HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit)
Subject: Re: a quote from "Alice"
Organization: York U. Student Information Systems Project
	<1992Aug24.191218.26126@galois.mit.edu>
	<BtMnnJ.2v1@usenet.ucs.indiana.edu>
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 20:11:00 GMT

TANAKA Tomoyuki writes:

   Would someone please check and report back here if the Duchess's
   remark in question is indeed as in Lewis Carroll's original?

I have already checked it, and it is correct, and you are also right
that Gardner skipped it in *both* of his volumes of Annotated Alice.

I haven't had the chance to check out other works such as Sutherland
[1] to see if Duchess's remark is discussed.

Based on my previously posted breakdown/bracketing [which by the way
did not mean bracketed parts could be removed], one other Carrollian
reduced the sentence to a logical contradiction, but we are not sure
if that reduction is correct. By the way, notwithstanding Tim Chow's
repeated claims to the contrary, we think that Duchess's sentence is
grammatically correct, and is reducible without gratuitous deletions
from the original sentence.

oz
---
[1] Robert D. Sutherland
    Language and Lewis Carroll
    Mouton, 1970.
---
Information is in the mind of | internet: oz@nexus.yorku.ca
the beholder. - R. Jackendoff | phone:[416] 736 2100 x33976
From: andrew@rentec.com (Andrew Mullhaupt)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Assasination
Date: 25 Aug 92 16:37:06 GMT
Organization: Renaissance Technologies Corp., Setauket, NY.

In article <1992Aug24.211112.13369@blaze.cs.jhu.edu> arromdee@jyusenkyou.cs.jhu.edu (Ken Arromdee) writes:
>In article <1205@kepler1.rentec.com> andrew@rentec.com (Andrew Mullhaupt) writes:
>>There is _no_ distinction among premeditated murders for the good of some
>>group other than if it is self defense or not.
>
>This applies to jail terms and fines, too.  There's no distinction between
>jailing and kidnapping except for who does it and why, and no distinction
>between fines and robbery except for who does it and why.

Absolutely.

Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt
From: danoc@earlybird.Eng.Sun.COM (Dan O'Connell [CONTRACTOR])
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Assasination
Date: 25 Aug 92 16:35:03 GMT
Organization: Lurkers Anonymous
NNTP-Posting-Host: earlybird

(Jim Kalb) writes:

 Maybe the question is what counts as premeditated murder.  We've
 touched on defense of self and others.  If capital punishment or
 killing in war don't count as murder, then assassination would
 sometimes have similar justificatory features that would distinguish it

I think capital punishment, and killing in war are both forms
of murder: i.e., wrongful death. In fact any killing of a human
being without their consent would be murder. 

For the unwilling victim, their death would always be murder.

Dano
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,sci.logic,cs.logic
From: peterb@cs.rug.nl (Peter J. de Bruin)
Subject: Re: a quote from "Alice"
Summary: Solution?
Organization: Dept. of Computing Science, University of Groningen
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 1992 09:08:32 GMT

       `Be what you would seem to be' --
       or, if you'd like it put more simply --
	`Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than
	what it might appear to others that what you
	were or might have been was not otherwise than
	what you had been would have appeared to them to
	be otherwise.'

I think we should decrypt this as follows.  We have to insert a period after
`others'.  The remainder of the phrase consists of two sentence parts weaved
together.  They share the words `That what you'.  Disentangling them, I get:

========================================================================
] Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear [
] to others.                                                           [
]    That what you were  was not otherwise than what you had been,     [
] or that what you might have been                                     [
]                        would have appeared to them to be otherwise.  [
========================================================================

Unfortunately, the meaning of the first sentence is now contrary to the
intended meaning `Be what you would seem to be.'

-- 
 Peter de Bruin             +------------------------------------------+
 University of Groningen    |  Awareness of our Universal Brotherhood  |
 The Netherlands            |  shall irresistably penetrate society.   |
 ( P.J.de.Bruin@cs.rug.nl ) +------------------------------------------+
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
From: wpborden@rodan.acs.syr.edu (William P Borden)
Subject: Re: free will
Organization: Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 92 12:40:36 EDT



I would like to attempt a certain refinement of the concept of free will
here.  With regards to Mr. Peregrino, two qualities are essential:

	1.  That the action being willed cannot be predicted by
            any observer.
	2.  That the action can be predicted by that which wills the
            action.

Where point 1. is false, a choice has not been made, but rather forced
by circumstance; in essence, the constraints of history and natural law.
Where point 2. is false, a choice has not been made, but merely happens;
a random event where free will has played no part.

The deterministic nature of the universe is not an issue.  As Mr. Feld
noted, chaos theory shows that any recursively self-referential system
(humans, certainly) may be both deterministic and unpredictable.  He
also correctly pointed out that at quantum scales, the actions of
electrons (individually, at any rate) cannot be predicted.  However,
Bell's theorem seems to suggest that electrons cannot predict
their own behaviour, and so cannot be said to have free will.

Free will is an experiential fact, and arguments that it is illusory
are not satisfactory.  It would be more useful to ask what concept
of free will can explain the experience of it, as well as its results.

						William P. Borden
						--------//-------


Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,sci.logic,cs.logic
From: tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow)
Subject: Re: a quote from "Alice"
Organization: None.  This saves me from writing a disclaimer.
Date: Tue, 1 Sep 92 20:45:32 GMT

In article <OZ.92Sep1122054@ursa.sis.yorku.ca> oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes:
>I assume this is in reference to your initial argument, where there
>are supposed to be extra parts to the sentence, just to confuse the
>unsuspecting reader, but it seems clear in that discussion that you
>simply misunderstood the structure of the sentence.

Clear?  Really?  I don't think so.  The only difference between your
analysis and mine is that you replaced "not otherwise than" with "as" and I
simply dropped the phrase altogether.  Thus we have the reductions:

OY: Never imagine yourself to be as what it might appear to
    others that X was as Y would have appeared to them to be
    otherwise.

TC: Never imagine yourself to be what it might appear to
    others that X was Y would have appeared to them to be
    otherwise.

The first "as" does not change the sense of the sentence, and the second
"as" occurs after the point where the sentence ceases to be grammatical so
it doesn't help.  In fact, changing the second "not otherwise than" to an
"as" is somewhat dubious.  Consider:

A. I am not otherwise than what you might have been.
B. I am not otherwise than what you might have been was.

A'. I am as what you might have been.
B'. I am as what you might have been was.

Now A, A' and B' are all perfectly grammatical sentences.  But in B, there
should be an extra "what" after the "than."  Your reduction of "not
otherwise than" to "as" results in something like B', so in other words it
amounts to inserting an extra "what" into the sentence---which you can argue
is implicit in the original sentence, but it depends on bending the rules of
grammar a bit.  On the other hand, my omission of "not otherwise than"
retains the grammatical structure of the original sentence strictly.
-- 
Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,sci.logic,cs.logic
From: oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit)
Subject: Re: a quote from "Alice"
Organization: York U. Student Information Systems Project
	<OZ.92Aug29232827@ursa.sis.yorku.ca>
	<1992Aug30.203410.12823@galois.mit.edu>
Date: Mon, 31 Aug 1992 17:16:34 GMT

Timothy Y. Chow writes:

   >I am not sure that your "obvious fix" is legitimate, ...

The obvious fix was:
	
	Y would have appeared		 Y would have appeared
	to them to be not as	  ==>	 to them not to be [as]

where [as] is appearently redundant. where do you see a problem?

   >					... but in any case your
   >last sentence doesn't make sense:

   >>	Never imagine yourself as
   >>	what it might appear to others
   >>	that 
   >>		you were not what you appeared to be

   >This sentence has the same structure as the following one, which is clearly
   >ungrammatical.

   >  Never imagine yourself as what it seems that coal is black.

It is possible that I may have missed something in that reduction,
so feel free to present an alternative reduction. As for the last
sentence, you may wish to spell out exactly what is ungrammatical,
and why.

Of course, it is possible that the Duchess's sentence really does
end somewhere near the middle, and the rest is just for confusion,
as you were claiming earlier. :-]

oz
---
postings are long, life is short.  |  electric: oz@nexus.yorku.ca
                    -- anonymous   |  phone:[416] 736 2100 x33976




Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,sci.logic,cs.logic
From: tycchow@riesz.mit.edu (Timothy Y. Chow)
Subject: Re: a quote from "Alice"
Organization: None.  This saves me from writing a disclaimer.
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 92 21:52:02 GMT

In article <OZ.92Aug27151100@ursa.sis.yorku.ca> oz@ursa.sis.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes:
>By the way, notwithstanding Tim Chow's
>repeated claims to the contrary, we think that Duchess's sentence is
>grammatically correct, and is reducible without gratuitous deletions
>from the original sentence.

So what is wrong with my analysis of your breakdown?  It boils down to:

1. Your last two "what" clauses are independent clauses.
2. The structure of the sentences requires the "what" clauses to be noun
clauses.

Which of these claims is incorrect?
-- 
Tim Chow     tycchow@math.mit.edu
Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs
30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vacuum tubes and weigh
only 1 1/2 tons.                               ---Popular Mechanics, March 1949
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
From: feld@ccu.umanitoba.ca (Michael Feld)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Assasination
Date: 25 Aug 92 16:48:08 GMT
Organization: University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

>Say I'm standing in front of an attacker who has just poured a gallon of
>gasoline on me, and is about to light it with a torch.  It seems to me that
>it would be morally justified of me to shoot him, even though in falling
>down he is certain to set off the fire.
>mikhail zeleny@husc.harvard.edu
>"Un de mes plus grands plaisirs est de jurer Dieu quand je bande."
>
Sounds like Samson all over again, and M.A.D.: the gun's firing is the
kicker here.  THROW the gun at him, why don't you, or use your knife
; and then there are threats.
-- 
Michael Feld                         | E-mail:  <feld@ccu.umanitoba.ca>
Dept. of Philosophy                  | FAX:     (204) 261-0021
University of Manitoba               | Voice:   (204) 474-9136
Winnipeg, MB, R3T 2M8, Canada
From: "elliott chapin" <elliott.chapin@canrem.com>
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: publication notice
Date: 26 Aug 92 10:18:33 EST
Reply-To: "elliott chapin" <elliott.chapin@canrem.com>
Distribution: talk
Organization: Canada Remote Systems

          LETTERS FROM QUEBEC     v.1   Philosophy for Peace and Justice

          by Howard Richards, Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College, 
          Richmond, Indiana.

          ISBN 0-920759-14-9

          CONTENTS

          Letter One         Think Globally, Act Locally
          Letter Two         Claudel's Hope
          Letter Three       The Love of Wisdom
          Letter Four        Rationality
          Letter Five        Please Do Not Understand Me Too Quickly
          Letter Six         Hunger
          Letter Seven       The Abatement of the Little Mother
          Letter Eight       Friedman's Guillotine
          Letter Nine        Irrational Rationality
          Letter Ten         The Night Walker, the Blue Lady,
                             the Frog Stone, the Chicken in the Road
          Letter Eleven      A Dialogue on Metaphysics with Veronica

Elliott Chapin
---
  DeLuxe 1.12 #4315  elliott.chapin@canrem.com
--
Canada Remote Systems  - Toronto, Ontario/Detroit, MI
World's Largest PCBOARD System - 416-629-7000/629-7044
Xref: sparky talk.philosophy.misc:1693 talk.religion.misc:15446
From: danoc@earlybird.Eng.Sun.COM (Dan O'Connell [CONTRACTOR])
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Metaphysics of Plato and Parmenides
Date: 2 Sep 92 20:27:09 GMT
Organization: Subvert the Dominant Paradigm, Inc.
NNTP-Posting-Host: earlybird

(HOOPLE TOM) writes:

                              ...since anything which really exists cannot
 be destroyed or really changed in any significant way.

Tell that to the people in South Florida and central Louisiana. . .


Dano
From: ric@hpspdla.spd.HP.COM (Ric Peregrino)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: free will
Date: 25 Aug 92 17:28:31 GMT
Organization: HP Stanford Park - Palo Alto, CA

In response,,,

>To say that A is sufficient for B is to say
>that B can't occur (exist, obtain, etc) without A's existing, occurring,
>etc. It doesn't mean that A causes B.

This is not the normal definition of sufficient. I think necessary
is what you mean here.

>To say that A is NECESSARY for B is to say
>that B can't occur (exist, obtain, etc) without A's existing, occurring,
>etc. It doesn't mean that A causes B.

Besides that I agree.

>No no no, no. Prediction doesn't imply foreknowledge.

This may be my fault for being sloppy. I meant something like:

1. Free will exists if there is no way to make predictions of human actions
such that the they always happen to within the uncertainty of the predictions.

>2 goes through only if it assumed in advance that human agency can be
>described adequately within the conceptual apparatus of physics, or if the
>concepts used to describe human purposeful activity (intention, choice, etc)
>can be given a purely physicalistic interpretation without loss of meaning.

I don't think you need to assume this because humans are made from the
elements of the periodic table. If I can predict the positions of these
elements (see 1. above), then I can tell what the human's actions were.
Maybe you could complain then that I can't tell you what the human is
thinking; that's yet another definition of free will. Besides, I was
offering a definition of free will. There's no going through or not about
it. How would you precisely define free will and deterministic physics?

>About 3, the mere absence in the world of strict regularities wouldn't by
>itself guarantee the existence of free will.

I agree here. Where's 3?

>Can anyone help me get my 8/7 free will message, either from a possible archive
>or from someone who has a copy. Thanks.

Not here, sorry.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ric Peregrino     c/o Hewlett Packard Co.        I represent only myself
ric@spd.hp.com    1501 Page Mill Rd. Bldg. 5M    Buy low, sell high
415-857-7526      Palo Alto, CA 94304            Do DC photons exist?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Brennan.J.Murphy.53@nd.edu (Brennan J. Murphy)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Paper Topic Help!!!
Date: 25 Aug 92 17:14:19 GMT
Followup-To: talk.philosophy.misc
Organization: University of Notre Dame

I am a Junior Philosophy major at the University of Notre Dame.  In my
Metaphysics 424 classs, I am required to to write 2 8-10 page papers
dealing with any aspect of metaphysics. There are 3 restrictions: 1)the
papers have t be about Metaphysics, 2) they have to be original papers and
3) they have to be not merely descriptive but critical.
Can anyone offer suggestions as to what would be an interesting topic and
where I can find background information on the topic?  I am interested in
Alvin Plantinga's work and as of now I would like to focus on some of the
questions he deals with.
Thanks for your help,
Brennan
From: jk@panix.com (Jim Kalb)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: Assasination
Date: 26 Aug 92 00:56:17 GMT
Organization: PANIX Public Access Unix & Internet, NYC

zeleny@husc9.harvard.edu (Michael Zeleny) writes:

>Assuming that assasination is justifiable, our deontologically minded hero
>will want to kill Hitler, not in order to save some innocent lives thereby,
>but because such killing would be right, because Hitler's continued
>survival poses an intentional threat to innocent lives.  The distinction
>makes a difference, on which more anon.

[anon:]

>Say I'm standing in front of an attacker who has just poured a gallon of
>gasoline on me, and is about to light it with a torch.  It seems to me that
>it would be morally justified of me to shoot him, even though in falling
>down he is certain to set off the fire.

I don't follow.  You aren't killing the attacker because his *continued
survival* poses a threat to your life -- his death poses an equal
threat.  Perhaps your point is that if you plugged him the threat he
posed would no longer be intentional.  But suppose he really hated you,
and said while he we was standing there, "OK, Zeleny, I know you have a
gun and you'll probably shoot me before this is over but I don't care
because even if you kill me you'll still die."  (I'm assuming you're
not killing him because he might kill again.)  Would that deprive you of
your justification for killing him?

-- 
    Jim Kalb (jk@panix.com)
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
From: ak254@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Ralph A. Gardner-Chavis)
Subject: Re: free will
Reply-To: ak254@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Ralph A. Gardner-Chavis)
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Date: Sun, 30 Aug 92 01:08:01 GMT


 
I will not live long enough to search all of the dictionaries for every 
definition of `freewill'.  Most of what I have seen have been
examples of the use of the word `freewill'.  The only entry that I
considered an attempt at a definition said that freewill is `action without
antecedent'.
 
If I ever hear anyone speaking fluent Sanskrit then I will know that 
freewill is operating.  Since no one at this time has heard Sanskrit, 
speaking it will be action without an antecedent.  (Of course, I will 
not know that it is Sanskrit since I also have not heard it.) <G>
 
It can be said that we have choices but which ever choice is made is the one
that has the determining factor as its antecedent.  No matter how slight is
the factor which determines the choice, it is still the DETERMINING factor(s). 
Thus the concept of freewill is a subjective illusion, it only appears to us
that we have freewill. Someone who knows us very well can, within the limit of
their knowledge, both of our past experiences and how these past experiences
will influence us at this instant, predict our next action.  It is very, very
seldom that this knowledge is available to anyone and generally not even
available to us.  The `choices' which are not taken may be considered
`virtual' choices since they are not real and did not occur at that instant.
 
Ralph
 ------------
----------
-- 
Intelligent life on Mars? 
I didn't think there was intelligent life on Earth!
From: danoc@earlybird.Eng.Sun.COM (Dan O'Connell [CONTRACTOR])
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: free will
Date: 2 Sep 1992 23:08:59 GMT
Organization: the.devils.advocate.exception.police
NNTP-Posting-Host: earlybird

(William P Borden) writes:
 
 I would like to attempt a certain refinement of the concept of free will
 here.  With regards to Mr. Peregrino, two qualities are essential:
 
 	1.  That the action being willed cannot be predicted by
             any observer.
 	2.  That the action can be predicted by that which wills the
             action.

Re: (1) above: you have free will to choose pepperoni or green pepper
or some item within the menu; if I know of your general choices, I
can predict with some accuracy what that choice would be, even though
you still have "free will".

Re: (2) above: I may be unable (for a variety of reasons) to
predict an action, until it actually happens even though I 
am the actor (instances are left as excercises for the 
student :)

Dano

Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,talk.religion.misc
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc
Subject: Re: **VIABILITY OF MORAL EDUCATION**
From: RGINZBERG@eagle.wesleyan.edu (Ruth Ginzberg)
Date: 3 Sep 92 09:46:28 EDT
Distribution: world
Organization: Philosophy Dept., Wesleyan University
X-News-Reader: VMS NEWS 1.20In-Reply-To: psgoh@pieman.compserv.utas.edu.au's message of Wed, 2 Sep 92 23:25:37 GMTLines: 41

oh, i wasn't going to post anything to this group any more, but i'll bite...

In <1992Sep2.232537.25518@cam.compserv.utas.edu.au> psgoh@pieman.compserv.utas.edu.au writes:

> Sometimes I wonder what we mean by moral education in our society that is
> so changing and uncertain. In most democratice countries, adults are
> allowed to voice their opinion and to take part in making government
> policies and decisions that will affect their lives. Democratic society
> allows its citizens a certain degree of freedom to control and make 
> choices that they are conscious of, to decide what is right and wrong.
> To make such moral decisions, they should have the ability to think 
> rationally, intelligently etc...
> 
> SO - my question is HOW DO WE then proceed to educate our future
> children in aspects of rationality..???? Hmm..??

ok, a couple of questions for you:

1) in a democratic society,(a) do things BECOME right or wrong by virtue of the
majority of folks voting to make them so, or (b) will the vote of the majority
just happen to correspond with what actually IS right or wrong, perhaps because
of some embedded wisdom in the populace, or (c) can the majority make an error
about what it (mistakenly) BELIEVES is right or wrong?

2) in a democratic society, what ought the relationship be between things that
are morally right or wrong & things that are legally permissible or legally
impermissible? {careful: you don't want (e.g.) laws against hurting your best
friend's feelings, or moral retribution for violating a trespassing law while
saving your neighbor from a fire, do you}

3) do you think that rational, intelligent thinking, alone, will provide for
the most moral world, or do we need folks who are perhaps rational &
intelligent thinkers, but also (e.g.) predisposed to use those cerebral talents
toward good (rather than evil) ends?

i think your answers to these questions will exert considerable influence upon
yr final theory of moral education. 

------------------------
Ruth Ginzberg <rginzberg@eagle.wesleyan.edu>
Philosophy Department;Wesleyan University;USA
Newsgroups: talk.philosophy.misc,talk.religion.misc