule of faith" and part of the same process is canonization. The single rule is simple: preserving the teaching of the apostles that have been handed down (Latin traditio means handing down).
@Rusi Just watched the first 2-3 minutes myself, but it's no news to anyone who studied theology in a seminary. In the first 3 minutes he only mentioned a handful early ones: Gnosticism (the 365 gods), Marcionism (OT is evil book, Jesus was never born), Docetism (Jesus didn't have human body, never died), and Apollinarism (Jesus didn't have a human soul).
There may be a more effective way to reduce the number of comments than what has been proposed so far: ask a CM to rename the "Add a comment" button to "Improve this post". See This one weird trick gets rid of all off-topic comments. Let's use it! on Interpersonal Skills Meta Stack Exchange.
Well, since I see above that more discussion in the chat room is apparently wanted, anyone want to discuss the text “Wittgenstein and Private Language” by Kripke?
@PhilipKlöcking Hello! It seems that the Philosophy site requires registration to ask and answer questions. However, after searching, I couldn't find a per-site meta post about it. If there's one, can you please link me to it? If not, can you please let me know where the relevant discussion is, so I can link to it in the global meta canonical post?
Now some theologians proclaim God as beyond our common notion of existence-and-nonexistence, i.e. God hyperexists if anything as such, or for God there is no difference between Its existing and not existing, on account of Its superlative essence, which is an even more enticing proposal, although also one such as annihilates the meaningfulness of atheism (which might tell against such a proposal).
OTOH we might believe that there are exceptions to almost every rule, including the, "No analytical existence claims," rule, and it might be thought fitting to hold that God is such an exception, here. So the part of me that is tempted by ontological argumentation gravitates towards such a possibility, too.
(This is, incidentally, why divine simplicity often "rubs me the wrong way," since the standard reasoning is that if God isn't absolutely simple in every relevant way, then God wouldn't be a se, which sounds like a deduction of aseity from an axiom of simplicity, which deduction is then neither itself simple enough nor a good expression of aseity!)
In other words/"in conclusion" (hardly!), that something exists should be inferred dependent on other existences that "lead to" it, but God as an independent being is not supposed to be given from the creation, but unto this, so one wonders howso we should ever infer the divine aseity from something else.
E.g. we don't want to define unicorns as such that there are a thousand of them, but we would want to perceive the mass of unicorns and determine their number by this perception. (Kripke IIRC has an argument that there are essentially zero unicorns because the genetic substrate of the concept is insufficient, but set that aside for now!)
And generally, we would (without Anselm) wish to count the number of a thing by counting it in perception, or at least perception-like epistemic space, rather than counting it conceptually, since given the tight connection between conceptual and logical space, we would prefer to leave questions of what exists unsettled by "mere" logic.
We would try to say, with Anselm, that the concept of God is of a being such that Its concept necessarily has one instance, but this seems presumptive, and anyway we would then be able to define semi-Gods such that there were necessarily two instances of the concept, then semi-semi-Gods with three instances of the concept, etc.
Indeed, we would often think that we ought not try to define a concept such that it analytically would have a certain number of instantiations. And so this is still where ontological arguments would seem to go wrong.
Now, per Meinongianism, among other things, a separation of the concept of existence from quantification often occurs, but that just means that we can say that God exists without quantifying over God, which removes much of the bite from the intended arguments.
Sometimes you'll see a misinformed analyst claim that necessary existence is "obviously" a substantive property, but Kant would not have that, his major enterprise in the first Critique is a theory of modality where necessity and possibility are also non-properties.
@AgentSmith the reason for Frege to follow Kant was because most everyone had Anselm's ontological argument in the back of their heads when evaluating these matters, but most everyone also understood and appreciated Kant's rejoinder to Anselm (and Descartes, incidentally).
Nor are their objections to dualism entirely empirical. Thought experiments do not give us empirical evidence: as I wrote above, the fate of the EPR paper demonstrates how what seems to be an unavoidable conclusion from a thought experiment can be overthrown by empirical evidence that was not even conceived of at the time.
Developing these in qualia-free chemical algorithms was possible, but an immensely long and slow project. Those protocells which became ensouled instead, had an immediate competitive advantage over the purely physical protocells, and that advantage was extended for those that tuned their ensoulment interface for greater effectiveness.
"I don't see it that way. If you look at sensations as being signals carried by nerves that affect the behavior of the brain, then sensations do exist according to illusionism. It is only the qualia of the sensations that illusionism says does not exist."
So take headaches for instance... the actual feeling... the pain of the headache... the thing I want to stop... is that qualia or sensation, neither or both? Does illusionism say this feeling does not exist?
I noted that I am a dualist. This model, based on Libet, Kahneman, part of Dennett, and Eagleman, is entirely compatible with dualism. Our brains do the unconscious stuff, our souls do the general steering plus occasional emergency override, and the communication media from brains to souls is our qualia.
@AmeetSharma -- yes, your judgment of the value of reasoning in Dennett's model is correct, and Dennett knows this. THAT IS WHY HE DID NOT ARGUE FOR DELUSIONISM WITH REASONING!!!!! Instead, he presented a set of intuition pumps whose purpose was to get his readers to think in Delusionist terms. Read Blackmore's Very Short Introduction to get the reasoning for Delusioism.
@MatthewChristopherBartsh I am skeptical of illusionism (about consciousness), but not for the usual reasons that it is counterintuitive or “crazy”. I just do not find the motivation minimally attractive. It is quite transparent that the only connotation of “illusion” of interest is that what is so called can be set aside. It is designed to solve a metaphysical problem for physicalism, which is seen as struggling to accommodate qualia. I submit that this perceived problem is itself an illusion.
Let me explain. There is no reason why objects should not have qualities, 1-place relations. On the other hand, physics, and science generally, are designed to represent only structural information (about 2 and more place relations) for the simple reason that only it can be represented (modeled) and communicated. Qualities must be lost in any structural representation by their definition.
Very definitely an old joke. I've heard that one before. Descarte takes his wife to a restaurent and she orders the most expensive wine on the list. Descarte exclaims "I think not". And POOF, he disappears in a puff of smoke.
There's a saying found in some Jewish sources: "there's no joy like the resolution of doubts". It's been attributed to החוקר (roughly The Scholar), which is sometimes a reference to Aristotle. Does anyone know a similar saying of Aristotle's?
3. The statement 'This mathematical theorem is true' is subjective, but isn't the statement 'This mathematical theorem is true, if the axioms are true' objective?
> Dean, to the physics department. "Why do I always have to give you guys so much money, for laboratories and expensive equipment and stuff. Why couldn't you be like the math department - all they need is money for pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper."
I remember a passage/section of a work that discussed the vagaries of the question "Did Moses exist?" -- ideas about what it would take for one person to be assigned the identity of "Moses" vs. if he's an amalgam, or maybe he "exists" in the metaphorical sense and so on. Anyone recall that work?
This user @BeachBum has a fascinating profile. He's been on SE for seven years, his only activity is asking two questions (one here, the other one, seven years ago on SFF) and yet he also has three silver badges, including a "notable questions" one for each of his two questions...
@Dcleve: Regarding Tim Button, he is a good read in that he shows that all the language-theoretical arguments cannot ultimately justify "internal realism" (of mental representations or thoughts) nor "external realism", i.e. the reality of trees, tables, etc. as we perceive them. He analytically rejects nominalism, realism, and radical scepticism.
@Dcleve: I find it hard to grasp what you are actually looking for. In a sense, epistemology, ontology, and philosophy of language cannot be separated since even true propositions - if they are to be knowledge - are tokens of language. For modern accounts of nominalism, you may have a look here
I also tend to consider the linguistic turn of philosophy to have been a major mistake and dead end, so Tim Button elaborating on the "relation between ontology and language" I fear would not be useful for me.
There may be a more effective way to reduce the number of comments than what has been proposed so far: ask a CM to rename the "Add a comment" button to "Improve this post". See This one weird trick gets rid of all off-topic comments. Let's use it! on Interpersonal Skills Meta Stack Exchange.
