Wayfarer

I read that as a parable about the development of self-consciousness and language. Animal awareness is innocent in the sense that it has no sense of s...

But nothing like empiricism as generally understood. Buddhism is maybe more like what William James had in mind with 'radical empiricism'. James belie...

Digression, but the question I have for Hoffman is, if everything you think is a result of evolutionary adaptation, doesn't that include his theory of...

A couple of things to bear in mind. One is the popular notion that order simply emerges spontaneously from chaos. This seems to be the conclusion favo...

Grist to the mill. Not that I find it the least cause for joy. More for dissappointment.

Just for the sake of clarity: So, you're still 'realist', but you are outsourcing measurement to everything that exists: So, 'measurement', for you, o...

Something the readers of this thread might enjoy (and apologies to Dfpolis for gatecrashing) - an excellent review from Edward Feser on a contemporary...

Physics is a human undertaking. Who is doing the measuring is just as much part of it as the object of measurement. The mistake is to believe that phy...

I gave up at ‘there’s a unique form for every particular’.

In what possible world is there no suffering? Where children emerge wholly formed and not subject to the hazards of infancy? Where there is no predati...

Inanimate objects don't measure anything. And measurement is a conscious process. The 'moon exists to the rock' is a meaningless statement. 'Imagine t...

Speaking of magic, John Michael Greer has a series of posts on disenchantment, the current edition being The Destiny of Disenchantment, discussing Owe...

:100: This is similar to John Hick’s argument in Evil and the God of Love. Can’t find any fault with it.

I think this is a confused argument. What strikes me first of all is that good and evil are manifest in experience from one’s earliest memories, in th...

I don't understand the point you're trying to illustrate. Nothing on the macroscopic level really exists in anything like the mathematical superpositi...

Nihilism is basically 'nothing matters' - which is close in meaning to 'nothing is real' or 'it doesn't make any difference what you do'. It doesn't h...

I agree that tackling Aristotle is daunting (and my knowledge of him is fragmentary). The standard encyclopedia sources are the Stanford Encyclopedia ...

I studied Protestant Work Ethic as an undergrad, it was unbelievably dense but it opened up the field of sociology of religion - Durkheim, Peter Berge...

Did you ever encounter Habermas' dialogues with Cardinal Ratzinger? I've never read the books but I've read a few articles about them - see Does Reaso...

I only meant 'bogus' in that it's not a bona fide quote. Einstein has many great philosophical quotes, and I'd have like that to be one of them, but i...

You know, 'disenchantment' has it's own Wikipedia entry. The article goes onto mention the Frankfurt School, which we've discussed recently. There's a...

There have been many multi-million dollar lawsuits over yoga terminology and acoutrements in the USA, with corporations copyrighting Sanskrit terms an...

Here's the current installment from the excellent Matt O'Dowd of PBS Spacetime on the reality of space and time (hey he's been working up to this titl...

as T Clark mentions, there are similar ideas found in many forms of Eastern philosophy and religion. I think the underlying problem is that modern cul...

You're welcome. Those books were staples of my reading in the 1970's.

Pondering what is 'before the beginning' is just the kind of question that Buddhism designates as unanswerable, of which in some versions, there are t...

I can't read Greek. Sophisticated readers (such as yourself) will understand the use of the word 'substance' in philosophy as being different to norma...

No, again it’s that ‘substance’ is a misleading translation of ‘ousia’, (as per Joe Sachs’ comment earlier in the thread). It’s not that ‘ouisua’ sugg...

It’s the use of the word ‘substance’ especially when said to ‘immaterial substance’ . That’s what I say is oxymoronic. But then, ‘substance’ is not th...

There’s that oxymoronic term again.

Any rational sentient beings would presumably make some of the same discoveries. That’s the meaning of ‘true in all possible worlds.’

The Muslims invented it but Old Nick sure knows how to bend it to his ends.

‘God created the integers. All else is the work of man.’ Leopold Kronicker.

I had rather thought if the phrase used ‘principle’ instead of ‘substance’ it might remain defensible.

I thought it might have a metaphysical interpretation but perhaps not.

Thereby providing justification for all those who say that Aristotle should be relegated to history with the geocentric universe and the crystalline s...

Wouldn’t the claim of the existence of such a bodily substance be an empirical claim? If it’s a substance, then either it can be detected by scientifi...

That’s quite alright. Thanks for your feedback.

Gee you have an interesting reading list! On mine is a book I might have mentioned previously, Mind and the Cosmic Order: How the Mind Creates the Fea...

Is that really so? The IEP article I've referred to on the Indispensability Argument for Mathematics says: Another essay says I interpreted these obje...

I don't know if that is Plato's view. From everything I read, the basic tenet of mathematical Platonism is that numbers are real independently of any ...

I think there's a deeper underlying issue. Despite your professed scepticism about scientific realism, I think your philosophical framework is still c...

how so?

Basically you're asking, How is it that all humans are homo sapiens yet with such a diversity of appearance?

I hear you.

As I said - through inductive reasoning, we can expect that the measurement is taken, that the data exists on that system unobserved. But you won't em...

It's significant that empiricist discussions of the nature of number tend to question how it is that humans even have a faculty that knows mathematica...

You're not even allowing for pure mathematics. Also for the role that mathematics has had in disclosing things about nature that we could never, ever ...

First, I need to comment again on the translation of 'being' by 'substance' in Aristotle, which Joe Sachs criticizes here. Sachs says in reference to ...

Not 'mind' in the sense of 'conscious mind'. It is purely cellular and organic in nature, but it still can be conceptualised in terms of interpretatio...