Hi, I'm Mick

[FBM]

Yup.

Moving on...

I guess this means we don't get any evidence for god(s).

Right after you post reasons to think that there is no evidence for God.

Yet another rhetorical dodge. I don't claim to know that there is no god. You're the one claiming that there is one. I'm just saying I've never seen any evidence for it. If you've got some, show it. Otherwise, you got nothing but empty rhetoric and word games. Ball's in your court.

[pErvinalia]

Yup.

Moving on...

I guess this means we don't get any evidence for god(s).

Right after you post reasons to think that there is no evidence for God.

Because you haven't posted any yet. The evidence for the lack of evidence so far, is the lack of evidence so far..

[FBM]

Nice. Perfect, even.

[JimC]

Yup.

Moving on...

I guess this means we don't get any evidence for god(s).

Right after you post reasons to think that there is no evidence for God.

Because you haven't posted any yet. The evidence for the lack of evidence so far, is the lack of evidence so far..

He has alluded to evidence in the sense of statements by religious people about their personal experience of god. This is the sort of thing that Seth says we must allow as evidence, otherwise we are being biased...

All subjective codswallop, of course...

[tattuchu]

You know what, Seth? The next time somebody reports one of your posts for a "fuck off" or a "go fuck yourself", I will vote for a further suspension of increased duration. Because you have just admitted that you are doing so as a tit-for-tat response that (you believe) is not against the rules. How's that?

Tit for tat is where it's at

[Mr.Samsa]

Mr Samsa wrote:

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here, as ethics doesn't really play into anything related to blank slatism. You can have a perfectly valid ethical system which completely rejects all known biological facts and that wouldn't be a case of blank slatism.

Any ethical system which ignores the biology of the beings it is deigned for will not be a good fit. Pragmatic ethics takes what is there, and tries to find ways to maximise a variety of parameters, such as health, fulfilment, safety and many others. This is easier if you don't start by pretending that society and/or parents can mould individuals to suit any given social theory. The clay is somewhat obdurate, so you need to work around it...

I don't see why we have to suppose that an ethical system can't work without having to be based on facts of human biology. We can create a system where something like "well-being" is relevant but in that case the ethical system is based on the reasoning that well-being is something worth valuing and then we look to human biology to help inform us of what this translates to but the human biology is irrelevant when deciding values.

[JimC]

You know what, Seth? The next time somebody reports one of your posts for a "fuck off" or a "go fuck yourself", I will vote for a further suspension of increased duration. Because you have just admitted that you are doing so as a tit-for-tat response that (you believe) is not against the rules. How's that?

Tit for tat is where it's at

My dear chap, I wish you all the tits in the world!

[pErvinalia]

You know what, Seth? The next time somebody reports one of your posts for a "fuck off" or a "go fuck yourself", I will vote for a further suspension of increased duration. Because you have just admitted that you are doing so as a tit-for-tat response that (you believe) is not against the rules. How's that?

Tit for tat is where it's at

[FBM]

Nice one, tatt...

[orpheus]

Never actually read either Aquinas or the Joyce Book you refer to, could you expand on it?

Dedalus actually appears in three of Joyce's books, although he is not actually named in Dubliners. I only ever read bits of all four of them myself, and I don't think I've missed out on much by dropping them.

I think it's a matter of individual taste. I'm a die hard Joycean, so I can't imagine being without his books.

Anyway, Stephen Dedalus actually appears in four books: Dubliners (where, as you say, he's not actually named); A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Ulysses; and Stephen Hero (the original version of Portrait - a rough draft of sorts, of which we have only a fragment).

In both Stephen Hero and Portrait the young, brilliant, insecure and arrogant Stephen Dedalus tells his mocking schoolmates about his theory of aesthetics, which he says is "applied Aquinas" — and it seems to be.

Actually, I prefer the version in the rough draft of Stephen Hero. It lacks the poetry of the corresponding passage in Portrait, but it has a directness and clarity that get right to the point. I don't think I can quote the Stephen Hero passage without violating copyright laws, but this is a link to the excerpt: http://theliterarylink.com/joyce.html

(BTW, Svartalf, I see you're in Paris, which brings to mind a nice coincidence: I bought my copy of Stephen Hero at the modern-day Shakespeare & Co. bookshop, which is named after the original one run by Sylvia Beach, who was a great supporter of modern literature, and who published Ulysses in 1922. Her shop was a famous meeting place of sorts for Pound, Joyce, Hemingway, Eliot et al. I got my book stamped with the official "Shakespeare & Co." stamp. It's only a cheap paperback, but it makes me smile to look at it.)

Anyway, Portrait is available for free at http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4217, so I'm pretty sure it's ok for me to quote the passage in question:

—To finish what I was saying about beauty, said Stephen, the most satisfying relations of the sensible must therefore correspond to the necessary phases of artistic apprehension. Find these and you find the qualities of universal beauty. Aquinas says: AD PULCRITUDINEM TRIA REQUIRUNTUR INTEGRITAS, CONSONANTIA, CLARITAS. I translate it so: THREE THINGS ARE NEEDED FOR BEAUTY, WHOLENESS, HARMONY, AND RADIANCE. Do these correspond to the phases of apprehension? Are you following?

—Of course, I am, said Lynch. If you think I have an excrementitious intelligence run after Donovan and ask him to listen to you.

Stephen pointed to a basket which a butcher's boy had slung inverted on his head.

—Look at that basket, he said.

—I see it, said Lynch.

—In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time.

What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehended it as ONE thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is INTEGRITAS.

—Bull's eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.

—Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is ONE thing you feel now that it is a THING. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is CONSONANTIA.

—Bull's eye again! said Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is CLARITAS and you win the cigar.

—The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but the shadow, the reality of which it is but the symbol. I thought he might mean that CLARITAS is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalization which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks in the scholastic QUIDDITAS, the WHATNESS of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley's, called the enchantment of the heart.

— A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, chapter 5

[Svartalf]

Thanks Orpheus.

[Mick]

I did it years ago. It's time for Mick to catch up.

Evidently he was looking at evidence you didn't find.

I'm pretty sure that he would have presented it if he had it.

You are free to check out my formal debate with lobawad in RS to see me defend an argument for God's existence.

[Mick]

Yup.

Moving on...

I guess this means we don't get any evidence for god(s).

Right after you post reasons to think that there is no evidence for God.

Easy!

The reason is that no one has ever produced evidence that deserves the word evidence...

The hidden implication here being this: If there were evidence for God's existence, then someone would have produced it already.

am I right?

[Mick]

Yup.

Moving on...

I guess this means we don't get any evidence for god(s).

Right after you post reasons to think that there is no evidence for God.

I think there is no evidence for god because I have never seen any. Care to enlighten me?

I've never seen aliens. Does this fact allow me to infer that there are none?

[FBM]

I did it years ago. It's time for Mick to catch up.

Evidently he was looking at evidence you didn't find.

I'm pretty sure that he would have presented it if he had it.

You are free to check out my formal debate with lobawad in RS to see me defend an argument for God's existence.

You are free to present evidence for your god's existence here. Thank you for playing. Please try again.