Wayfarer

I’m perfectly aware of what eliminative materialism actually says, and I think it is absurd. of those books, Kumar’s is the best.

Noted, but I still think Nagel’s criticism is correct. Any tips on what those compelling reasons are? If the whole argument about ‘the first person’ i...

Again, you’d be mistaken. Just read this passage again and tell me what you think Nagel has wrong when he spells out what Dennett says and what he thi...

'woofarer' is an ad hominem. To say that quantum physics did not completely revolutionise the conception of physics is not a matter for debate. The qu...

That's interresting. Albright was always someone I had respect for. And agree that the Yugoslav intervention was more successful. Still I think the hu...

I did a term paper under Keith Campbell at the University of Sydney, on the subject of Philosophy of Matter, and Lucretius’ atomism (gained High Disti...

I have plenty of references for what I’ve said. Current book I’m reading on it is Nature Loves to Hide, Shimon Malin. Others I’ve read recently are Ma...

You have to be able to do better than that. ‘Tortuous prose’ falls short. There is only one profound philosophical point that has been made by quantum...

I see your point, and it’s an important one.

‘Radical’ means ‘from the root’. Both are radical philosophies. Buddhism was and is a radical philosophy, although it’s been thoroughly domesticated i...

Right. Of course I’ve heard of the British Medical Journal but you could read that blog post not knowing that and be none the wiser at the end. Of cou...

There's been an ABC TV special, second installment this week, Beyond the Towers. It goes right back to 9/11 and Rumsfield-Cheney-Bush and spells out t...

Indeed, although they're both fairly polemical accounts, seems to me - written by industry insiders. Difficult to parse what the problem is with Pete ...

Well, I'm into the first one - incidentally the second link seems to be same article - and the author is not overall critical of Ioaniddes, says he ha...

I judged that comment I made 'too sarcastic' and deleted it. I try to avoid sarcasm. OK here's a challenge. You won't be able to back that up with any...

:up: Thanks, interesting.

I am interested if there's anything in the press about it. I was quite interested in what Ioannidis had to say.

Got any documentation on that?

He thinks the first-person perspective is an illusion, or no different in meaning from the third-person perspective.

There's a lot of literature on the possible influences between Madhyamaka and Pyrrho of Elis. There's quite a good wikipedia entry on it here. The rad...

Yes that is a huge blot on our international reputation. There was completely bi-partisan, if very cautious, consensus until 2010, when the most obnox...

Fortunately, the Right here are moderated by the egalatarian strain in Australian politics. Not totally, of course, but we really don't have local cou...

There's a discussion of that in Theaetetus, under the heading of ''Knowledge is True Judgement with an Account" - you can find a summary here. There a...

I suppose you're right - it's a very tough question. Has parallels to climate policy, doesn't it? in that case also the greater good requires making s...

Much less, though. Yes, the data is moving around, but I think it's indisputable that vaccinated subjects are less likely to contract the virus, commu...

Didn't say that. I made an admittedly sardonic appeal to 'the principle of natural selection'. The fly in the ointment being that refusing vaccination...

Not bitter at all. More annoyed. Just making an observation and stating a case. Timely occasion for my favourite quote from an American politician - '...

I trust Darwinian selection will winnow you out before too long....let's hope you don't take too many others with you....

I do recognize that control measures are a restriction of civil liberties. No question. But the alternatives are worse, if it means loosing your life ...

Of the 40,000 people who have died in Florida, there's bound to be a fair number of children who have lost parents. That'll hurt them a lot more than ...

Spot on! (I should mention this book, The Blind Spot, by William Byers. It is exactly about this point. I went and ferreted it out from an obscure bra...

Beautiful prose, although I don’t understand all of the allusions. My feeling about The Enlightenment is that its aim is to bend the world to our will...

:rofl: NSW (Australia) is about to hit 1,000 daily cases, probably (today's number was 919). Still, Florida USA, similar population, is hitting around...

Check out https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/ treasure trove of .pdf files on early modern philosophy, revised editions with annotations. CCEL has an in...

Repeatedly.

:rofl: Aren't you the person who was lecturing me on my supposed inability to distinguish 'methodological' from 'metaphysical' naturalism? Would you l...

The point I make is that, since the Enlightenment, science has assumed the cloak of authority with respect to arbitration of what should be considered...

But ignorance is what binds you to the cycle of re-birth, so liberation from that, and liberation from ignorance, amounts to the same. The problem is ...

Plato's dialogues set a very high bar for what constitutes knowledge. The Theaetetus ends in aporia, with no accepted account of what constitutes know...

the traditional form of dualism was not Descartes’ mind and body dualism, but Aristotle’s matter-form (hylomorphic) dualism. It would be impossible to...

An approach known as ‘shut up and calculate’.

It was the suggestion that his negative review was motivated by financial gain that I said was ad hom, which it plainly was. No kidding.

Plainly! So stop telling me that I don't understand what I'm talking about. Thomas Nagel is a serious philosopher, with a long publishing history. Dan...

Don't you think that's rather a low blow, in a discussion such as this? Basically an ad hominem? That Nagel, who is, in my view, really a serious and ...

You know what 'reductionism' means, right? This is the definition of reductionism. I'm done mate. From my side, it's like beating my head against wall...

*

And an alternative.

That is it. It is his whole philosophical approach in a nutshell, everything else comes from that. The 'acid' of 'Darwin's dangerous idea' eats throug...

'Can't be bothered' is not 'running away'. The post I provided is all I have to say on it, if you disagree, good for you.

It is exactly what he says.