Honestly, I think both of you need to lighten up. Jeremy was telling the truth when he said that we've gotten complaints about you before. You can come off as rather cantankerous. (I've always wondered if it has to do with your prose style or English, perhaps, being a second language?) He can be heavy-handed. He and I have differed on how to approach hard cases in this way for years.

I'm not going to promise that you will never be moderated again, but if you think you've been treated unjustly please contact me privately and I'll look into the matter.

Due_Kindheartedness wrote:

John West wrote:

I realize that a lot of people are coming from pop apologetics where the aim is often to “win” debates by swaying hearts (and, ultimately, votes).

That seems like a voluntarist effort rather than an intellectualist effort, doesn't it? After all, why bother to strive toward the truth if the only thing that matters is what your heart says is right? Winning hearts and votes seems like a voluntarist tactic. An intellectualist would do as you are doing, which is to succor others toward finding the truth.

You're probably right that intellectualists tend to heavily favour rational appeals, but it's still possible for their goal to be persuasion rather than truth. But when they're aiming at persuasion rather than truth, they're simply not philosophizing. They're doing rhetoric. (Think of it in terms of intentionality and what makes for an act of philosophizing in the first place.)

You're noticing an inconsistency because there is an inconsistency. We administrators are different people, with different views, and the policy of the forum (or, better, the interpretation of the policy of the forum) tends to be the policy of whichever one of us is most active at a given time.

I'm extremely laissez faire. I've never banned anyone, I've never deleted any posts (except accidentally), and I've never locked any threads. I've lobbied for one of the people who have been banned behind closed doors. (I've done all this even when tempers have flared, even when they've flared towards me.) My reason for being laissez faire is that I think it's already hard enough for people to put themselves out there without their also having to worry about all sorts of rules. The danger for me has always been that I might end up letting people get out of hand and lower the quality of conversation or chase others away.

Last one: I've been at it for two days and I'm about to wind down with something nonphilosophical (Yukio Mishima's Runaway Horses, I think). I'm posting mainly to help clarify the discussion (if not for you gentlemen then for others reading you):

Calhoun wrote:

Also that does seem like somewhat odd definition of contingent, I think contingency is essentially a modal notion, it doesn't have some essential connection to explanations. Its just something that could not have existed, some state of affairs that could otherwise have not obtained. If something doesn't have any sort of explanation , it doesn't seem to necessarily follow that its thereby necessary as it still might not have existed. At least this is how I grasp the concept of contingency.

It's worth distinguishing modal contingency from dependent contingency. x is modally contingent if and only if x is possibly nonexistent if existent and possibly existent if nonexistent; x is dependently contingent if and only if there is some y such that (i) x is not identical to y; (ii) necessarily, if x exists, then y exists; (iii) y is in some sense the ground or source of x's existence. (The definition of modal contingency can also be put in possible worlds jargon: x is modally contingent if and only if x exists in some possible worlds but not others.) You're obviously right that it's unorthodox to call dependently contingent beings “contingent beings” without further qualification, but Monkey stipulates that is what he's doing at the start of his post so I don't really see a problem.

Noble_monkey wrote:

Check the update, their objections are to an older argument.

I just noticed that. I was going to edit in the following comment:

(I see, on posting this comment, that the offending sentence has been pulled out. I'm going to leave the comment anyway. I hope no one is terribly bothered by it.)