Jimmy Kimmel back on air from next Tuesday! :clap: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/business/media/jimmy-kimmel-returns-abc.html?unlocked_article_co...
Although, speaking of 'atomic facts', and as Buddhist philosophy has now been introduced, Buddhism has a psycho-philosophical schema, known as abhidam...
The argument is that the reference to "spiritual/supernatural objects" is a category error. That by declaring the 'spiritual or supernatural' to consi...
Fair enough, mistake on my part. However I don’t take issue with physicalism because you hold it, but because I believe it’s a mistaken philosophical ...
Nihilism. There's an anecdote I sometimes tell. During the 1950's the then Pope Pius XXIV said: What impressed me about this was the fact that Lemaîtr...
I think this interpretation is really a symptom of the old Cartesian division between mind and world, self and other. We inherit, both innately and cu...
PRESS RELEASE: FOR IMMEDIATE PUBLICATION Department of Educational Standards and Community Safety Administration Announces Removal of Voltaire Materia...
Ever read Schopenhauer? Yours is the man-in-the-street version of idealism, which is 'the hope that everything will turn out for the best'. Idealism p...
For anyone interested, current email update from John Vervaeke. It discusses some of the themes we’ve been looking at in this and other threads. Why O...
In Western metaphysics, ‘creation’ has a specific status, reserved for the Creator (‘creature’ meaning ‘created being’). It is of course used more bro...
Trump is going full totalitarian mode now. The latest outrage is the firing of Erik S. Siebert, a DA who had been told to rake up incriminating eviden...
It is true that Descartes had to forego the publication of some of his works for fear of religious persecution, and that the trial of Galileo was argu...
The way I took it is that addition of numbers is sequential - first, 7, then 'add 5' giving the result '12'. It is the fact of the sequential order of...
Indeed! As Heisenberg says, this is broadly compatible with Aristotle's notion of matter as pure potentiality ('res potentia'). And once we admit pote...
But if they form a sphere - one of marble, another of stone, etc - then we recognise the sphere, irrespective of the matter from which it is formed. T...
Here again the echo of Aristotle's form-matter dualism. He transposes Aristotle’s schema from the level of substances to the level of cognition. Inste...
But again, please understand what I see as the fundamental category error in this formulation. By casting the non-physical in terms of 'spiritual/supe...
In its early modern form, materialism drew its authority directly from the successes of the new science. Galileo’s mathematization of motion, Descarte...
Not quite what it says. I don't claim that the mind is constitutive of objects in the way that wood is constitutive of boats or clay of pots. It is an...
I have a book published mid 1980’s The Intelligent Universe, Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasingha mentioned in the article. They made a good case for...
Thanks for clarifying. But this seems to sharpen the question rather than resolve it. If physicalism transcends physics in the sense you describe, the...
I appreciate the time and care you've taken to explain your viewpoint but I'm afraid we'll remain at loggerheads. But how can physicalism transcend ph...
You could say the role of the synthetic a priori in science is precisely to bridge the gap between logical necessity and empirical causation. Logic al...
A priori means “prior to experience.” If you tell me you have seven beers in the fridge and I bring to another five to give you, I can know you have t...
Quite, the Prolegomena. That’s where I read it. But inductive arguments are a posteriori by definition. Dirac’s prediction of antimatter was not an in...
That is perfectly in keeping with the ‘mind-created world’. Bateson is one of the sources of ‘enactivism’ and a major influence in The Embodied Mind, ...
If mathematics were merely convention, then its success in physics would indeed be a miracle — why should arbitrary symbols line up so exactly with th...
Briefly, although it wasn’t on the curriculum of the courses I did. Kant in no way denied the fundamental role of language, I don’t think that would h...
Other creatures also have perceptual experience, and some can even discriminate small quantities. But they don’t go on to develop arithmetic. That sho...
I provided the argument for it upthread, but it was ignored. That argument was, you have wildly divergent views of what quantum physics means (realist...
Perhaps by scattering a range of balls of different sizes and saying 'fetch the large, white ball' or 'the ball nearest the lemon tree.' That might do...
You might turn your attention to the 3 arguments presented in the post above this one. Such as the claim that 'It is wrong to think that the task of p...
You’re right that one can treat “7+5=12” as analytic by stipulation, or check it a posteriori with pebbles. But Kant’s point is that neither account e...
I hope to make a plausible case for anyone reading. So, sure, I seek to persuade. I've explained, I hope, that I believe physicalism is lacking in som...
I asked ChatGPT ‘When an LLM ‘gets’ a joke and signal ‘ha ha’ - it doesn’t actually feel amused, so much as recognizing it as a joke and responding ac...
That's an interesting Pinker quote, although I myself frequently think in English sentences - not that I regard that as typical or as something everyo...
Furthermore, I don’t think it’s helpful to frame this as though my philosophical outlook simply reduces to my personality or my particular “areas of c...
The reconstructions are extraordinary, no question. But it’s important to see what’s really happening: the system has to be trained for hours on each ...
That technology is astounding, no question. But it should be born in mind that those systems are trained on many hours of stimulus and response for pa...
Well, bear in mind, that was a paraphrase of Noam Chomsky and Robert Berwick's book. But it is also addressed in a polemical argument by Aristotelian ...
But surely philosophy is concerned with the whole range of questions about the human condition. The task of science is to explore and explain what exi...
I don't really understand what you mean by this. I think you correctly identify the role of Protestantism in the formation of individualism, and the r...
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