Zompist Bboard Again

I've never heard of a mobile phone being called a "mo", so the name makes no sense to me - plus, of course, it already has an established meaning. Is 'nomophobia' really a word people encounter in real life? I've never hear it, certainly. I'd suggest, with a slightly broader meaning, asynd...

Well, I didn't say the argument is terrible. I don't think it's plausible that this argument, or anything much like it, could convert an entire intellectual class or an entire tradition to monotheism, but that doesn't make it terrible. Anyway it doesn't make it more terrible than the cosmological a...

Oh, there's an interesting thing happening, incidentally. Over the weekend, there was a fuss about an unnamed businessman who'se been sexually assaulting people. Allegedly. Nobody, officially, knows who it is, but they'd been accused by at least five women, and now up to six. The problem is, all the...

For those who don't know, Sajid is a self-confessed fan and reads the Fountainhead every year. Incidentally, is Ayn Rand becoming more popular on this side of the pond? I know her books have long been incredibly popular among certain sections of the US voting population, but my perception is that s...

Maybe a bit cheeky to derive monotheism from eternal return :) One thing that strikes me about the argument is that, given the background, you might expect inferences from regularity to law to lawgiver to be foregrounded somehow; though those are a couple of the points at which the argument (or at ...

dewrad wrote: ↑Wed Sep 05, 2018 6:38 pm Empires and "Heroes": 253 to 900

You know, the downside with you writing things that are so realistic and well thought out is that it's difficult to make any constructive comment on them...

Orthographically this sentence is indeed ambiguous. In the spoken language, the two meanings would be disambiguated by prosody though: The unmarked stress pattern with the accent on König is typically interpreted as a NRC, but a RRC reading can be forced by putting stress on the article ( Dér König...

Modus Tollens and Qualifiers Meanwhile, lawyers of Dinasra’s school had also begun to classify the forms of argument – indeed, due to the qatmesh system, this classification was the foundation of law. One of the most important argument forms for the Carians was modus tollens: if A entails B, and B ...

The Enumeration of Voids A number of further key theoretical developments emerged among Dinasra’s followers. First, the more speculative lawyers wondered, as a thought experiment, whether Dinasra’s conclusions could be extended to voids, areas of nothingness. It was concluded that they could. Since...

One minor nitpick: I believe what your're discussing are inventories , not catalogues . (To me, if you have a quantity next to each item, it's an inventory. If you don't, it's a catalogue.) That's a fair distinction to make; I didn't think of it. To be honest, I think 'catalogue' sprange to mind as...

Practical considerations for estate catalogues Now, while the theoretical aspect of the sophist attack has been rebutted, the practical complaint remains. Is Dinasra not continually going to call for increasingly more particular enumerations of contested estates? Well, no. Because here Dinasra intr...

The sophistical regress Now, the sophist, frustrated to have their tricks stymied by this absolute standard, will reason as such: if the general catalogue contains no information that is not in the particular catalogue, and hence depends for its accuracy, its very being, on the more particular cata...

Comparing more particular and more general catalogues – the importance of distribution Although Dinasra demonstrates that pure catalogues of a given genre were absolute, and that mixed-genre catalogues could conceptually be reduced to extracts from pure catalogues in combination, he was not able to...

The Enumeration of Heritable Estate Capital Dinasra did not write any books – writing at that time being chiefly reserved for official documents. Instead, he became famous through his lecture series. Unfortunately, no original record of the content of these lectures survives, but the general struct...

I know, I have peculiar interests and a warped sense of fun. Which is why I sat down the other night and wrote up the following. It's perhaps the first stage in a broad outline of the course of the religious and philosophical history of the Gureha region of my conworld; although I recognise it's of ...

I would derive a lot of personal satisfaction from seeing her kicked out of 10 Downing street, Parliament, the Conservative party, and public life. Here's hoping that as many of those happen as soon as possible. I think everyone would. It's tricky, though, because a loss for May would be a win for ...

There's been a shocking development: the Prime Minister is thought to perhaps be on the verge of being ousted! Yes, hard to believe, I know. It's now known that David Davis and Boris Johnson and their coteries have been explicitly lobbying MPs to call for the PM's dismissal. The number of MPs who ha...

Not sure whether to post this here or in the Random Thread in Ephemera, but when all is said and all is done, it is a language-related question: When and why did some British media outlets start calling homeless people "rough sleepers"? It sounds like a rather callous euphemism to me. It'...

Isn't the Lotus Sutra being awesome the key doctrine of the Lotus Sutra? Some groups believe the Lotus Sutra is so awesome that just saying its name repeatedly is itself enough to ensure enlightenment. The actual content is secondary. Think of it as a chain letter. "A tentasquillion beings in a...

when it comes to Indo-Uralic or some other kind of macro-comparison involving Indo-European, it becomes a matter of interest what the PIE laryngeals are like and what they may be cognate to. But this is, as we've said before, working in the wrong order. You cannot use the similarity of PIE and Ural...