has pretty obvious problems, doesn't it? If it were really just "constant conjunction" that led us to posit causes, everyone would believe that the buying of summer fashions caused the hot weather that follows, right?
Gene, you are making a common sense statement. That is forbidden in philosophy these days.
In my undergraduate course, my professor didn't bat an eyelash when a fellow student made the suggestion that he thought causal nihilism was persuasive. I asked him why he bothered believing that he came to class in the morning. Someone could have brushed their teeth and caused him to appear, randomly, in the room.
*sigh*
"There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it." - Marcus Tullius Cicero
I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Ancaps often declare, "All rights are property rights." I was thinking about this the other day, in the context of running into libertarians online who insisted that libertarianism supports "the freedom of movement," and realized that this principle actually entails that people without property have no rights at all, let alone any right to "freedom of movement." Of course, immediately, any ancap readers still left here are going to say, "Wait a second! Everyone owns his own body! And so everyone at least has the right to not have his body interfered with." Well, that is true... except that in ancapistan, one has no right to any place to put that body, except if one owns property, or has the permission of at least one property owner to place that body on her land. So, if one is landless and penniless, one had sure better hope that there are kindly disposed property owners aligned in a corridor from wherever one happens to be to wherever the...
Gene, you are making a common sense statement. That is forbidden in philosophy these days.
ReplyDeleteIn my undergraduate course, my professor didn't bat an eyelash when a fellow student made the suggestion that he thought causal nihilism was persuasive. I asked him why he bothered believing that he came to class in the morning. Someone could have brushed their teeth and caused him to appear, randomly, in the room.
*sigh*
"There is nothing so absurd that some philosopher has not already said it." - Marcus Tullius Cicero
Can you prove it doesn't ?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I understand what you mean, Rob.
Delete