Wayfarer

An insight that requires virtue and reason to obtain; not commonly found amongst the uneducated or untrained; the aim of the philosophic life. See e.g...

I’m not putting myself up as an exemplar. Like you, I’m citing sources - for instance, Pierre Hadot's, whose interpretation varies considerably from y...

But wisdom is the aspiration, surely. Otherwise, what’s the point? I would put it in more traditional terms - that there is really such a thing as the...

…for argument’s sake.

There is a distinction between mere ignorance - not knowing specific facts - and learned ignorance, an awareness of the limitations of knowledge in ex...

However the fundamental constraints and ratios, per Martin Rees’ ‘Just Six Numbers’, seem very like prior conditions required for anything to evolve. ...

Everything in the ‘futility bias’ article you linked really just amounts to cynicism - ‘don’t even try, you know it’s never going to work’. Might also...

The Nirv??a Fallacy is a new one to me, must admit. :-)

What I meant was that if you read the quoted passage “If we take in our hand any volume; of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance; let us ask.....

One interesting fact about flounders (and flatfish generally) is that as small fry, they have regular eyes, one on each side of their head. As they ma...

Mod note: removed duplicate post.

I myself can't help but see a connection between necessary truths, the domain of a priori, and an implicit order in the Cosmos (although I remain agno...

Interesting to note that the criticism also applies to his book. Not for nothing is Hume sometimes called 'the godfather of positivism'.

:up: Helped me make sense of it. What I'm reading is that the biggest inhibitor to Hezbollah's involvement is that Lebanon is already totally economic...

Yuval Noah Harari has something to say about that in a Washington Post OpEd. Addressing why the country was caught so utterly unprepared for the Hamas...

It's fantasy. That robot meditation image is grotesque. Here's an anecdote - Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, pursued an arduous form of ascetic medita...

Basically, you're describing what is generally called ‘cynicism’. It’s not a fallacious argument as such, more a negative attitude towards human natur...

A little further down from that chapter: ‘at the very moment when radical anthropomorphism set in and man could know only his own work, he had to lear...

:up: I think the motivation for questioning the existence of 'natural law' is because even though science assumes the regularities of nature designate...

I read it. I’m making a philosophical observation, not offering a scientific theory.

The criterion of objectivity would presume that, would it not?

Speaking of the hard problem, a letter was published in Sept 2023, signed by 100 notable scientific researchers, to the effect that the currently-popu...

It was intended as a defense of idealism from the outset. Splendid Hegel quote. Just the kind of thing that Marx inverted.

Another installment from the never-ending Vervaeke content stream. Listened to this one at my gym workout this morning, has a few egregious clangers (...

In classical philosophy and scholasticism, particularly within the Thomistic and Neo-Platonic traditions, there is indeed a view that the human intell...

Almost certainly, but then I am trying to follow a thread through a labyrinth. And thank you. :pray:

On further reflection, it occurs to me that an Aquinas would not endorse the notion of a 'mind-independent object'. Why? Because in his philosophical ...

At issue is NOT what I mean by it, but whether Descartes Which he does not, as the SEP link you provided amply illustrates.

No, it's because I believe it the most accurate view. And I don't believe any of that supports this contention:

:up:

As you know, since Day 1 on the forum, I've been pursuing the question of the question of the reality of number (and abstract objects generally). My v...

As I noted, briefly, I think there's a lot in Aristotlelian-Thomist philosophy - which surprises me, as I'm not Catholic, and it's usually associated ...

Courtesy a link provided by @"Janus", I've just acquired Jane McDonnell, The Pythagorean World: Why Mathematics Is Unreasonably Effective In Physics -...

BECAUSE the rational intellect knows the forms of things. Google 'the union of knower and known'. Most of the top results are either Islamic or Thomis...

You'd need to be in the same street to do that ;-)

It's not a contradiction. Time itself is one of the primary intuitions, the condition of our experience of the object. There is no time from the persp...

When we find any object, we will generally find that it has qualities and attributes such as shape, which pre-date our discovery of it. But at the sam...

But it doesn't. It simply states that empiricism is not the sole arbiter of what it true. There's no contradiction. Remember that in this analogy, 'gl...

I've said a number of times, I'm not questioning empirical facts. This is also Kant's attitude, as he was at the same time an empirical realist and a ...

There is plenty of scope to explore philosophical topics on the forum, and you’re welcome to do so, but this particular thread was about a very specif...

However, your two above entries show no discernible relevance to the topic, which specifically mentions Aquinas. The digression into Cartesian dualism...

Why ‘the world’s’ being? Could you elaborate on that?

Quite right, although as often pointed out, the term ‘idealism’ was not current in Plato’s time and would not be coined until the 1700’s. But there’s ...

The question of solipsism has come up several times in this thread. ‘If “the world” is experience alone, then how is solipsism avoided?’ From an excel...

Totally get that. Author is a young Australian researcher, this is her PhD thesis, published as a book. I found it via another really interesting arti...

The passage you’ve linked to clearly says in many places that Descartes conceives the soul and body as separate substances, with the soul acting on th...

mate you’re a champion. Averse as I am to IP violations, here my curiosity outweighs such scruples. Thanks a ton.

I’ve discovered the book I’ve been wanting to read for decades: The Pythagorean World: Why Mathematics is Unreasonably Effective in Physics, Jane McDo...

There have been many comparisons between Hume’s so-called ‘bundle theory of self’ and Buddhist no-self teachings. But obviously the context and intent...

What I meant was that while religion used to provide the ‘summum bonum’, a universally-agreed ‘highest good’, this history of sectarian religious conf...