[lit-ideas] Re: A thought for the coming year
- From: Donal McEvoy <donalmcevoyuk@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 31 Dec 2013 07:46:47 +0000 (GMT)
>It would be really nice
if idealism was true, I'd have a box of pizza in front of me instead of
just the thought of pizza in my head. >
Delivery times would be faster too and last minute changes of topping easier.
But clearing leaflets from the mind everyday - a chore.
Dnl
Btw, it is not necessarily the case that the form idealism would take would
mean what is now merely thought of a pizza would produce an actual pizza rather
than produce a thought that a pizza is actual.
On Sunday, 29 December 2013, 23:14, Omar Kusturica <omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
It would be really nice if idealism was true, I'd have a box of pizza in front
of me instead of just the thought of pizza in my head. O.K.
On Sunday, December 29, 2013 11:24 PM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
Walter wrote
Well, when I asked RP to articulate for us his conception of a thought, I
was
not thinking he would simply compile a number of examples of "thought" or
"thinking. From these examples proffered, we see that the terms, as understood
by RP can refer to:
1. an argument
2. a belief
3. a thought dreamt (this one sort of begs the question, I would think)
4. a decision made or report on a decision made
5. a phenomenon or word to which "weird" could be attributed
6. an activity
…………………
But RP must still be firmly ensconced in the lap of family and friends since he
resists the labour of the concept called for by the philosophical question I
posed.
*It’s not so much that I resist it; it’s that I don’t understand it. I really
don’t know what ‘the labour of the concept’ means.
Walter spells out what I would have to do in order order to adequately answer
that question.
[I would have to provide us ] not with a laundry-list, a bag, of examples of
"thought"/"thinking" but rather with the criteria [I use] in identifying all
these examples as examples *of* "thought"/"thinking." [For I] surely must be in
possession of such criteria, else [I] would not be able to differentiate
"thought"/"thinking" from anything else in the world (i.e., pizza, doggy-bags,
birdfeeders, a 40 yr old Highland Park) and thus would be unable to identify
some things and events as "examples."
*Something has gone slightly wrong. Apparently Walter is providing a list of
things that aren’t and could not be thoughts, yet how he knows they aren’t
thoughts isn’t entirely clear. The items in this motley are apparently related
to each other only insofar as they are not thoughts. How this is known a priori
is not obvious.
I don’t think that how a thought differs from a birdfeeder e.g. is an empirical
problem.
And yet…
How did I identify the things on the list in my last post as thoughts or
thinking? What criteria did
I use? That is a question for another post. The stuff above is just
skirmishing. I’ll get right on it.
Robert Paul
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