These are not universal truths...

Note to others:

That’s the best you can do? Trying to mock me for word salad? I can assure you, my reply to your posting history is clear and sane.

Okay, that’s 1.

2.14159265359 more to go.

Speaking of pi, how close does this…

geom.uiuc.edu/~huberty/math5 … igits.html

…come to a universal truth?

You seemed incredulous that Faust did not think it was coherent. Then you defined it. If you don’t think your definition is the right one why is it your definition? I could understand you saying you are not sure if it is the right one, but to define X and they say that your definition of X is not one you think is right means that you are just wasting people’s time.

Sure. But if we don’t even know what ‘it’ is how could we possibly explore it contextually out in the world of human activities.

A: I don’t think alskdjflaölös is coherent.
Iamb: give us some concrete examples of alskdjflaölös.
A: huh?
Iamb: I think alskdjflaölös means Y. And why is no one applying it to concrete real world examples?

[pause]

Iamb: I don’t believe my definition of alskdjflaölös is right. But I want people to talk about alskdjflaölös in the world of conflicting goods.
A, B, C…etc.: huh?

Well, if Faust thinks the phrase makes no sense, he can’t. There are a few people who don’t think the phrase makes sense. Zero Sum does think it makes sense and he gave an example. For what it’s worth.

Right, if it is not considered coherent by others, that means they don’t understand what it means. So there is no how it is understood that can then be explored in via concrete examples.

You could acknowledge this, apologize to Faust for your humbler than thou irrelevent insults and then ask the minority of people here who think it makes sense how they would apply it in concrete situations.

Of course this would be a tangent. It’s not what the OP was about. This is your concern. It’s a good one, but as usual you try to move every thread into becoming one of the threads of yours people avoid. Which you may interpret as their great fear of nihilism. Might be that. Might be something else. Might vary.

But your interaction carries the weight of ‘should’, over and over. It should be talked about it like this, relating it to conflicting goods.

Despite your hypothetical nihilism.

Notice your use of the passive: it needs…

It doesn’t need. You want.

Why hide in the passive? Why present your desire as objective need?

[please consider that question rhetorical. not in the sense that I know the answer or that we do, but rather that you are being disingenuous…for some reason or other]

No no, it’s not:

It’s: do you want me to tell you the story of the bald chicken?

On the other hand, which came first, the bald chicken or the bald egg? You know, going back to a definitive understanding of existence itself. Or God, if He came first.

No, no, no… It is not:

It is: do you want me to tell you the story of the bald chicken?

Iambiguous,

Really!? That was your big trick? You’re coming at me with math? Dude. Bad idea.

Any irrational or transcendental number can be made rational by making it the base.

Base pi.

I really don’t want to bother with you if you’re going to pull this cutsie shit on me.

I have a real argument that is outstanding and you haven’t addressed it in your posting history, the argument against your posting history.

Bump , in case it was missed.

True is true and “universal” adds no meaning to it. It’s really as simple as that. I was about to make a very long post about this, which I may yet.

Mine is not an argument having anything to do with gun ownership. It’s with your formulation “universal truth.” Here, you’re calling the second amendment a universal truth and bemoaning the fact that it doesn’t settle arguments. This is literal nonsense.

I guess you’re trying to say “If anything is a universal truth, the second amendment is and it still doesn’t settle political disputes.”

But it’s not a truth of any kind, universal or not. And there have been uncountable disputes over the bill of rights since its adoption (and before). So you’re setting up a strawman. No one thinks of the second amendment as “a truth.” Plenty use it to support their political views.

So what?

My personal view is that most people should be able to own (some) firearms by right but that this right is not established in the second amendment. But I’m not a supreme court justice and certainly am not five of them. It’s important to note that the constitution does not exist empirically. Any more than a novel does. It is important only because the ideas therein contained are accepted, by people who count, if not by many Republican congresmen at the moment, as foundational to our government. But the constitution has been viewed differently over time. Was gay marriage rights always in there somewhere? Presumably, but SCOTUS never quite saw it before.

It’s not even close to a “truth”.

It is true that women are shorter than men. But it is not universally true. It is true as an average, not a universal truth.

see what i mean? you guys are fiddling around and that’s what’s making this so confusing. you gotta go on a case by case basis and watch your statements. tell em, faust.

that first sentence needs a quantifier or by default everyone will think you mean ‘all’ women… which clearly isn’t true, much less universally true.

the last statement has issues too. if most women are shorter than men, the statement ‘most women are shorter than men’ would be universally true… so long as there are no women taller than men unaccounted for on some other planet.

in this case, being true ‘as an average’ is just the condition of the universally true statement ‘most women are shorter than men’, so the statement ‘it is true as an average, not a universal truth’ is misleading.

tell em, faust. tell em man.

This happens all the time, which is why I say that you cannot do philosophy until you have mastered a language. It’s why I say that philosophy is only a peculiar study of language.

Statements, claims, propositions, declarative sentences. These are where you look for something that is true. But many utterances that look like claims to truth are not.

“Universal” is a metaphysical modifier. To even us this kind of modifier catapults your thinking into metaphysics.

The question of truth is much simpler than that.

That is none of my concern. But you strike me as weaker than you sometimes seem when you comment on a theory you haven’t learned.
If you had stated your erroneous understanding after having made an attempt to understand, it would be a bit sad, but that you present assertions about a theory without even having made an attempt to learn it, is also a bit sad.
How would you respect someone who went around saying “Silhouette’s Experientalism says that experience isn’t real” or something completely contradictory to what you’re actually saying? Not very much, or?

Anyway, no harm done, feel free to study whenever you like and address me with an informed position. Also feel free to keep ignoring it.
To be honest Im proud of how difficult the valuator logic is to handle. It is, in the tradition Nietzsche set out, a selecting mechanism.

I’m not weak nor strong, I have arguments.

Judge them.

Yeah it’s sad that I’ve not made an attempt to learn ur stuff - I actually read ur link though, and I liked the statement “The I is thus always an activity.”

But I still don’t really know what VO does.
I try to bring up Experientialism only when it has a direct application and solves some previously seemingly paradoxical dilemma. On its own it’s probably pretty dry and like “so what?”, just like VO.

I’m no expert on VO, just like you’re no expert on Experientialism - I present my criticisms on what I think you’re talking about and you say that’s not what you’re saying. That’s fine, I accepted that. You’re still happy to throw out statements about how I’m “not much of an expert on Experience” - on that other thread you made, though. If there’s anything I’ve learned on these forums it’s that arguing past one another is truly empty.

There’s a lot of emotional baggage to get through to debate with you though, which makes me feel like I can’t really be bothered to talk with you. I don’t really care if you’re butthurt or you don’t like my politics - logic stands regardless.

Be proud of your mental creation by all means, I’ve never thought of you as unintelligent even if you’re a bit weird about some topics in a way that makes me doubt your sanity more than your logical capability.

“I’m no expert on VO, just like you’re no expert on Experientialism”

Nonsense. I am an quite well versed in Experientalism, as I have actually read endless posts of yours about it and discussed it with you and always arrived at disagreement in terms of falsifiability, and as I follow your arguments I accept that they can, when using an uninvestigated notion of “experience”, lead to such an assertions as you’re making, but I have countered with an argument you professed to simply not understand before you turned your back.
Ill rephrase the overture: can experience relate to itself without there being “a self”?

I slightly disagree with Faust on how philosophy is about language - A philosophical act was when Ape spoke the first deliberate reference to an object that wasn’t a fellow ape, gave birth to some objective realm, a metaphysics which drew the apes energy into his brain like a tree soaks up water with negative pressure from its crown, and erected ape and made this cosmos appear, as Stanley Kubrick visioned it. The cosmic wheel which the ape begins to propel after he raises a stick to a larger stick and begins to literally “beat down” - hammer - the first metaphysical act.
Philosophy is the active aspect of the human mind, that which engineers appearances before they manifest, for example that which produces syntactic solutions.

To use the tool because of the power of the tool is to begin the journey, the tools create the job so to speak, power engenders goals, but it is hard to keep these goals under control - that is a power mankind has not yet attained. Nietzsche produced the the Superman idea, but I find this to be too anthropocentric as a goal. So to me not language as such but its touching Earth are ultimately the criteria for sound philosophy; can you touch it. Does it ‘make sense’. Kant doesn’t, Machiavelli does. Rules are usually either iron or very cheap plastic.

I’m not exactly sure where we disagree, Jake. I do overstate things, deliberately. This is more journalism than philosophy for me, here on this board. Language is the medium, so the subject is language in the same way that paint is the medium of a painter, and therefore also the subject of his art. Girl with a Pearl Earring is always only about paint.

Few here keep their language under control. Someone has to do it.

Philosophy is only about language.

Philosophy is only about values.

Philosophy is only about politics.

Philosophy is only about power.

Philosophy is only about wisdom.

Look, either you and I and Faust will at least make an attempt to bring “assessments” of this sort out into the world of human interactions or I’m left with stringing my own words together while we connect the dots between them and technical “statements” about “universal truth”.

First note a context. A context in which human interactions come into conflict over the assessment of particular things and relationships deemed to be or not to be true by different people for different reasons. For example, a context revolving around gun control. Then encompass what “it” means to you then and there.

And I will react to it.

In other words, anything other than example like this:

Come on, at least try something a bit more realistic, okay?

What does not make sense about philosophers taking their intellectual assessments of – technical statements about – “universal truth” and noting how they do in fact have both a use value and an exchange value in interacting with others in particular contexts. Otherwise [to me] you seem to be saying that philosophers have their own “thing” here and it’s not really relevant to human interactions at all. “Universal truth” becomes this epistemological contraption that serious philosophers are more intent on grappling with “technically”.

All I mean is that in order for them to be of interest to philosophers of my ilk, technical assessments of “universal truth” either can or cannot be made relevant to the point Durant makes…

He wanders farther and farther away from his time and place, and from the problems that absorb his people and his century. The vast concerns that properly belong to philosophy do not concern him…He retreats into a little corner, and insulates himself from the world under layer and layer of technical terminology.

Though clearly this has a meaning for me that will not resonate at all for others. The part I attribute to dasein.

Yes, that’s what I want. So, if he or you or others want/need something else, then by all means steer clear of me here.