The Philosophy Discussion Forum

duszek wrote:But if everything influences everything else, more of less, then what is special about the complementary influence ?

Nothing special, really. It is just a facilitator.

Complementarity is also about robustness. It brings elements together to create a fuller picture, a fuller world and a fuller experience. For instance, a particular wine can complement and complete an individual's gastronomic experience. Having two complementary eyes creates for us a more complete a...

Having recently gone to St. Petersburg and to a cemetery there were many of Russia's great thinkers reside I began wondering what produced these people. Subsequently I came across Isaiah Berlin's book "Russian Thinkers". It seems that Russian intellectuals were born of German Romanticism. ...

Complementarity doesn’t necessary have to be composed of the same kind or related opposites. For instance, the sky and a tree can be complementary in that together they produce a visually pleasing view. Or a piece of furniture can be complementary to the size of a room and other fixtures in it. So c...

Through the facilitation of humans an inert stone can function as a tool, as you say. In that manner the human acts as the complementary element.

Lehman Brothers was not a bank, per se. It was an investment bank. Nevertheless, it was overly leveraged with its investments and that's what did it in. In Canada our banks are conservative and well regulated. Banks and money make an excellent complementary relationship. They facilitate each other. ...

Having money in the bank makes me feel secure, and happy to a great extent. Not having that security would make me more miserable than I am.

When colours are complementary they produce something new together, for example yellow and blue produce green. Freedom and safety produce ... happiness ? On the other hand, if yellow and blue remain independent of each other they can aesthetically produce a very pleasing, complementary scene. And o...

I am not sure why Robinson Crusoe was tossed into the discussion but there are some features that lend him to it. Perhaps Crusoe did feel like a free man on his island but he did not believe in equality, which is apparent in how he treated his man Friday. He insisted on Friday calling him Master . C...

I am not sure whether the desire for freedom and the desire for equality can be complementary. I didn't say that freedom and the desire for equality are complementary. These desires reside in all of us; we want to be treated as equal yet we want our freedom. But they aren't necessarily complementar...

MacFarlane writes about the evolution of functionality , the functionality of an agent, the ability of an agent to be or become functional through complementarity. He writes that the individual agent on its own does not have the complexity to handle all contingencies it encounters. Thus it seeks out...

The violinist who smashes the violin ends a complementary relationship which was one-sided from the beginning. I doubt that a complementary relationship between a conscious being and an inanimate object is at all possible. The violin simply does not care. Only the violinist does care, very much. Ne...

Nietzsche´s Zarathustra would be of a different opinion and prefer the solitude of a hermit than the debilitating company of blinking over-civilized humanity. That got me thinking about the meaning of hermit and how it might apply to the discussion. Probably there is a connection between hermit and...

How about a solo artist having a complementary relationship with her/his instrument where one day the artist turns on said instrument and smashes it to pieces, turning it into a un-complementary relationship. Or a person who has a stroke and loses the influence of part of its brain, making for a men...

A violinist or a singer can theoretically refuse to cooperate and start performing a solo part.

There will be a complementarity in some other way.