The Human Question

Clearly, I need to argue against Hume by pointing to how we are aware of our own efficacy (call it first person causality).  I can now see that the best example of this efficacy is our awareness of our own self-movement in the act of communicating.  That is because the one who denies the connection effectively silences his or her self.

The story of the ship of Theseus could be used, I suppose, to argue against identity through time.  That is, just as we can't resolve the question of whether a ship whose parts have been replaced bit by bit is really the same ship, so too we can't tell whether we are the same self we used to be, as our parts are being replaced without our even noticing it.  So the argument would go. Although I would not recommend this sort of argument I'm throwing it out there because I want to pair it with the following counter-argument that could be given via a thought experiment that I would title "The Sentence of Theseus."  It would start by pointing to a sentence, suggesting that we replace one-at-a-time, as many of the words as we can, with a near-synonym.  It would then follow by suggesting that something like that is going on all the time without our intending to change any words at all, so that the sentence expressed by Theseus undergoes significant change with each utt...

This is a very rough draft of some ideas I'm kicking around: Scientific reports are either given in the first person or at least presuppose a first person report. That is evidenced by the necessity of using indexicals  to give reports.   Indexicals include "this," "that," "here," "there," "now," "yesterday," "thereupon," etc. The use of indexicals involves a first person perspective because they situate what is being reported in relation to the individual giving the report. The practice of giving scientific reports begins in the first person.  That is, science as social practice begins only after someone says, "I did this, then that happened." Eventually, reports can be given in the third person passive voice.  "This was added to that; such and such was observed."  But this is just a way of giving a first person report while leaving the reporter anonymous.  It is parasitic upon the fir...

Atheist to theist: "If materialism is true, then your invisible friend called 'God' is unreal." Theist to atheist: "If materialism is true, then your visible friends are unreal as well." In other words, those who reject theism on the basis of materialism can do so only by relying upon reductionist asssumptions.  They thus end up denying that we have an enduring identity.  For if a whole is nothing but the sum of its parts and the parts are always changing, then amongst those changes can be found nothing that endures.

...seem to suffer from math envy.

Just wondering: some new atheists say that it doesn't make sense to say, "Why everything?"  But I do think they would grant that it would be okay to ask "Why this galaxy?" or "Why this universe?" (where "universe" is understood as a part of a multiverse). The difference between the two statements is that in the first case one asks a question about the whole, whereas in the second case one asks about a part.  If by "the whole" one means the totality of all that there is or can be, it would not make sense to go looking for something outside of that totality to explain it.  Yet that is what "Why everything?" does or seems to do.  In the second case, however, one asks a question about one part with the intention of finding an answer in another part.  Such an inquiry makes sense if any inquiry makes sense, for that is how questions work. But isn't the objection to the question "Why everything?" an example of c...

The following two statements:      "It is good that I exist."       "It is better that I exist than not exist." ...are "obvious" to me.  It also seems to me that my reasoning about how I am going to act presupposes  at least one of these or a synonymous statement.  That is, my practical reasoning presupposes that it is objectively true that it is good that I exist. But can a positivist, i.e, someone who thinks all genuine knowledge is to be found only in science, take this claim to objectivity seriously?  Wouldn't the positivist think it more accurate to recast statements like the two above in emotive terms  (i.e., as meaning something like, "Leo feels really good when he thinks about the fact that he's alive")?  Wouldn't the positivist regard the claim to objectivity as non-sensical, for one cannot (speaking here from a positivistic perspective) have genuine knowledge about the goodness of things? And since ethics presu...