{"id":1351,"date":"2023-06-27T13:46:13","date_gmt":"2023-06-27T13:46:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2023\/06\/27\/how-to-write-a-good-comment\/"},"modified":"2023-06-27T13:46:13","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T13:46:13","slug":"how-to-write-a-good-comment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2023\/06\/27\/how-to-write-a-good-comment\/","title":{"rendered":"How to Write a Good Comment"},"content":{"rendered":"

I offer a comment of mine as an example.  It is a brief response to a Substack<\/em> entry by Elliot Crozat.  Here is the comment:<\/span><\/p>\n

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Very nice post, Elliot. Your reconstruction is valid. You say that (2) is "solid." It is, but it is not self-evident. For one epistemically possible view is that the dead are nonexistent objects: they do not exist, but they have being, and have properties. Indeed, they actually<\/em> have properties; it is not just that they could have properties. So on this view, there is no bar to a dead person's having the property of being communal or standing in the communal relation to other dead persons. This quasi-Meinongian view is skillfully developed by Palle Yourgrau in Death and Nonexistence<\/em> (Oxford, 2019). It of course has problems of its own.<\/span><\/p>\n

(5) and (7) are undoubtedly true.<\/span><\/p>\n

And I agree with you that (1) is reasonably rejected on eternalism which is a plausible alternative to presentism. Surely wholly past individuals are not nothing despite their not being temporally present. They exist, but not at present. Presentists, despite a lot of fancy footwork, have a hard time accounting for this plain fact. This is one reason why eternalism is well-represented among contemporary philosophers. Eternalism allows for a watered-down personal immortality which has been embraced by Einstein, Charles Hartshorne, and most recently by John Leslie. The main difficulty of eternalism is to give a clear account of existence simpliciter<\/em>. But it appears that the presentist faces the same difficulty assuming that "Only the present exists" is not a miserable tautology that boils down to "Only what exists (present tense) exists (present tense."<\/span><\/p>\n

As for Aristotle, he is standardly taken to be a presentist (see Feser, e.g.) and thus your invocation of the Stagirite in support of eternalism is questionable.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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PROVISIONAL PHILOSOPHICAL REFLECTIONS<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Time, Death, and Existence<\/span><\/div>\n
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Cormac McCarthy\u2019s The Sunset Limited contains many good lines. Here\u2019s one from near the end of the play: \u201cYou can\u2019t be one of the dead because what has no existence can have no community.\u201d As I take it, \u201cone of the dead\u201d means \u201cone belonging to a community of dead persons.\u201d<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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JUNE 27, 2023<\/span><\/div>\n
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……………………….<\/span><\/div>\n
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So what makes my comment good?<\/span><\/div>\n
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1. I interact directly<\/em> with what the  author has written.<\/span><\/div>\n
2. In doing so, I show that I have made a good faith attempt to understand him.<\/span><\/div>\n
3. I tell him whether I agree or disagree and why.<\/span><\/div>\n
4. I do not go off on irrelevant tangents.<\/span><\/div>\n
5. I keep my comments brief and to the point.<\/span><\/div>\n
6. I try to be helpful.<\/span><\/div>\n
7. I do not use his site to promote myself or to advertise my wares or to dump large undigested quotations from other writers.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I offer a comment of mine as an example.  It is a brief response to a Substack entry by Elliot Crozat.  Here is the comment: Very nice post, Elliot. Your reconstruction is valid. You say that (2) is "solid." It is, but it is not self-evident. For one epistemically possible view is that the dead … Continue reading “How to Write a Good Comment”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[109,204,71],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1351","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-time-and-change","category-varia"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1351\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}