philosophy

Thanks, I'll check it out.

You're referring to modern metaphysics. My question concerns metaphysics in the time of early Greek philosophy, specifically the Pre-Socratics and Pla...

I'm tempted to agree, which is why it's such a frustrating and fascinating question!

As aforestated, Aristotle did not consider the questions that Heraclitus and Parmenides were asking to be scientific; questions relating to ''Being'',...

Because ''Being'' has traditionally been understood to mean an unchanging, metaphysical reality and ''Becoming'' has been understood to mean a world o...

Yeah, I also like ''continuum''.

If you're interested, I'd recommend you check out Parmenides' argument (easily accessible online) as it is fascinating. As I understand it, Parmenides...

I think that's the point, especially when we come to Nietzsche. Being (i.e. an unchanging, metaphysical reality) cannot be accessed either through the...

I should have defined the terms, my bad. In this context, ''Being'' refers to an unchanging reality. ''Becoming'' refers to changing reality. Our sens...

But change seems to presuppose the existence of a thing. If something is changing then there must be a thing, i.e. an identity, that is undergoing cha...

I agree with you and it is for these very reasons that I am not sympathetic to post-modernism. Perhaps I phrased myself incorrectly. What I should hav...

But continental philosophy is not the same as postmodernism. Kant and Husserl were certainly not post-modernists, and arguably neither was Hegel. All ...

Agreed. He makes for awful reading.

But this still means that there is something that transmits this information. We can distinguish between that which transmits and that which is transm...

I think so, yes. Wouldn't the objective speed of the ball be the speed of the ball as it is, independent of observation? The moment we observe the bal...

I get your point here. But what if we had a universe with no observers? If motion is relative to an observer, would it not follow that there would be ...

This is interesting. So, if a person were locked in a room with nothing in that room, would that person still retain a sense of the passage of time?

But isn't the key word in all this appearance? The ball appears to travel slowly for the observer on Earth, but it doesn't follow from this that the b...

My premise is that time is constant; it does not speed up, nor slow down. So, if we are using measuring devices to indicate time, those devices have t...

Thanks for your answer. Heidegger's account, then, seems to lead to a certain subjectivism that undermines science. The scientist claims that he is de...

@"MindForged" Thanks. I'd be curious to hear what your views on Nietzsche are regarding this. Nietzsche essentially argues that we simplify the world ...

I've got to go for now but I will respond when I'm back.

''All that I can know are my perceptions''. Translation: All of my knowledge consists of perceptions. Yes. I would have thought that that would follow...

I literally just wrote in the post above: ''all that I can know are my perceptions'' If that does not answer your question there's not much more I can...

There's no need for a condescending tone. I have repeatedly said that perception of an unperceived object is impossible, hence we can have no knowledg...

Sorry, I thought I would have made this clear. Answer: because ''knowledge'' that is independent of that which you perceive entails knowledge of that ...

Sure, you can infer that the tree continues to exist independently of your perception of it but it does not follow that you can know this. The inducti...

I guess it depends how you define ''faith''. Regarding induction, Hume showed that there is no non-circular justification of induction and, as such, i...

I distinguished between knowledge of what I am perceiving and knowledge of that which is beyond my perception. The idealist affirms that you can know ...

I completely agree that it makes sense. Hume would as well (can't remember the exact passage but he says ultimately that once he's stopped philosophiz...

Because I know that I am perceiving what I am perceiving. I cannot know whether what I am perceiving exists independent of my perception of it since t...

I haven't said that just because Hume says something it must be correct; I quoted him to better clarify my position. How do you know that an object ca...

But it still seems to me that realism is refutable in a way that idealism is not. Realism is refutable in that it commits one to a contradictory term,...

If I'm not mistaken, Hume was writing after Berkeley. Although I think it is fair to call both Hume and Berkeley ''idealists'', they are idealists in ...

External to my body is locational in that the pen is in a different location to my body. External to my mind seems to be non-locational. My position i...

Sorry, could you clarify how you would distinguish between a locational and a non-locational view of externality? I have an idea of what you mean but ...

The pen is external to the body in that it is outside my body. The pen is not external to my mind since it is being perceived, i.e. it is inside my mi...

I am not aware that I have made a claim about relative extension? You seem to be suggesting that I believe that the mind extends beyond the body. I ha...

To quote the passage from Hume that I've been referring to: ''We may observe, that 'tis universally allow'd by philosophers, and is besides pretty obv...

I have no idea what the relation between mind and body is. My body is as much an external object to my mind as is the pen. My point is that the moment...

I haven't changed my argument. If you read above I clarified that by ''external'' I mean external not to one's body but to one's mind. This pen in fro...

The idealist does not deny that things exist independently of one's mind, i.e. independently of one's perception. The idealist does claim that one can...

The idealist doesn't deny that one is perceiving an object. What he denies is that one can know that that object exists independently of his perceptio...

But the realist position commits one to perceiving an unperceived object (i.e. ''seeing'' an object outside of one's mind), a contradiction in terms, ...

But that's precisely the point - the idealist's claim (original post) that the existence of the external world cannot be proved is irrefutable.

Perhaps I was not clear in what I meant by ''external''. By external I mean external not to one's body but to one's mind, i.e. to one's perception. Yo...

Thanks for this. I found the following section, from Hegel's Science of Logic, also helpful: Things are called “in themselves” in so far as abstractio...