Philosophers need to be judged by their BATTING AVERAGE.
Philosophers, even the greatest, are not infallible.
So there are TWO questions:
1 Quantity: How MUCH thinking did the philosopher do?
2 Quality: How MUCH of the that thinking was correct, or correct-adjacent?
Aristotle in Quantity: As Will Cuppy said “Aristotle probably thought more square feet than any other human being ever to live.”
So quantity = literally more than anyone else.
Aristotle in Quality: Extremely high “batting average.” Probably in the 700s or higher.
And he mostly makes errors in biology, a science he began, because he had only limited specimens and limited tools. He had no microscopes, for example.
And Aristotle is NOT DOGMATIC. He was perfectly willing to be corrected in the light of new data.
His infamous and much-derided “spontaneous generation” idea was put forward by him PROVISIONALLY. He wasn’t willing to SAY there were eggs he couldn’t see, but he does SUGGEST it.
In the Physics, Aristotle literally mentions BOTH Darwin’s idea of natural selection AND Newton’s law of inertia.
He rejects both, for fairly substantial reasons. But they are THERE.
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As Putnam notes, the fact/value dichotomy fails because it never manages to actually distinguish the two entirely, due to a kind of necessary entanglement (or kinds) between putative "facts" and "values."
What we have is a situation of distinction where in some facts are not values, some facts are values, some values are facts, and some values are not facts.
What we do not have is a fact/value dichotomy which amounts to a metaphysical dualism.
This is one of my rules. I use language quite carefully. When someone response to something I have said by calling it "word salad," nothing is lost by blocking them.
There is no possibility they are being an honest interlocutor.
Anyone with more that a child's level of acquaintance with theology should understand that talk about God will always be quite unlike talk about anything else, unlike talk about any creature (which everything but God is).
This does *seem like* a huge incoherence in transgender ideology.
It seems as if it is absurd on its face to say that children can consent to medical "transition" and a lifetime of medicalization and sterilization, but not consent to smoking a cigarette or having a beer.
An honest atheist (if there were such a thing) might say that he does not believe in an uncreated creator. No!—he must pretend that the concept of an uncreated creator is nonsense!
As if everything that does an action need be susceptible to such an action!
A lot of picture-thinkers will form an image of what’s being talked about and then think something that only belongs to the image belongs to the idea itself. Which in turn causes them to miss/reject other cases that instantiate the idea but don’t fit their particular image.
Descartes gives an example of the limits of substituting pictures/the imagination from concepts/the intellect:
Consider a chiliagon, a thousand-sided figure with equal sides. Conceptually, this is easy to understand, but it is impossible to picture clearly and distinctly.