[Buddha-l] Bertrand Russell

[Jim Peavler]

On Aug 14, 2006, at 2:12 AM, Erik Hoogcarspel wrote:


>>
> So you support all those hate preachers (christian, hindu or  
> muslim) because they're fun and not dull? Do you really think that  
> it's fun to watch a dialogue in which opponent arguments of are  
> misrepresented all the time. I personally find this very boring and  
> 'human all to human'. That's why I don't bother to read Russell and  
> prefer to read Coppleston.

Well, golly then, what do you do for fun?
>
>> Take unfair caricature out of a philosopher's tool kit, and the  
>> philosopher becomes a reliable but dull pedant (except that most  
>> philosophers are such pee-poor scholars that they don't even  
>> qualify as pedants).
>>
>>
> I find your arguments very poor indeed. First of all your standard  
> seems to be pure amusement, which is not the standard raison d'être  
> for discussions.

I reckon that depends on the discussion. There are purposes for human  
intercourse that are different (perhaps even superior to) somber  
discussions of high-flown conceptual thinking. Humans engage in  
intercourse for all manner of reasons, but perhaps the most noble is  
to enjoy each other and to develop connections with folks other than  
them selves.  Your recommendation for the only kind of valid  
discourse sounds kind of like intellectual masturbation to me. Which  
is OK, of course, so long as you are getting off on it.

> Secondly the structure of your argument is that misprepresenting  
> arguments is not bad because people do it all the time, which is  
> nonsense of course (a.o. because of confusion between 'is' and   
> 'ought').

Now see, you are as good at strawman as anybody!!! Nicely done!

> Thirdly you would have to misrepresent the arguments of your  
> opponents as well, which means no dialogue but factual solepsism.

"solepsism" -- I could not find this in wikipedia. It is outside my  
own world experience, so I can't relate to it.


> Do you really think you're so funny? :-)

I think you should lighten up a bit before you have a stroke or  
something. You really need to relax a little.

> www.xs4all.nl/~jehms
> weblog http://www.volkskrantblog.nl/pub/blogs/blog.php?uid=2950
>
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Jim Peavler
jmp at peavler.org