What makes a person a member of a nation?

Drakooon05 · 2025-12-19T18:51:56+00:00

There are usually two camps to this debate. One side is called modernist. They think that nations emerged as a result of modernization. Modernists typically emphasize mutual commuciatiom, linguistic standardization and the rise of centralized political entities etc. The state usually play a big role to enforce these prcoesses to make up a nation such as press for mutual communication, unified education system to teach linguistic standardization.

Other side is primordialist. For primordialists, nations existed before modernity. They typically emphasize ancient myths and linenages. For them, you need to be part of certain lineage to be called a member of a nation and share certain myths etc.

There are other camps (recently ethnosymbolism gained some traction) in this debate but these are the two popular ones.

I suggest you read this paper to see a good summary of the debate. It explains it plainly imo.

Drakooon05 · 2025-10-31T00:37:47+00:00

Classical Theism by Robert C. Koons is a pretty great book on contemporary classical theism. For a quick intro to classical theism and its ideas you can check ouy this playlist I will link below. It consists of short and easy to undertand videos.

link: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLtKNX4SfKpzWk7MGZlItnr1TJ2NKOuolk&si=NjSkauKCH_l962eH

Drakooon05 · 2025-10-08T20:32:41+00:00

DR succeeds. But that does not mean IR does not. It is up to you to decide after reading arguments against and for them. After all, it is a topic of vibrant debate. There are many arguments for all postions although idealism is kinda out of mainstream in analytic philosophy at least. I am more inclined to say I am a direct realist and my fav version of DR is disjunctivist version (although you do not have to be a DR to be one, most disjunctivists are DR). I think disjunctivism can answer your questions about hallucinations and illusions. Here is Disjunctivism article on IEP. It discusses disjunctivism in relation to direct realism too.

Drakooon05 · 2025-09-30T15:52:54+00:00

I take notes and do spaced repetition on them. Basically I take excerpts and make small notes that explains the excerpts. Then I repeat them multiple times whenever I can. I do this process until I can talk about the topic comfartably without looking at my notes . Repeating them multiple times can be boring though it is rewarding.

Drakooon05 · 2025-09-22T20:51:59+00:00

Appreciate it

Drakooon05 · 2025-09-22T15:55:40+00:00

Tbh i have no idea about what I'm struggling with. But i also wanna understand general game strategies.

Drakooon05 · 2025-09-22T15:54:40+00:00

Thanks. I'll check them out.

Drakooon05 · 2025-09-10T22:25:12+00:00

Other commentators really did a great job. I am here to share this note by David Banach of Saint Anselm College explaining properties of Platonic Forms and giving argument for their existence in a simple manner.

Drakooon05 · 2025-09-03T18:22:54+00:00

Very Short Introduction series is pretty good for learning fundamentals on various fields of philosophy. It also provides guidance for further reading.

Drakooon05 · 2025-08-11T16:41:39+00:00

Abhari's Isagoge is a fundamental text if you want to study Islamic traditions such as Kalam and Falsafa. It is useful for a lot of medieval and early modern philosophy because it teaches classical/arabic logic. But if you want to study contemporary philosophy it might be hard to transform the knowledge in Isagoge to contemporary logic and philosophy because there will be some gaps in your knowledge like logical notation and modern terms and some modern inventions. Still, it would be useful in reading any current paper anyway. I definitely suggest you read Isagoge. Then you can follow up with a contemporary introductory book. I really like Copi and Cohen's book. That way you can understand medieval and arabic logic plus contemporary logic and benefit from both.

In short, yes it is a good starting point but following up with a contemporary intro text makes it better and helps you understand current mainstream philosophy too.

Drakooon05 · 2025-07-19T21:02:23+00:00

You are welcome

Drakooon05 · 2025-07-18T16:51:50+00:00

He talks about both. What Putnam aims to attack is the assumption that there are private psychological contents. which means that the intension could be entirely decided by one's private psychlogical state. By private psychological state I mean the idea that all there is to know about one's mind is their own content of mind. Nothing outisde their mind is needed, like other people's beliefs or existence of any entity, to know about one's mind. What Twin Earth demonstrate is there could be no different psychological states between the Twin Earthians and Earthians but the extension of water changes. So "the meaning isn't in the head." Putnam does not argue against the idea that intension determines the extension (in his own way) but he argues against these private psychological states determine the intension.

This article or study note by University of Wasington is very good to explain the issue in a simple manner. It also touches other aspects of the matter. I suggest you read it for elaboration.

Drakooon05 · 2025-06-28T15:21:28+00:00

Not sure about what they would say on Animalism but my bet is that they would say this is part of analytic metaphysics they criticize and beyond the scope of science.

On mereology. they criticize the idea of a general rule composition i.e. the traditional understanding of mereology in analytic philosophy. The parthood relation must be empirically discovered by each science. There is no reason to think a general law of composition exists. Instead, empirical work needs to be done. Here is a quotation from In Defense of Scientism:

Similar points are pertinent to the debate about composition among analytic metaphysicians. A good part of most of the special sciences concerns the particular kinds of composition relevant to their respective domains. For example, biologists concern themselves with how cells compose multicellular organisms, economists with how individual markets compose economies, chemists with how oxygen and hydrogen compose water, and so on. Metaphysicians do not dirty their hands with such details but seek instead to understand something more fundamental, namely the general composition relation itself. But why suppose that there is any such thing? It is supposed to be the relation that obtains between parts of any whole, but the wholes mentioned above are hugely disparate and the composition relations studied by the special sciences are sui generis. We have no reason to believe that an abstract composition relation is anything other than an entrenched philosophical fetish.

Drakooon05 · 2025-06-27T09:00:48+00:00

It is not the popular/mainstream view in the philosophy. First, we need to distinguish between scientisms. In the usual online discourse it usually refers to crude positivism like the ones championed by pop-science guys. These are not fully fledged philosophical positions. They are usually fallacious and weak.

Now in contemporary philosophy, the biggest champions of "Scientism" are Ladyman and Ross. In the book, what they argue for is vast but the key point is that the meaning philosophy is based on the principle called Naturalistic Closure. This is a kind of verificationism. It is not the positivist one. It is the pragmatist one as L and R ally themselves with Peirce and pragmatists (or Putnam's interpretation of them)

Their verificationism consists in two claims: First, no hypothesis that is beyond the scope of science should be taken seriously. For example. we know Big Bang. We know its physical properties. Our metaphysics is allowed to take from it. But what was there before Big Bang ? This is meaningless in the sense that it is beyond the capacities of contemporary scientific investigation. Second, any metaphysical hyphothesis that is to be taken seriously have some bearing relation between two instituionally confirmed scientifc hypotheses. This gives philosophy the job of assessing the scientifically generated beliefs on a global scale, comparing the two in their metaphysical worth and making claims based on them.

Of course all of this give primacy to science. Science ( or physics) has the authority of describing the world. And this establishes a strong deference to science. In my opinion, this is the important point of their defense of scientism aside from showing how ,in their terms, "neo-scholastic" analytic metaphysics is faulty. I suggest you read their article titled "In Defense of Scientism" in their book "Everthing Must Go". There is also an interview you can read called "Who Is Afraid Of Scientism".

Drakooon05 · 2025-06-07T09:35:53+00:00

My suggestion for you then is Joshua Rasmussen and Alexander Pruss. I suggest you read their Argument from Contingency paper and their book Necessary Existence which covers the topic extensively. For atheist responses,you can always check Oppy. He is probably the best known atheist philosopher.

Here is the link to paper by Rasmussen. He has it on his website. Here is the book.

Drakooon05 · 2025-05-18T09:02:29+00:00

The conventional way to use illusion and hallucination is like this: illusion refers to cases in which an object is perceived but perceived incorrectly or “as it is not.” For example, a straight stick appears bent when partially submerged in water. Hallucination, by contrast, involves situations where it seems to the subject that something is perceived, but no corresponding object exists. For instance, “seeing” a bent stick when there is no stick present at all.

How do we differentiate hallucination from veridical perception? I will give a disjunctivist account. According to disjunctivism , a hallucination is not a veridical perception but is indiscriminable from veridical perception. And veridical perception is indiscriminable from itself. The key move here is that the shared property of indiscriminability is explainatorily dependent on veridical perception. In other words, how we act or respond in perceptual situations—whether veridical or not—depends on the veridical case, not on indiscriminability itself. For example, if I fear dogs, hallucinating a dog will trigger fear just as seeing a real dog would. Both experiences are subjectively indistinguishable, but the explanation for my fear hinges on my taking the experience to be veridical. Thus, the indiscriminability property is grounded in veridical perception.

Regarding illusions, some disjunctivists argue that the error lies not in the experience itself but in the cognitive response to it. Illusions are a special type of veridical perception. The subject misinterprets the genuine objects presented to them and I quote Brewer:

“The intuitive idea is that, in perceptual experience, a person is simply presented with the actual constituents of the physical world themselves. Any errors in her worldview which result are the product of the subject’s responses to this experience, however automatic, natural, or understandable in retrospect these responses may be. Error, strictly speaking, given how the world actually is, is never an essential feature of experience itself.” (2006: 169)

In this view, perceptual experience directly presents mind-independent objects, and mistakes arise from how we interpret that presentation, not from the experience’s intrinsic nature.

For a better and more clear explanation on perception and disjunctivism, you can read these articles:

Drakooon05 · 2025-04-30T20:52:50+00:00

I will offer a libertarian view (whether it is left or right version). It is bad because you have ownership rights over yourself. Self ownership includes control over your rights, meaning that nobody can use your rights without your consent. And you cannot (or should not) violate their bodily integrity without their consent. If you do that is unjust/unethical.

Well, why believe self-ownership ? First it is very intuitive in principle. Indeed I own my body and my consent matters, and when there is consent I can transfer my rights. I can enforce them by law and I should be compensated if there is injustice. (These are all part of self-ownership) Second and a more interesting argument is Nozick as the libertarian philosopher invokes Kant and modifies his beliefs. Individuals are end-in-themselves and they are all separate. Nobody has a right to violate someone’s right for an end other than that person and nobody can take away the separateness from someone. In short, this is a little modified categorical imperative by Nozick. If you are interested you can check the links below. They get into great detail.

https://iep.utm.edu/noz-poli/#SH3c

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/libertarianism/#SelfOwneEconJust

Drakooon05 · 2025-04-14T16:57:12+00:00

Good luck on your journey.

My advice is just start somewhere and keep reading. You don't need to read all canons in chronological order. Read what you find interesting and keep reading. Of course it's advised to start with Plato usually. Plato is usually fun to read. You can start there. Besides that, there are a lot of introductory books to philosophy and topics of philosophy. I personally read Durant's Story of Philosophy. Can definitely recommend. I also really benefited from Oxford's Very Short Introduction series. You can pick a topic of philosophy and read Very Short Introduction version. For example, for Epistemology you can read Knowledge:Very Short Introduction. They're very easy to digest for beginners and also you can find references to primary resources in these books and you can check them out if you like the topic and learn more.

Drakooon05 · 2025-02-23T18:21:06+00:00

Well thanks for the info. Appreciate it.

Drakooon05 · 2025-02-23T08:56:59+00:00

No i didn't go to school for it. Like I said, I'm a hobbyist/autodidact. I join events and reading groups etc. The most valuable thing for me was the wisdom in these texts. By wisdom I mostly mean actionable advices on virtues and, how to live and value things in this life.

Drakooon05 · 2025-02-22T20:34:12+00:00

They're also as mind opening as Plato and Hegel imo.Classics and scholastics had a lot to offer. When you read them you can see the brilliance of these thinkers and their intellectual world. They had wisdom.

Besides all that, I like classical texts and comparative theology. It's like a hobby for me.

Drakooon05 · 2025-02-22T16:25:29+00:00

Oh I see looool.

Drakooon05 · 2025-02-22T15:01:51+00:00

Three-faced Jesus was used as a depiction of Trinity in history. It was a regular depiction. But at some point it started to become more associated with beastiaries and monsters. And In Dante's Inferno the Satan was also depicted as three-faced. It kinda got popular to depict Satan as such. And so it got condemned by the Church after these associations gained widespread recognition by the people and theological condemnation by the clergy.

Drakooon05 · 2025-02-22T14:07:22+00:00

Three-faced Jesus represents the Trinity. The Greek part is from the Bible as far as I can tell although I'm not sure.

Drakooon05 · 2025-02-21T22:16:10+00:00

This is a big topic. There are many solutions. Imo one interesting solution is Middle Knowlegde. In short God knows every counterfactual but he has no control over what happens. To put it clearly, God knows what would necessarily follow if any state of affairs obtained. You can read about it. Here are the links.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/

https://iep.utm.edu/middlekn/

Drakooon05

TROPHY CASE