Category: Uncategorized

Black text by London Ed; my comments in blue. Consider: This parcel of land on the Thames is a bank. A bank contains money. *This parcel of land on the Thames contains money. The two tokens of ‘bank’ are tokens of the same type, if I understand you correctly. So does the Thames argument above…

 This from a recent comment by Ed, see article below: I am starting with a few claims, with the additional claim that the claims are Moorean. Not only do I claim we use fictional or empty names to tell people which individual we are talking about, I claim that this is uncontroversial. Developing a theory…

This post is for my old college buddy Tom Coleman, fellow Kerouac aficionado, who played Dean to my Sal back in the day. It's Saturday night, the day's scribbling is done, and I just made myself a wine spodiodi.  It is a sort of alcoholic sandwich with mean bourbon the meat and sweet wine the…

For Obamacare to work, the young must sign up.  But will they?  Why should they?  Jeffrey H. Anderson: In its government-run exchanges, Obamacare raises premiums for the young by suspending actuarial science. It forbids insurers from considering some variables that are actuarially relevant to health care, such as sex and health, while also limiting their…

London Ed claims that 1. Sherlock Holmes is a purely fictional character means 2. Someone made up a story about a person called ‘Sherlock Holmes.' I don't think this is right.  Even if (1) and (2) are intersubstitutable salva veritate in all actual and possible contexts, they are not intersubstitutable salva significatione.  They are not…

A good read about one liberal's Obamacare cancellation.  Excerpt: Last week the frustration of people like Peter and me—Obamacare supporters who lost their current plans—was heard by the White House, which promptly panicked. On Thursday, President Obama announced a policy change that would allow insurance companies like Regence to keep customers like me on the…

This from David Fredosso: Now embarrassed by his oft-repeated and false promise that “if you like your health plan you can keep it,” Obama has retreated to a new line of defense: Your old health plan had to be canceled because it was “junk.” I object.  It was not a promise that Obama repeatedly made;…

Here is a sampling, starting with the determinable and proceeding to some determinates: Donovan and Joan Baez, Colors.  I forgot how good this song is.Hank Snow, Yellow Roses.  I prefer the Ry Cooder cover, but it's not available.  Bobby Darin, 18 Yellow Roses.  Never could understand why this tune is almost never played on the…

I continue the investigation into existential meaning and absurdity.  Earlier posts in this series are collected in the Meaning of Life category. Let's take a step back and ask what we might mean by 'absurd' the better to isolate the sense or senses relevant to the question of the putative absurdity  of human existence.  I count…

Spencer of Cairo writes, I've been following your writing on same sex marriage and I've got to say I think you have, in a certain sense, taken the bait. SSM proponents demand much of conservatives that they are in no position to demand. For instance, they demand that conservatives, in order to justify their views…

W. K. writes, and I reply: I agree with most of that [Mature Religion is Open-Ended Too], except what I take to be your idea of dogma. You say that the 'dogmatic contents' of religion is 'where it is weakest' and 'dogmatics displaces inquiry'. In both cases, for Catholicism, this is not only a misconception…

If it is a mere absence of sound, why is it so delicious?  Turn off some noisemaker and the silence is there, palpably.  It is supereminently there if you succeed in turning off that most noisy and hard-to-turn-off noisemaker, your own mind.  Max Picard proved unhelpful.  His effusions are vaguely suggestive but neither fish nor fowl, neither…

How can Dick Morris and other conservative pundits be so cocksure that Romney will win big?  Do they have crystal balls?  It's more a case of brass balls.  Do they think that by confidently predicting a Romney landslide they will energize the conservative base?  Why wouldn't it have the opposite effect?  ("If Romney's going to win…

I wrote: Here we observe once again the patented Kraussian 'bait and switch' dialectical ploy.  Note the scare quotes around 'wrong.'  Krauss  is switching from the relevant normative sense of the word to an irrelevant nonnormative sense.  That is the same type of trick  he pulled with respect to the Leibnizian question why there is…

I discussed one of the Peter van Inwagen's arguments here and found it wanting.  He has a second argument:  ". . . 'exists' is univocal owing to the interdefinability of 'there exists'  and the obviously univocal 'all.'  But this is a powerful argument, for, surely, 'all' means the same in 'All natural numbers have a successor'…