One very specific point I've noticed: Inorganic matter can only react to what has happened, whereas any kind of organic life is concerned with what wi...
I think the idea that is being circled around here without really being stated is metaphysical realism. Metaphysical realism is the philosophical posi...
That’s because you’ve defined the problem away. The very features you call “pseudo-problems” are precisely what make consciousness philosophically dis...
I agree with Joshs. European philosophy will consider these perspectives, which Anglo philosophy barely does. Existentialism, by its very nature, is p...
The question has a clear historical provenance. Your argument proceeds on a number of dubious and unsupported statements. No one claims that conscious...
That is the way that 'Praxis' will invariably respond any arguments of these kinds. That's your 'dogma'. And I know this from very long experience, so...
Your original post is tantalisingly close to being correct, but it misses the point in a profound way. The simple reason that consciousness was not co...
But humans are moral agents in a way that animals are not, because they can consider various courses of actions and make decisions in respect of their...
The way the matter is considered in modern culture entails that it is viewed within the frame of it being 'either subjective or objective'. There are ...
Bitbol does often quote Wittgenstein, including the quote in the original post. But I agree with Joshs that it's a mistake to say that we as agents ca...
There is no denial of moral agency in the Buddhist teaching. This is made completely clear in the Attak?r? Sutta: Here “self-doer” and “other-doer” si...
That's true in some ways.Take a look at the Wikipedia entry on the conflict thesis 'which maintains that there is an intrinsic intellectual conflict b...
The only Merleau Ponty I know is second hand, via that book I quoted, and also through The Embodied Mind, where he figures prominently. (I have a copy...
Although notice that behind this framing there’s still an implicit self–world division at work. Intelligibility is taken to be either in the mind — a ...
Marvellous verse, I had not encountered that one before. It is almost identical to what integral theorist Ken Wilbur described as the ‘pre-trans falla...
I think, following Talbott, the real nub of the issue is the relationship between the because of physical law and the because of meaning (with reason ...
Ego is really 'the self's idea of itself'. I take it to refer to our conscious self-image, how we see or imagine ourselves to be. For Freud ego is the...
Naturalism says we need to explain who is explaining in terms of what is being explained. :roll: Me, I'm still partial to 'God breathing life into cla...
A lot of people will say that, but you never see intentionality in the data. It is always only imputed - and by whom? For what reason? Do you believe ...
Excellent question. I agree that minimal, functional aboutness—I’ll use intentionality—poses no special problem for naturalism. For a signal to be use...
Well, sure, because always we have a situation to deal with. We live in a context. So we're participants, not simply spectators. As a primer on Kant s...
To try and summarise what I've attempted to spell out. Formal ideas such as logic, mathematics, and natural laws can be understood as structures of co...
Of course, Husserl is in no way re-stating classical metaphysics, and I’m not trying to equate the two. But I do think his analysis recovers—within a ...
I don't consider myself expert. An expert has considerable training in a discipline or subject area. I'm very much aware of gaps in my knowledge and t...
Not expertise, just reading. But this is basically naive realism. It assumes that we can differentiate 'the object' from 'what we know of the object',...
That OP I drafted recently, 'the predicament of modernity', is basically about this. It says, there's a clearly discernable historical geneaology behi...
I don’t think the break is as radical as you’re suggesting. The deeper difficulty, it seems to me, lies in how the reality of number—using “number” he...
It’s very important to grasp that the term ‘anatta’, which means ‘not self’ or ‘no self’ is always used as an adjective in the Pali (early Buddhist) t...
I always thought that is what Nietzsche meant when he said we hadn’t got rid of God because we can’t get rid of grammar, although I’m not much of a Ni...
Naturalistic replies (e.g. jkop) often emphasize evolutionary utility: cognition tracks what matters for survival, not truth. That story can explain w...
Especially for those who equate all religion with dogma, which is, of course, a dogma in its own right. And it’s understandable, considering the dynam...
My follow-up essay on Michel Bitbol, Phenomenology Meets Buddhism, has been published on Philosophy Today site on Medium. 'Friend link' is here. (I'm ...
The 'framework of understanding' is that of 'depedendent origination' (Prat?tyasamutp?da) - the sequence of stages which culminate in birth (and hence...
I've been logged out for a couple of weeks, working on writing, but decided to log back in and respond to some comments. But the formatting has gone r...
All of which is premised on the assumption that Buddhism cannot be what it describes itself to be, which is, a way to the total ending of suffering. N...
Chill. It's just, like, 'keep an open mind'. Myself, I have no doubt of the reality of re-birth, something in which I take no comfort whatever. But I ...
I think Hegel's philosophy of history is really important in its own right - not in relation to Kant only. I've discovered an Hegel scholar called Rob...
On the first passage (and leaving aside the digression into his commentary on Plato and Aristotle) - there's still a more 'charitable' reading of the ...
That could be said of practically all of the major religions, couldn’t it? That it doesn’t come down to peer-reviewed evidence, so much as a moral vis...
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