Wayfarer

you do know why Karl Popper introduced the criterion of testability? And that he himself was not a materialist? Agree, but this doesn't account for th...

'Self-annihilation' can't help but sound like suicide. I'm sure what is meant by it is much more like the quoted passage - absence of egotism or ego-c...

Have a look at this post where I attempt to disambiguate the word in respect of its European and Eastern applications. (Not that it makes a lot of dif...

You reckon? :yikes:

:100: As I pointed out at the beginning of this thread, and every thread on the subject of metaphysics, the word itself was coined in relation to Aris...

:100: Objectivism = ‘it really exists’. Nihilism = ‘It doesn’t exist’. The two extreme views according to Buddhism.

The point of metaphysics is to arrive at the terminus of explanation. Surely many will say that it can’t be done, but it’s worth spelling that out.

But then, where do conditions come from? Remember, metaphysics is 'first science', so you can't start with any assumed conditions. This discussion sta...

I removed my link to the wrong Hoffman. :yikes: for anyone interested, the link I had posted is this one https://www.essentiafoundation.org/about/

I think that's very likely true, but then it still begs the question as to how this can be the case, because all of the inherent characteristics of ph...

By which scientists, for example? Ever run across https://www.thethirdwayofevolution.com/ ? Determined by what? Or rather, what is it that determines?

It's only to provide food for your habitual trolling, truth be told, so I'll stop indulging you.

My point exactly. //ps// check out this blog post. Don't know anything about this guy, but his blog is pretty interesting.

That is just another way of saying 'by chance'. The million-monkeys idea - give a million monkeys typewriters and enough time and they'll produce a ma...

No argument there. But what do you make of that statement 'the whole modern conception of nature is founded on the illusion that so-called laws of nat...

It's worth reading the OP. Paul Davies got a lot of pushback for that piece. His argument is that until now, scientists simply assume scientific laws,...

There are points in the Paul Davies OP that I think are worth discussing in the context of metaphysics. He concludes: Which is what motivates this sta...

But then, he won a Templeton prize. See for instance this OP which triggered a backlash from the secular intelligentsia.

'apathea' was originally a virtue. Its meaning was close to the 'detachment' that was the subject of the quote from Meister Eckhardt. It was originall...

I was listening to a promo for Brian Cox's interesting show on the Cosmos last night when I heard him say that 'we are the most amazing things that na...

It's not that I don't have regard for them. I hold them in the highest regard. What I said was, outside the social context in which they are lived, it...

Another highly didactic post. I've studied them to some extent, and even passed Pali 101. But I'm at a loss as to how to relate to Theravada Buddhism,...

I remember a remark made by a maverick guru I used to read in regard to Westeners pursuing Eastern spiritual disciplines: 'you don't have the archetyp...

1. 'No mind' is a synonym for the dissolution of self-centred consciousness with its inherent sense of 'I and mine.'

You're welcome. Not as yet. Thanks for the reminder. Need to read up on Damasio some more.

How about: because Aristotle's Metaphysics is as sane, sober, dry, and methodical piece of philosophical reasoning as exists anywhere in the corpus. W...

Eckardt on Detachment 1. Compare with the Buddhist '8 Worldly Concerns'. 2. Compare with the Sanskrit 'neti, neti'.

I admire your openness and the friendliness of your posts. But I'm afraid the idea of 'representations of reality' is much more associated with the Br...

I think it's important to spell out the different senses of the word as there's a lot of ambiguity and misunderstanding about its meaning. I do wonder...

What would that comprise? Enlightenment in the European context 'includes a range of ideas centered on the value of human happiness, the pursuit of kn...

Incorrect. Scientific materialism is dualist through and through, based on the fundamental distinction between mind and matter, primary and secondary ...

That he never accomplished it?

None of these things are easy to understand or practice. But it doesn't mean they're unreal.

a.k.a. 'philosophy'.

Plotinus and Parmenides 1. This 'union of knower and known' is frequently encountered in non-dualist philosophies. 2. Signifying a form of divine unio...

Do you think samadhi is within the scope of empiricism?

My very first lecture in philosophy was about the distinction between empiricism and rationalism. Took me a long while to grasp that distinction, and ...

The provenance of the term is that it was used by Thomas Rhys-Davids, founder of the Pali Text Society, which translated the Pali Buddhist texts into ...

It's mainly influenced by the British empiricist tradition, that knowledge can only be grounded in what can be experienced by the senses and/or scient...

That is more typical of those who dabble rather than just rejecting them outright which is more typical of straight-ahead secular culture. In some ide...

I used to spend a fair bit of time at the Adyar Bookshop in Sydney, now long-gone, the entire collection of which was devoted to this subject. One of ...

Thanks. Very informative comments.

In all of those cases you're surmising what might happen in the absence of there being an observer. But of course, we will never know that without obs...

Indeed but I think if she did then she’d no longer be materialist.

From my very limited knowledge of physics and chemistry, I'm sure this is nonsense. For if it were so, how could any physical substance retain its pro...

That wasn't why I mentioned it. I'm interested in his view of 'Buddhist modernism' and his criticism of the assumptions behind that. Especially becaus...

Thanks. My philosophical attitude to it is that reality is 'actualised' through observation, and that what exists outside of or apart from observation...

Don't understand what you mean. You said that perhaps electrons exist outside space and time. And the article I linked to says that So - what do you m...

If they don't exist within space-time, then in what sense do they exist? There's an idea in Heisenberg that they exist as potentia - that they have a ...