User talk:JimWae/Philosophy, Space, Time, Ethics

Help needed on the Ethics article
Unfortunately, someone set up an article parallel to our article on Ethics, in violation of Wikipedia policy. That parallel article violated NPOV by acting as a blog for one man's personal views, a person that also happens to be hard-banned user. Please see Votes_for_deletion/Simple view of ethics and morals Thanks for your time. RK 20:13, Apr 8, 2005 (UTC)

Time
It is presumptuous and against Wikiquette to use the comment "leave view you do not understand alone"; Specifically, "If another disagrees with your edit, provide good reasons why you think it's appropriate"; and "Explain reversions in the edit summary box". Please, help the editing process by explaining your thinking! Banno 20:49, Jun 10, 2005 (UTC)

I will admit I should have hesitated longer & changed the edit summary. I will still ask you to refrain from editing the section that you do seem to have repeatedly disparaged each time you have edited it. Your recent edit turned it into simply a negation of the realist position, without providing any more context - btw, what happened to realism in that paragraph? --JimWae 21:01, 2005 Jun 10 (UTC)
 * Take it to talk:time Banno 06:08, Jun 11, 2005 (UTC)

Spacetime and time travel
With regards to your comment in time travel: I think this was mostly the result of bad wording in the original version of the introduction. I've attempted to clean it up. While spacetime is a background, it differs from aether in that it does not impose a preferred frame of reference (the core tenet of relativity is that the laws of physics look the same in all inertial reference frames).

For time travel itself, special relativity and the Lorentz transform note that FTL travel and time travel are equivalent (depending on your viewpoint, motion may look like one or the other), and general relativity defines geometries of spacetime (closed timelike curves) that allow time travel without requiring the traveller to violate the local rules imposed by SR and GR (i.e. traveller doesn't have to teleport or move locally FTL).

I hope this information is useful to you.--Christopher Thomas 19:26, 11 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Space
Feel free to delete the first two paragraphs if you so desire. Steve block 19:58, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Zeno's paradoxes
Hi. You have removed my submission asking whether my submission is disputing the proposed soulution. Since the Zeno's statement talks about overtaking, the solution is obviously inadequate. Reaching a goal and surpassing it are not the same at all, are they not? The solution makes Achilles reach the tortoise in infinite attempts already; so overtaking is out of question. Therefore my addition seemed necessary for me. Also i am newbie here at wiki and am somewhat amazed that removing a submission is not done by some kind of unanimous agreement between multiple people; but merely by one individual. If some people are regarded as authorities and decide how an article will look then forgive my ignorance for i am not sure about the moderation here. Thank you...

Kimal 14:17, 28 July 2005 (UTC)

Sorry I do not have time to respond fully. The first part of the paragraph is overly conclusive (POV) too. Hope to get back to you on this soon--JimWae 03:17, 2005 July 29 (UTC)

Kant, positive, and negative
In the Kant article, "positive" and "negative" are not evaluative terms but rather technical terms in philosophy, as in the phrase "the positive sciencese", which became the basis of positivism, or in Hegel's conception of "negativity". I will try to rewrite this to make this clearer. Jeremy J. Shapiro 18:38, 3 September 2005 (UTC)


 * I also have problems with
 * According to Kant, philosophy must henceforth operate within the narrow "limits of pure reason" and recognize that most positive knowledge could come only through the sciences based on sense perception and not through metaphysics, which was about things of which we could never have direct sense perception.
 * This whole idea of "positive knowledge" needs explication
 * The Lead intro is getting way too lengthy - it is meant to introduce topics, not fully cover them
 * You are giving the impression that Kant was an empiricist instead of an idealist
 * --JimWae 18:49, 2005 September 3 (UTC)


 * Do you think that there should be perhaps a separate little encyclopedia article about positive and negative knowledge? The use of positive and negative to primarily mean evaluative is a more recent colloquial usage.  Most of the dictionary definitions of "positive" are not evaluative but consist of things like "explicitly laid down", "direct" "real", "beyond all doubt", "concerned with real things", "empirical", etc.  I tried to make this clearer in my last revision, but I could certainly do it at greater length in the Kant article itself.
 * Do you think that the third paragraph on impact should come perhaps toward the end of the article? I put it in the introduction because I thought that for most people that would be one of the absolutely most basic things to know.  But it certainly could be later under "impact" or "legacy".
 * As you know, the whole point about Kant was that he WAS an empiricist -- AND an idealist. That was his key innovation.  As he said, his doctrine was one of "empirical realism and transcendental idealism", i.e he was an empiricist about knowledge of the real world, but an idealist in asserting that empirical knowledge was always shaped by the mind's constitutive activity and therefore could never be of reality as it might be independently of that activity. Jeremy J. Shapiro 18:58, 3 September 2005 (UTC)

I have serious concerns about 500 word paragraphs in the lead section - let's continue any further discussion on the article's talk page--JimWae 20:34, 2005 September 3 (UTC)

Kant
My prose is awful? I think the changes you made are "stodgy"Amerindianarts 21:43, 5 September 2005 (UTC)

No, Kant's prose is awful - he is mostly left unread--JimWae 21:45, 2005 September 5 (UTC)

I agree. What is awful is that rather than remove this new section with it's initial as relevent elsewhere, and then argue for its deletion, I have to make a dry sarcastic comment and hope someone else picks up the ball.Amerindianarts 21:50, 5 September 2005 (UTC)