Wayfarer

He seems like a double agent. If Trump’s a RINO, Manchin’s a DINO.

In German-speaking culture, there is Giesteswissenschaften, the ‘sciences of spirit’. There’s no direct equivalent in the Anglosphere.

Whereas, as Zahavi says, he claims that he doesn’t deny that consciousness exists, but then proceeds to define it out of existence anyway. Don’t worry...

:rofl: It is that introspection is notoriously difficult to schematise. It originated with Wilhelm Wundt, a German-American who was one of the founder...

It is axiomatic in Buddhism that regardless of your beliefs, actions will reap consequences either in this life or some other. Belief that at death th...

:up: :clap:

Of course. And the Buddha preserved the name and the memory of those teachers, but he also ultimately struck out on his own. In the Pali texts, the Bu...

Ah, that’s the Metta Sutta. Thank you for the reminder. I read both those books of Armstrong’s. I didn’t much like her book on Buddhism but overall sh...

There are many forces antagonistic to Western culture, the Fabian Society and Theosophy must rank a pretty long way down the list. The real enemy is t...

Your problem is that your ontology lacks any kind of conceptual space for the distinction that needs to be made here.

I wouldn't be too cynical about that. At the time - late nineteenth century - culture was in a huge ferment, ideas from all over the world were becomi...

The point is simply that the argument that just because a chariot cannot be reduced to its parts, doesn't mean that there is no chariot. It's a mereol...

It's also because Dennett has to deny that the first-person perspective contains any elements that are not in principle reproducible from a third-pers...

@"Apollodorus" - a Platonist challenge to Buddhist philosophy that I once put on a Buddhist forum, although it didn't attract much interest. There's a...

:up:

They're not easy questions. Some of the teachers I had admired were later caught up in scandals. There's a saying that 'all power corrupts', and that ...

And they probably wouldn’t appreciate my syncretism but I do hold the tradition in sufficient esteem to have passed Pali 101. (One of the most difficu...

Those are Pali terms, universally accepted by the Theravada. The aim of the Buddhist path is not comfortable adjustment to life in the world or for th...

The Buddha is 'lokuttara', it literally means 'world-transcending' or 'above the world', and also 'lokuviddu', knower of worlds (i.e. the six realms o...

I suppose you could find, in Spinoza, recommendations for the way in which the 'amor dei intellectualis' could be sought or cultivated, and alternativ...

Very briefly, in various cultures, the 'great chain of being' was the assumed hierarchy of kinds of being(s). At the bottom level is minerals and what...

From the first paragraph of Zahavi's paper: I have said time and again that this is what Dennett says, and every time I say it you tell me I'm attacki...

there is probably a book on it, somewhere. I remember studying the idea but I can’t recall any specific text. Huston Smith’s The World’s Religions mig...

I don’t think its a question of something being more real than ‘this life’, but I think there’s a definite sense in which the way we live closes us of...

Another point to recall is that there are threefolds in many different religious traditions. The Hindu trinity has Brahma the creator, Vishnu the pres...

One of the key factors of the 'scientific revolution' that occured in the early modern period was the conjunction of Galileo, Kepler, and Newton's dis...

So that's 'the real Christianity' in your mind? A problem with religion (and a lot of other cultural forms), is that it has been packaged and repeated...

'Psychologism' and 'physicalism' are the attempts to account for the mind in terms of psychological attributes or in terms of neuro-science. Physicali...

'Intentionality' was one of the major themes of a philosopher called Franz Brentano. And he was one of the seminal figures behind phenomenology, which...

'Intentionality' is a key term in modern philosophy. Intentionality is the power of minds to be about something: to represent or to stand for things, ...

There is considerable archeological evidence of the Buddha's life recorded in many languages and scripts, dating back to within a couple of centuries ...

You were asking as to what criteria to judge a spiritual teacher. I said the criteria are not objective, because what is objective is contingent, and ...

I have been dissillusioned at times by things that have been discovered about various spiritual teachers, but they're not all tarred with that brush. ...

No, what I said was that I thought your remark about the 'rolling of the dice' in respect of Christianity was arrant nonsense. I was born into a Chris...

I deleted the comment so there's no point discussing it. Buddhism is frequently accused of nihilism - by Brahmins and also Christians. But it is not -...

Some hellfire preachers often seem to appear deliberately threatening but overall I agree with you. Well, it's not a social or political philosophy, b...

Kind of like how you respond to anyone who dares to differ with you.

When I studied comparative religion, I noticed that that Old School approach, personified by the avuncular head of department, was, I suppose 'curator...

You can bet that in Buddhist cultures there will be some monks who will teach that Christians and Muslims are all doomed for the Buddhist Avici hell u...

I think there is a difference between the kind of analytical meditation that you find in Advaita and Buddhist philosophy and the practice of petitiona...

And of the apparent huge divisions between different religious conceptions:

The mirrors reflect light into the Optical Telescope Element for image capture. (I imagine if our eyes were mirrors then shaving or driving or all man...

No apologies needed, it's just a matter of not diverting the thread. I do know the theory now called 'the big bang theory' was originally the subject ...

Science is concerned with objective and measurable facts that are true for any observer. In the context of this particular thread, I'm finding it hard...

The reason is not silly. Or that matter is immaterial.

….is doing the Republicans an historic service.

I'm still considering it.

I suppose, to answer a few of my own questions: - NY Times etc would not publish classified information as this is illegal. A large part of Wikileaks ...

Of course. If say the NY Times or Washington Post had accessed those sources and published classified information, do you think the editor of those jo...