Arbitrary Marks

Nāgārjuna in the Vigrahavyāvartanī is responding, as I’ve noted, to critics of his view of emptiness (also translated as “void”). The way that this particular prose work is structured involves twenty verses from his opponents–the last post was a translation of Verse 1–and thirty verses of Nāgārjuna responding.

“If an intrinsic nature of the things, whatever they may be, exists nowhere, your statement must be devoid of an intrinsic nature. It is not, therefore, in a position to deny the intrinsic nature [of the things].” - Translation by Bhattacharya

This is the opening charge, quoted by Nāgārjuna in the Vigrahavyāvartanī.

We’ll see if my post can live up to the title I’ve just crammed into my Wordpress draft. I had a wide-ranging conversation today with a fellow student at the U of C about Empiricism & the Philosophy of Mind by Wilfrid Sellars. I was so disappointed that I didn’t have with me 1) the previous blog post and 2) the text itself. However, since Sellars has come up in several places recently, I made myself come back home to do some skimming and put together the puzzle pieces we were discussing.

A month ago I had Andrew Simone guest blog here and he wrote a couple of posts about violence and truth. His conclusion is at his own blog, as are the links back to the context here.
I will admit great ignorance about Heidegger and Derrida, so I have difficulty following Andrew’s conclusion.

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Via 3QuarksDaily comes more conversation about god and god’s existence. Comments there immediately pointed out how boring this media tug-of-war is. Haven’t we all made up our mind by now? Aren’t the arguments tiresome?

My reaction is to wonder if there is anything new under the sun (setting Ecclesiastes aside for a moment) on this topic. One of the questions is whether we’re going about this debate all wrong. Is god just one fact among many, an entity whose existence we can prove or disprove? And is the argument tiresome because nothing is really at stake in the image of god we’re haggling over?

This lecture sounds interesting and is pertinent to my current paper topic.  While philosophical thought experiments are sometimes far outside of the realm of human experience, let’s not forget that reality presents us with difficult “thought experiments”, too–ones with dramatic implications.
Dr. Christine Overall
Queen’s University
“Conjoined Twins, Embodied Personhood, and Surgical Separation”
Thursday, November 1st 2007
3:30-5:30 p.m.
Galvin Auditorium, [...]

I’m curious what your intuitions are about the following scenarios. Where would you be, if these stories happened? (And by “you”, I mean whatever you tend to mean when you say “I”–nothing more or less).

This is the kind of response I get a lot of (in offline conversations) with scientists. And I respect them, their years of training and expertise, and heck, I may even, ultimately, agree with a materialist (i.e. physicalist) metaphysics. But–and this is what I was trying to get at in my earlier post–the [...]

I’ve worked out a preliminary topic, thesis and outline sketch for my paper. As I’ve stated, the problems surrounding reduction–persons, consciousness, self, etc.–are interesting to me in themselves and how they connect with other questions: what is the best level to describe the world? (semantic question) what counts as real? (metaphysical question) what should [...]

A few days ago, I wrote a little bit about the kind of knowledge we can obtain through rational reflection.  One commenter made the point that humans have lots of ways to knowing, including poetry, faith, etc.  Isn’t, however, physicalism an argument against these kinds of subjective facts?  At least, that’s often how it’s understood.
I’ve [...]