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I mean... you don't have to use the internet... Technology has been and is the best way of improving the quality of life for human beings. Had you liv...

This is one of the reasons why nominalism is so tedious and in all likelihood incorrect. Our language does not determine the identity of objects, the ...

It's definitely a Western thing, since afaik re-birth in Buddhism is more akin to the passing of a flame from one candle to the next. You obtain enlig...

So, like I was saying, Aquinas rather "bastardized" Aristotelianism. That's not to say that what he did was remarkable, but he certainly had an agenda...

They were free to think within the confines of Scripture. Like Whitehead said: Christianity is a religion looking for a metaphysics (...while Buddhism...

I might be wrong but I think Schop1 meant that Augustine (and Aquinas) limited themselves somewhat by adhering to Christianity. Whereas people like Pl...

Like I said, the Church was playing its cards.

Thank you, I hadn't heard of Kenny, although apparently Feser responds to his critiques. I'll have to read the original documents some time though. An...

What do you consider to be the "perennial" tradition? May I ask why you do not? This would make you, at minimum, opposed to his theology.

Peirce was basically an idealist - didn't he think matter was "condensed" mind? It's why it rubs me the wrong way when people believe in an objective,...

How does existence do this? By power ontology, teleology, tychism, etc?

(Y) I cannot and will not stand arguments. I enjoy discussion, not flame wars.

Interesting thoughts. What I was thinking was that, contra folk conceptions of a perfectly orderly universe that obeys timeless laws, you have "breaks...

Interesting. This seems to support the idea that, when natural selection is not at its most brutal (survival or nothing), sophistication can really ta...

I'll admit I never heard of such a theory (that the brain acts as a repressive organ and not a storage and functional organ), but I don't really see h...

It's clear that many animals are like us, at least in behavior. And if it's any indication from our own studies of our own species, it's that mental a...

What the hell bro. I don't know what to say to this. If you care about suffering, you'll do something about it.

From what I can tell, it's that idealism accounts for accidents only because what happens outside of our perceptions is dependent upon what happens wi...

How would the transcendental idealist or simulationist deal with the fact that accidents happen all the time? I could get struck by lightning and neve...

I feel like idealism might have some substance behind it, but it seems to fail to account for accidents, as well as the experience of discovering some...

Peter Zapffe and Julio Cabrera. Also Philipp Mainlander.

That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about primal material. It's not concrete, you can't hold it. Concreteness is complex, prime material is...

Exactly. Phenomenologically, substance is vague. But it isn't actually "vague". Although I'm sympathetic to the idea that vagueness is a real feature ...

You're calling Plato a mystic. OK. I adopted the hypostasis view because it makes sense and then adopted the necessary components like substance later...

Because it's what makes sense to me. I've stated my reasons and tried to make it as clear as I could. I view metaphysics as the study of being qua bei...

If what I said is an assertion, then everything you said is an assertion as well. I'm coming from a certain view point, and you are coming from a diff...

Well I think processes are dependent upon a hypostasis. It doesn't make any sense to talk of structure, vagueness, proto-objecthood, process, or what ...

It reminds me of Meillassoux's correlationism. I'm in the middle of reading his After Finitude, so I'll have to post some more later, but Meillassoux ...

No. The metaphysician isn't concerned with how universals evolved. He's concerned with whether or not universals exist. The evolving structure narrati...

Where does this sparrow emerge from? How is this "ancestral" generality not a particular? The fact that we can identify it and communicate about it sh...

I mean sure, we can have "higher-level" pleasures or what have you, but at the end of the day it's pain or pleasure. That's what drives our decisions.

Why is nominalism incompatible with this narrative? There might be a historic narrative of universalism, but nominalism, albeit clunky, isn't totally ...

There's a difference, though, between what universals exist, and whether or not universals even exist in the first place. For the metaphysician it doe...

Other than Aristotle what are some good resources on four cause causation, in particular its relationship to science?

I think John is more concerned with the method of finding truth. Or, in this case, estimating truth. I don't think he's going to deny that group agree...

Levinas, I believe, identifies our first acknowledgement of the Other when we figure out it has a will of its own. In a more scientific sense we might...

If we're to call them metaphysical, then we ought to distinguish between the metaphysics Carnap was criticizing and his apparent "metaphysics" that be...

Here's a link to a book on externalism, or the extended mind, btw: http://www.imd.inder.cu/adjuntos/article/604/The%20Extended%20Mind.pdf

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP1C-W8A69s

I got you fam. (Y)

I'd be interested in reading what you have. I can't say that I ever thought that a connection could be made between Aristotle and Schopenhauer, consid...

Externalism brah. The mind isn't an isolated specimen.

I made this a while ago, posted elsewhere, but here is a rough sketch of what I believe is the value of a life: https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1ye05cmM7Kc...

I believe Peirce actually thought that matter was just condensed mind.

Does Peirce think propositions are a real aspect of objective reality? Kind of like causal dispositions?

I'm not sure if harming oneself out of self-interest is even coherent. Surely, we can go through some tough times for the greater good, the overall go...

There's different kinds of nominalism, which can make it confusing. One kind of nominalism rejects abstract objects. The one you were referring to is ...

Collective personal values may make an impersonal value. Impersonal values tend to describe states of affairs: if you have to pick between scenario A ...

Yes, nominalism gets it backwards. Things are not similar because of our language, they are similar because of their ontological makeup. The names we ...

Is it not be the case that a nihilist rejects the existence of impersonal values? It would be impossible to live as a nihilist and believe that one's ...