This video is not as bad as I suspected at first. The speaker shows a way to think about the relationship of philosophy and science, so that philosophy has a place and purpose. Sure enough, philosophy has a place and purpose, most importantly in defining and exercising laws of logic. The speaker also directs criticism at philosophy, but this criticism only refers to the current organisation of academic philosophy, not with its overall place, purpose, or achievements. And possibly the organisation under criticism only applies to the United States
There are three issues with the video itself that I'd like to point out. First, the art and science of argumentation (the structure of philosophical arguments) is vital in philosophy. The speaker does not present a single argument. The speaker's world view is atheism and he repeatedly asserts its superiority over theism, but he does not give a single example by refuting a theistic argument or by presenting an atheist argument. Plain assertions do not make any case for a world view. One such argument or refutation would have been good to educate the audience and show the quality of the speaker's philosophical stance.
Second, he cites Krauss. Even though Krauss is topical, it demonstrates poor judgement to cite Krauss favourably, because Krauss's arguments are unphilosophical and self-admittedly illogical and irrational, while logic and rationality are central to philosophy.
Third, the speaker promotes his book in the end. It's okay that he promotes his book, but he makes rather bold assertions about it: "This is the only book that presents a coherent [naturalist-atheist] world view based on where we are in science and philosophy now." No, it's not the only such book. Let's recall, for instance, Walter Kaufman's "The Faith of a Heretic" and Alex Rosenberg's "Eliminativism without Tears". These are examples of philosophical attempts at a coherent explanation of everything from the atheist point of view. I also know of very good literary (bordering philosophical) accounts, such as Ernest Renan's "La vie de Jésus" and Thomas Mann's "Das Gesetz".
In addition to Frenzie's link, the video I'd like to recommend is Intro to Philosophy of Religion. The speaker is, again, atheist, so nobody should have a problem with him. His focus is on the nature of ultimate causes/explanations, on argumentation as such, and on the definition of God. All this is perfectly appropriate to the discussion. The video contains sufficient relevant distinctions from what is of interest to philosophers as opposed to scientists of specific fields or non-scientific people, and the way argumentation works as an explanation for something.
And on my own part, I'd like to say a few words on debate. Debate is an exercise of argumentation. Debate doesn't lead to truth, but shows who can build more solid and coherent argumentation, which in a good case should lead both participants to some considerations as to their overall world view, if they have it. Rather than a way to convince others of something, a philosophical debate is a good opportunity to learn about one's own beliefs oneself. Some relevant aspects of a debate are:
- Common definitions. In order to have a dialogue in the first place, there must be some common ground. Usually this means there must be agreement on one or some focal concepts.
- Criticism is always constructive. Given that the first aspect is fulfilled, it follows that there is dialogue, which in turn means there's critical scrutiny of definitions, of argumentation, etc., which again means that there is real progressive clarity regarding the things discussed. A good opponent is respectably and worthy. With this attitude in mind, ad hominem attacks and other lame fallacies are ruled out by themselves. By the amount and nature of fallacies it's usually easy to see if there's the appropriate philosophical attitude in the exchange.
- The topic dictates the nature of the arguments. For example, when the topic is "Does God exist?" it's irrelevant for the atheist side to say that God in the Old Testament is evil and stupid. This kind of argumentation builds a case for an evil god, i.e. it builds a case for a god. It doesn't undermine the existence of God. The argument from evil is applicable when the topic is "Is God good?" Similarly, the objections or refutations of God directly depend on the definition or concept of God. E.g. the argument from evil could refute a good God, but it doesn't refute the concept of a creator God as such. Also, the demand for empirical proof of God doesn't apply when God is not defined as an empirical being, an object among others. Etc.
These two videos should beat some sense into the discussion.
Here's a useful tutorial on Win 8 interface https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wi8NpwiEuzc You will learn how to find the taskbar and desktop from among the tiles, and how to snap windows so that you can open multiple apps/windows on screen, not just one full-screen app.
I personally am happy to have been able to dump Windows. I ditched it at Vista. I have a few friends who use 7. Nobody uses 8.
Wrong. The most sure thing you can say about the crazies is that they are crazy. Everything else is arguable and varies. And even craziness may not be detected early enough, because pretty much everyone is crazy these days, including the psychiatrists.
Does anyone know how to troubleshoot X concerning logout crashes?
See /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old, that's the log file from the previous Xserver run and may contain some hints on what exactly crashed it. Assuming the Xserver actually crashed and not some client.
I don't see any hints there of anything crashing.
What is a client? Is gnome-session-daemon or cinnamon-session-daemon a client?
Even deliberate libel and slander is difficult to prove. I think if was otherwise, at the end of each election each candidate would probably try to sue to the shit out of each other. Hrm, that might not be a bad idea. Let's make it so candidates can sue each other over misleading statements. Soon both the DNC and RNC would be bankrupt from all the lawsuits
Isn't it the fact that laws in every country provide this opportunity for candidates to sue the shit out of each other, and they actually do from time to time, even though it's hard to prove? E.g. rape is also notoriously hard to prove (the intercourse may be provable, but the nature of the intercourse is word against word), but is forbidden everywhere.
Well I can use a better word/phrase than proof in the following:
"I'm still waiting to hear what evidence exists that there is A GOD "
Everyone that believes must have had evidence of some kind to have come to that belief.
So what was it - somebody ---- anybody?
What kind of evidence do you mean? As I have argued before, if you insist on empirical evidence, your demand actually presupposes unempirical things, e.g. existence of beliefs and belief in the value of evidence. In which case your demand is begging the question. But if you really mean unempirical evidence, then define the unempirical scope of your metaphysics, so it would be clear what kind of evidence you allow.
You're quite wrong about the context of those cartoons. But I suppose it is true that even if you were right, I'd still disagree with you. Humor is part of free inquiry, and if some of it is unsophisticated you can mock it or deride it; banning is for the weak. If your faith, standpoint or conviction can't stand a little criticism or crude humor, maybe it shouldn't stand at all.
For example, I'd call the image Smiley likes to post of some kind of Calvin knock-off peeing on gun control crude and unconstructive. But why should that be a reason to ban it?
Well, let's be clear that I do not favour banning in this case either. It's a cartoon, for cryssakes. It doesn't even pretend to be for truth or facts or anything. This format is frankly out of reach of laws that regulate slander and lies. Sure, I regard the cartoons blasphemous and it's pretty clear that they were intended this way too, but I am perfectly okay that blasphemy is eradicated from laws in multicultural or religiously neutral societies. In this sense I agree with you, Muslims should have handled it with more cool.
Then again, were the same "opinions" expressed in an opinion piece of a newspaper, the case would more likely come under litigation. And as a regular news item, no Western law would allow it even when you appeal to free speech, freedom of press or things like that, right? So the cartoons get a pass only because they are cartoons, not because free speech as such. There is no "freedom to offend".
This is exactly the concept I objected to: […] And no, the outcome is not just someone's short-term hurt feelings. The outcome is express truth and revealed facts.
That means you're not objecting at all.
Let's take the Muhammad cartoons. The outcome was outrage across the Muslim world, i.e. it was an emotional offence. That's right, I said this alone doesn't make the cartoons wrong. However, is there any truth or facts in the cartoons? Even your article doesn't say that truth was the intention. The intention was to express an opinion. The question is, was it a constructive opinion? Was there any constructive purpose at all? The most evident purpose I see was to make a joke. So, were the cartoons funny? This last question is the only purpose where the cartoons can be coherently tied to. Again, there's no truth or facts in just being funny.
Therefore I object. Please exercise some consideration when you intend to be funny and nothing else. The cartoons had nothing else in them besides the purpose of being funny, but it didn't work out due to ill-chosen topic. There was nothing constructive or educating in them, nothing even remotely promoting critical thinking or such. Lack of consideration is the opposite of critical thinking.
Just because what is said might be emotionally upsetting or distressful to any group or person should not preclude what is being said from being protected by the Freedom of Speech, unless what is said is said with malice of forethought in order to specifically incite a criminal act against the person or group.
This is exactly the concept I objected to: Looking at the offence only keeping in mind the intention, not the outcome. When you look only at the intention, then how can you judge? Are you such a competent mind-reader of other people's minds? When you look only at the intention, then you could wiggle out from any kind of damage you caused by citing your noble intentions.
So, you have to look at the outcome too. And no, the outcome is not just someone's short-term hurt feelings. The outcome is express truth and revealed facts. To me it's obvious that, in ideal, freedom of speech isn't about my or anyone else's right to speak up about something, anything. It's not about letting everyone speak their mind to their heart's content regardless of the content. Instead, it's about letting people discuss and debate to find a solution or a better way, while it's understood that lies are still lies, slander is still slander, and blasphemy is still blasphemy. Even though the last concept has no legal purpose these days, isn't it evident enough that it has no constructive purpose?
In hot dry areas they have known how to build houses for millennia. Did people become stupid all of a sudden? Granted, it's not good for hot and wet areas, but surely there's some ingenious indigenous technique there too, if we are just smart enough to appreciate it.
Another serious issue is that changing to consoles (Ctrl+Alt+F1, F2, etc) cause the same crash.
I created another user account. Logging in and out and changing to console and back is trouble-free there. I will migrate to the new account, if I can't figure out how to repair the old one.
Edit: In conclusion, looks like Cinnamon 2 backported to Ubuntu 12.04 doesn't work so seamlessly and effortlessly, at least not when you install the meta package and Mdm. Cinnamon 2 was made for a later version, Mint 16 (Petra), whose Ubuntu equivalent is 13.10 (Saucy).
Around the turn of the calendar year, I added Mint main and backport repos to my Ubuntu 12.04 installation and this enabled me to install the latest Cinnamon 2. I took the meta package and also Mdm because my aim is to mintify this installation as far as possible. Unfortunately I ended up with glitches.
There's a cosmetic glitch around the ClipIt icon which sometimes affects also the CPU graph left to it (see the pic). More serious is that logout causes X.org to crash irrecoverably (reboot required). (I'm not sure my diagnosis is correct, but the symptoms are: the DE logs out, followed by blank screen where nothing works)
Does anyone know how to troubleshoot X concerning logout crashes?
Bah... Theism/Atheism is not a matter of "investigation" but about how we were born. Destiny it's what counts.
You mean to say that conversion doesn't happen?
Somehow, even though born in the Soviet Union, I resisted to be identified as a Soviet since very early age. Soon enough it turned out that the country itself was destined for destruction. In the light of this, what is destiny?
That would make most people atheists. Hmmmmmm.....When I was born, I didn't know anything about religion. As is true for every other human being. Does that mean anything?
Perhaps, but as any religionist will tell you, the Spirit of the Lard was watching over you at that time and all the way back to fertilization.
Children are clueless about most things. Is it surprising that they are also clueless about atheism-vs.-religion divide?
@Jimbro Kids are watched over by the parents. Perhaps this means something.
See, I am not good with that terminology. The Brussels regulation as propagated over here talks about savings bulbs only, not about what they technologically are. Again, definitions are important. I don't know if it's halogen or whatever. All I know for sure is that the old bulbs were better in several ways, but they have been replaced in shops with something less manageable, called savings bulbs.
Dutch is still the language most closely related to English by various measures.
What I have heard (actually read in encyclopedias), it's Frisian that is most closely related to English. But this is irrelevant in several ways. The languages in that corner of the continent are necessarily closely related. Moreover, English is a lingua franca, i.e. a global communication tool pliable hither and thither rather than a fixed symbol system, a distinctive marker of (self-)identity for a specific group/location. The latter is how I prefer to define (proper/real/true) language. Lingua franca is related to everything and everybody, nothing special about it.
I saw a South-African lamenting that if the Dutch hadn't disavowed Afrikaans on account of apartheid
...nicely illustrate how the distinction between dialect and language is political rather than linguistic. Science is politically neutral, even though it can be used politically, and often is.
By the way, my two sentences, as you quoted them, did not belong together. "Their mutual intelligibility is so fluent that they could be considered dialects" referred to the Scandinavian languages. With "Saxon, Franconian, and (High) German" I began next thought that I probably should have marked by beginning a separate paragraph.
I studied linguistics at the university and one of the professors was fairly straightforward: "We call them language/family trees but they aren't really. They are more like shrubs or bushes."
Did your professor study math? The tree is a topological type of a graph.
He studied literature, so he saw in the term "language tree" a poetic metaphor rather than a math concept.
Unless you're saying that incandescents are bad for people because they're bad for cacti, what's your point?
To everything I said previously, I can also add that they are near-perceptibly flickering, and this is another dead serious point to me, as I am a book-reading person. I hate cold light. I hate their colour range. I hate flickering. I hate it that they burn out fast in my particular lamps. What is there to like? Will they save the world somehow, like electric cars were supposed to?
Ersi, you're right about "continuum" but not right about the families - which are trees not clumps. Trees means that you cannot juxtapose two languages for that purpose isolately - because they are the most probably just the current-day states (slices) of themselves taken diachronically - when in time, they intersect in their certain ancestor (if one).
I studied linguistics at the university and one of the professors was fairly straightforward: "We call them language/family trees but they aren't really. They are more like shrubs or bushes."
Your remarks on divergence and convergence totally apply. Also assimilation should be an instantly understandable term. Other related terms are substratum and superstratum in language contact theory.
Still, I vastly prefer the Estonian variety (must be close to German) over Russian.
As far as I can tell, the big difference lies in the way the suerkraut was fermented, industrially or naturally matured in wood barrels. You hardly can find the naturally matured one at the supermarket
Right, I mean the wood barrel one. This is totally Estonian (or German if you wish).
The Russian one in the picture I linked is called "Siberian or Far East variety" on Russian Wikipedia, "which contains carrot in distinction from the variety used in European Russia." (Not so) oddly, we have carrot added to near-raw cabbage in our supermarkets too. I still refuse to call it sauerkraut, even though they do.
Dialect differences in Germany can be extreme, to a point where a Saxon won't understand a Bavarian or vice versa
Like I said, Saxon, Franconian, and German are three different languages from a linguistic standpoint.
From the linguistic standpoint, it's well understood that dialect and language form a continuum. Linguistically, undisputed languages belong to different families. Within language families, it's mostly politics that decides, not linguistics. A professor at the university brought an example concerning Indo-European languages: Lithuanian and Russian are separated to different groups (Baltic and Slavic respectively) while Icelandic and English which have significantly more grammatical differences belong to the same group (Germanic).
The Scandinavian languages are rather clearly a political phenomenon. Their mutual intelligibility is so fluent that they could be considered dialects. Saxon, Franconian, and (High) German have a common present. Politically they have a less common past, which makes them differ. It's a political choice if you prefer the point of view of the present or of the past. Geolinguistically they have been closely related all along.
Off-topic: It's apt that this thread split off one of the religion threads where I was in the business of defining God. According to one tenet, the relationship of the universe and God is like that of a word and its meaning. Indicative, not causal.
Dutch Wikipedia makes some unsourced claims that Sauerkraut might've originated in northern China, was taken along to eastern Europe by the Mongols, and made its way from there across Germany to the Netherlands with Ashkenazi refugees.
Indeed, now that you mention it, I remember how I enjoined "varza murata" in Romania and "savanyú káposzta" in Hungary.
Here's the Russian variety. In Siberia they touch Mongolia. Still, I vastly prefer the Estonian variety (must be close to German) over Russian.
The US will approve immigration reform? What does that mean? It reminds me of the oracle of Delphi: "If you cross the river, a great empire will be destroyed."
The oracle does not predict anything. The oracle only intermediates a required message.
