I just wrote a comment (in German) on an article by two philosophers who tried to argue that "woman" is now a cluster concept, as Wittgenstein declared "game" and "number" to be. For academics, currently, all incentives are pointing away from substance.
It's very difficult to detach these ideas from some kind of universalized metaphysical realism, whether it's Platonic or Christian. To say a dog is a four-legged animal is to imply, on some level, that every dog *ought* to have four legs, and a three-legged dog is a broken or imperfect dog that falls short of that ideal.
When God created his original dogs and pronounced them good, they were both male and female (not chromosomally or morphologically abnormal in gender), and they were four-legged (not maimed).
Oh sure. And my big difficulty in these conversations is in deciding whether I should explicitly reference something like "because this is what God intended" or if, in a more pure Aristotelian sense you might say, I'm making a claim that any intelligent honest observer ought to be able to recognize.
The proclaimed experts and scientists who insist on this "spectrum" idea are in danger of defining themselves out of their professions.
I just wrote a comment (in German) on an article by two philosophers who tried to argue that "woman" is now a cluster concept, as Wittgenstein declared "game" and "number" to be. For academics, currently, all incentives are pointing away from substance.
It's very difficult to detach these ideas from some kind of universalized metaphysical realism, whether it's Platonic or Christian. To say a dog is a four-legged animal is to imply, on some level, that every dog *ought* to have four legs, and a three-legged dog is a broken or imperfect dog that falls short of that ideal.
When God created his original dogs and pronounced them good, they were both male and female (not chromosomally or morphologically abnormal in gender), and they were four-legged (not maimed).
Oh sure. And my big difficulty in these conversations is in deciding whether I should explicitly reference something like "because this is what God intended" or if, in a more pure Aristotelian sense you might say, I'm making a claim that any intelligent honest observer ought to be able to recognize.
I am unique, just like everyone else.