Li'l Turtle wrote, "Titus won Prail but I was missing a 't'.
In the United States, a marine-derived drug that has been extensively tested for the treatment of chronic pain is Prail
t. The drug, acting on nerve pathways to block pain more efficiently than traditional opiates, appears to be 1,000 times more potent than morphine and lacks morphine's addictive potential.
I could really get into it at this point, but I'd never get out. However, the thing to note is that the question of whether morally deviant worlds can be conjure/imagined can be raised just as sharply for Carlyle as for Voltaire (or Hume, Walton, et. al.) It just needs slightly different form and formulation. (Why Walton and co. haven't emphasized this, given the centrality of romanticism to literary culture, I have no idea.)
"i tried to write, just playing mind you"
I do not mean: I am prepared to offer airtight metaphysical, epistemological and semantical accounts of how all this is possible. Rather - just as we throw a ball without knowing what mathematical function would describe its arc - we constantly encounter, deal with, talk about, people whose concepts are a bit - or quite - different than our own. And we intuit that there are often social reasons for this.
Moreover, by 'no big deal' I do not mean that conceptual disagreements cause no serious, intractable problems. Alternatively, that it isn't worthwhile trying to give philosophical accounts of how all this is possible. I'm just pointing out that it may be wrong to emphasize the practical importance of starting with the philosophical accounts. This is as wrong as saying you have to work out the math before learning to throw a ball.
Herbert Marcuse once described the way philosophers who champion common sense scold those who propagate a more radical perspective: "The intellectual is called on the carpet .... Don't you conceal something? You talk a language which is suspect. You don't talk like the rest of us, like the man in the street, but rather like a foreigner who does not belong here. We have to cut you down to size, expose your tricks, purge you."
The accused then responds that "if what he says could be said in terms of ordinary language he would probably have done so in the first place." Understanding what the critical intellectual has to say, Marcuse goes on, "presupposes the collapse and invalidation of precisely that universe of discourse and behavior into which you want to translate it."
What I just wrote is not at all adequate as an elucidation of 'trivial'. Moreover, the foregoing description of absent-minded epistemological itchiness - although unsightly irritation of the intellectual epidermis is common - is not drawn to the life either. :wink:
Moving right along.
It is a nice question whether it is worse to perpetrate tautological emptiness with an aura of significance or egregious unsoundness/invalidity with an aura of significance.
)
