Wayfarer

Very much in the shadow of WWII and the Cold War. Walter Benjamin, who was an esteemed member of their circle, had been forced to suicide on pain of b...

I've read quite a bit about that book, but never actually read it, but it struck me as pretty important. It interests me that they make many of the sa...

It is rather like what East Asian Buddhism calls 'realising the true nature'. (Many critics have noted the convergences of Schopenhauer and Buddhism i...

I don't agree with that paraphrase of Schopenhauer's analysis. I think the crucial point about Schopenhauer and Kant (and to some extent the other Ger...

Well, I thought it appropriate to bring Schopenhauer back into the discussion, as that is what it started with. I will also add I thought it an excell...

Yes, I was going to add something along those lines.

That what we generally presume to be external to us is not, in fact, external to us, but only exists as an idea in relation to the consciousness which...

I am in complete agreement with your conclusion, but you don't make any kind of argument for it. But I'll leave you to it, others here seem to see som...

Thanks. My question was about the sense in which a domain, such as the domain of natural numbers, is real, but not phenomenally existent. I notice tha...

Unfortunately for your OP, this is a nonsense expression. It not actually an equation or even a meaningful sentence. The equations which govern the mo...

I've never read that the mechanistic model of the Universe started with Aquinas. I had thought it started around the time of Descartes, who firmly bel...

Alfred North Whitehead said that the laws of physics nowadays play the role assigned to the inexorable decrees of fate in Greek drama.

And yet

'Soul' is very much a term from the lexicon of Greek and Hebrew religions. There's no direct equivalent in Buddhism. Buddhism denies that anything exi...

Not to mention coffee cups, although if we went on, this would become rather a large list. Anyway, to hark back to Schopenhauer, as the thread was abo...

That filthy slot!

said Ptolemy

It undercuts Berkeley's form of idealism, but Kant still maintains transcendental idealism. The separateness of subject and object is undeniable. I ex...

Wouldn't that correspond to the real nature of the knowing subject? If the domain of representations corresponds to 'the phenomenal realm', then the n...

Nice of you to say so, but I consider myself more 'casual reader' than 'expert' :yikes: The aspect of this argument that most perplexes me is the sugg...

Exactly right, I completely mangled it. :yikes:

Thanks for that very painstaking response to my question about 'akrasia'. Again, my inner voice can only say - 'do more reading'. :sad: I have just vi...

As soon as you get into the actual physics, then it's really better suited to Physics Forum. The question is not one about physics, it's one about mea...

:up: __ I wonder if the following rings a bell? Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin (4 February 1889 – 10 February 1968) was a Russian American sociologist ...

During my hiatus from the forum last year I discovered John Vervaeke, a Canadian lecturer in cognitive science and psychology, who's channel is called...

We can only hope.

Nevertheless, let's not fall into the woke hysteria of judging every historical character against the standards of modern liberalism.

He’s not entirely off the hook, his attitude towards and treatment of animals was far from exemplary, but wanton torture, it wasn’t.

As an aside, I found during the course of that thread that Descartes likely DID NOT commit the terrible acts of cruelty that had been ascribed to him ...

Indeed! as am I, clearly. I meant I thought you were heading in a good direction in respect of this OP.

'Religion' is not and has never been a monolithic entity, a single thing. When it's used in this context, it denotes the Enlightenment schema of philo...

Yes - is 'the domain of natural numbers' a meaningful term?

One of the ideas I've picked up on this forum is Wittgenstein's 'meaning is use' - that you see what a word really means in the way it is used, not it...

They're deep and difficult topics. To discuss them requires awareness of the cultural and historical context within which they evolved and how they we...

Coming to think of it, here's a legitimate question within your area of expertise: there is a 'domain of natural numbers', is there not? And there are...

Have you ever happened across Wigner's essay The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences? It's atrocious prose, but I found ...

I would never visit a math forum. My school maths was terrible. My interest in the philosophy of math came later in life. I have enough interest in an...

I am very mindful of some parallels with Buddhist philosophy in this regard. One of the attributes of the Buddha is described in the Sanskrit term, ya...

:up: There's another thing which this brings to mind. It occurs with respect to 'akrasia', a term used by Socrates to describe the state of acting aga...

I've posted maybe a dozen times on Physics Forum, which is a fantastically well-run and professional forum, but they give very short shrift to anythin...

And they do!

I know, right? And it’s what Trump thinks he really looks like….

Wish to hell the federal indictments would drop. This interminable 'is he or isn't he/will they or won't they?' is intolerable. I'll add that of all t...

You may be interested to note that Philip Goff registered and entered one post in response to my criticism of one of his articles about six years back...

This is clearly derived from or descended from Parmenides, is it not?

A footnote: The way I parse this in the modern lexicon is to use the expression 'beyond existence' rather than 'beyond being'. 'Existence' is what 'th...

:chin:

There are degrees. Normality is not 'insane' by definition, but there's a range. I mean, there's been discussion of the fact that sociopaths and psych...

By the standards of the enlightened, everyone is indeed a bit mad. (According to Buddhist scholar William S. Waldron there is a Pali aphorism 'Sabbe s...

Can you see the issue lurking behind these controversies? It is that naturalism/empiricism - 'our best epistemic theories' - don't seem to provide for...