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Recent content by Received

  1. Received

    Firing your Therapist

    As a therapist who knows how many other therapists in my field (MA mental health counseling) as well as in clinical social work act, I can tell you with a bad taste in my mouth that randomly picking a therapist from the Internet is probably a 50/50 shot at finding someone worth keeping, and...
  2. Received

    Rights and their Basis

    I like the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy definition of rights: Rights are entitlements (not) to perform certain actions, or (not) to be in certain states; or entitlements that others (not) perform certain actions or (not) be in certain states. To be entitled to something is, roughly, to...
  3. Received

    Metaargumentative Aside: Ethics of Arguing

    I'm slow in responding because I read this post and thought, "hm, I pretty much agree with all of it, so..." My problem -- the unavoidable one -- is debating with people who seem or are sincere and, well, nice at the beginning, and then slowly suck you in by gradually throwing in inflammatory...
  4. Received

    Soren Kierkegaard and knights of faith

    Faith for K can entail a life of logic and reasoning, even though the leap to (not "of", which is an invention projected onto his writings) faith itself is arational. For K, a life of reason and logic can easily be an expression of the aesthetic mode of existence, where people "view life from...
  5. Received

    If suicidals only knew

    That would definitely sway a good portion, but appealing to reason isn't quite exclusively how suicide works. I mean, you can sometimes dramatically temper or even (over time) eradicate the depression (or anxiety) that underlies one's suicidality (thereby kicking off the suicidality with it) by...
  6. Received

    Metaargumentative Aside: Ethics of Arguing

    Yes, this is very good advice. Sadly, though, we can't always prevent who we think is a Jekyll from becoming a Hyde, argumentatively speaking. But hey, nothing's certain in this life. :)
  7. Received

    Soren Kierkegaard and knights of faith

    I've read the bulk of his writings -- and about halfway through reading and peripherally grasping what he was talking about, he being the great Mephistopheles of philosophy, most of his points suddenly clicked in a beautiful interlocking wave that was unlike any other philosopher I had read, and...
  8. Received

    Metaargumentative Aside: Ethics of Arguing

    Do you believe in character? I'm going to take @quatona's legitimately meticulous point and change "debate" to "argument". I don't really dig the point of debates in most cases. Yes, so perhaps we should speak of the person who initiates such behavior without being provoked. The latter...
  9. Received

    Metaargumentative Aside: Ethics of Arguing

    Yes, and I don't think immoral behavior is the same thing as ethical behavior (nor is ethical behavior the same thing as ethical character). Negative behavior, being negative, means it fails to meet a criterion for behavior, and I designate this in the area of virtue ethics, in that failing to...
  10. Received

    Metaargumentative Aside: Ethics of Arguing

    Because the argument speaks for itself, meaning any label which functions as a judgment about the argument is superfluous; and because labeling in inflammatory ways begs the question because it assumes the conclusion is true by the label being used. Finasteride, but I'm worried about the tiny...
  11. Received

    Metaargumentative Aside: Ethics of Arguing

    This be true.
  12. Received

    Metaargumentative Aside: Ethics of Arguing

    That's definitely an option, but only to a degree. But there are sneaky insecure folks out there who start with very subtle irrelevant inflammatory rhetoric and then gradually amp things up as they presumably realize they're losing the debate (or they're just buttheads). My sense is that...
  13. Received

    Metaargumentative Aside: Ethics of Arguing

    And maybe this reflects differing conceptions of what constitutes dignity, and that's totally part of my point. This also goes hand-in-hand with determining what constitutes negative behavior. So if I'm debating with someone who says my arguments are stupid, retarded, I'm full of it, or...
  14. Received

    Metaargumentative Aside: Ethics of Arguing

    Another thing I should've said: adding labels (crap, full of it, whatever -- and I totally get you're jesting when you're saying the latter) is completely superfluous, given that the points you're making in the argument either reveal an argument to be wrong or not, and so there's no point in...
  15. Received

    Metaargumentative Aside: Ethics of Arguing

    Here's something pretty nasty and in my view hard for most people to see. Person A and B get into a debate. As they continue the debate, A begins debating more aggressively, throwing down inflammatory rhetoric (e.g., such-and-such is nonsense, crap, stupid, dumb, "man you're full of it," etc.)...
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