Wayfarer

Besides, 'theism' is a word of the internet age. I bet before about 10 years ago, you would never find a description of someone being a 'theist'. It's...

It is not only 'up for dispute', it's factually incorrect. Buddhism is a religion, sure, but it is not based on the existence of God. Buddhists genera...

Sure. No disputing that. But it is not material to the question of whether animals have rights. I've found a good encyclopedia article on the history ...

I'm just reading an article on the origin of the concept of human rights. It notes that one of the historical sources is said to be Aristotle's Nichom...

It's awful. It's happened in Australia before - farmers selling livestock to overseas markets where they're sent by ship and then slaughtered overseas...

That said, there's a story breaking in Australia about shocking treatment of livestock in the live animal trade, by abbatoirs in Indonesia. I'm standi...

What do you mean, c'mon? I'm saying that humans are in a different category to animals - they have symbolic communication, and also rights, responsibi...

Ego is not an entity but a pattern of habituated activity.

But not symbolic communication and it’s a difference that makes a difference.

No, it's definitively not. One of the underlying problems in all of this is that it blurs the distinction between humans and animals. In fact it's hig...

I think the Aristotelian origin of 'metaphysics' ought not to be forgotten, otherwise an already difficult subject becomes impossible to define. Even ...

I didn't see it as germane to the point of the OP, which initially seemed to me a philosophical question, using Buddhism as an illustrative example. T...

The nearest to a philosophical sense of necessary being is the term 'unconditioned'. This points to the fundamental distinction between the uncreated ...

Modern science is much more narrow in scope than that. It is only concerned with meaning insofar as it confirms or falsifies a specific hypothesis und...

We are different to animals due to language and self-awareness. Rights come with responsibilities, they're part of the social contract. If a human kil...

I'm not implying it, I'm stating it. If there are examples of theistic Buddhism, then I'd be interested to know what they are. There are holy beings i...

There's a major difference between ancient and traditional philosophy and science as now understood. Traditional philosophy was 'top-down' in its appr...

:ok: Thanks, very interesting page and site. I will take some time to try and absorb that. :pray:

I think 'solipsism' results from a misunderstanding of Descartes. Because of his famous idea, cogito ergo sum, it is supposed that the only thing you ...

Fair enough! Rather it's that the deities they worship are not recognised as such by monotheism. Buddhism is not theistic in the sense of relying on G...

Guilty as charged.

the OP is engaging in just the kind of speculative questions that I referred to. Completely different question. Nowadays you can browse books from all...

Buddhism is not a theistic religion, though, and would never use that terminology.

Not at all. Remember the character Vachagotta, the kinds of questions he would ask and the responses to them? The 'undetermined questions?' ('avyakart...

https://static.ffx.io/images/$zoom_0.367%2C$multiply_1.0582%2C$ratio_1.5%2C$width_756%2C$x_114%2C$y_0/t_crop_custom/q_86%2Cf_auto/ed36cc13a42cafbb9240...

:100:

Likewise the arguments for the immortality of the soul in the Phaedo and other sources in Plato. Nowadays such ideas are dismissed as antiquated or ar...

:up:

Yes, rights are conferred, but they also need to be exercised by a subject in order for the idea to be meaningful. What brought this up for me was a p...

:up: It's not really a dismissal of idealism, so much as a sympathetic critique, I would have thought. But, thanks for the reference, appreciated.

@"tim wood"- happened upon this rather fascinating essay in The Atlantic recently, on just this point. Touches on the Pyrronian aspects of David Hume'...

Perhaps you're taking the notion of skepticism too far, so far that it begins to appear nonsensical. There's a kind of specious armchair skepticism wh...

Where in Husserl's writings would you look for that? See this article.

Rights should only be accorded to beings to whom the concept is meaningful. But this is not to say that all beings should not be treated humanely.

Spending too much time on Internet forums, probably.

Some relevant excerpts: (The discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012) illustrates is the ever present gap between theory and verification. The standard m...

Comes from Greek philosophy, Plato and Aristotle in particular. Questions of what can we know and how can we know it, but asked outside the strict emp...

??nyat? is not mentioned in that essay and a lot of people won’t know what is meant by it.

arranged by what, is the question.

Recall I had started by referring to an essay on Schopenhauer's philosophy of religion. This essay says that Schop. situated 'man's need for metaphysi...

I provided material about Schopenhauer’s philosophy of religion, only to be told that what he names ‘man’s metaphysical need’ is a mental pathology. R...

‘those who have ears to hear, let them hear’. That doesn’t apply to everyone, there are those whose minds are irredeemably made up already.

I would start with the Panjavi one, it's a bit more approachable. Siderits is used as a University text but I find him pretty hard to read. Murti's bo...

In a pragmatic sense, 'reality' is what exists independent of anyone's knowledge or perception, the entire, vast, unperceived universe, the bulk of wh...

Buddhism, A Philosophical Approach, Cyrus Panjavi Buddhism as Philosophy, Mark Siderits The Central Philosophy of Buddhism, T.R.V. Murti (The last was...

It wasn't 'a stance'. It was advice. I agreed with it, for the reasons I gave, I'm not going to elaborate. Point taken, although there's a lot of dive...

It was a more a matter of responding to the speculative questions in the OP. 'The Sabbasava Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 2) mentions 16 questions which are ...

How I interpreted that quote, is that Nietszche is criticizing asceticism, on the grounds that asceticism is I interpret that to mean that he associat...

Like I said - sacred cow. The irony.