Wayfarer

Thanks - but in all fairness, that is sometimes a difficult thing to discern. I will always stand by Kant's differentiation of phenomena and noumena, ...

You profess admiration for Wittgenstein, I wonder what you make of this interpretation of his work, by Ray Monk, his biographer, and whether you can s...

I say that the problem with science is when its methodological attitude is generalised to describe the universe in general. So I take issue with this:...

You may well be right. What I was commenting on was the well-documented villification of public health officials that occured in the USA, particularly...

Science with respect to the COVID-19 epidemic is not all set in stone, it's not as if there's a textbook answer to all of the unknowns about what work...

There lies a vortex, apply thrusters. My rhetorical question about the Bertrand Russell essay - that was an influential essay, at the time, and charac...

How about the other quotes? They were a response to something I had said about correspondence a while back, so I kept them in my scrapbook. They seem ...

Fair enough but note that is my gloss you're dismissing.

Well stated. But, as I said, I think it's really a vernacular expression and not a theory as such. We can always say of some statement, 'that doesn't ...

Is it?

You think? Philosophy actually questions that.

Whenever you have to enclose 'object' in scare quotes you can be sure you're talking metaphysics.

‘I know it’s there, because I saw it’. That is a statement of fact. But moral judgements arise from an assessment of meaning. Positivism and its cogna...

That moral judgement requires something more than quantitative analysis? That the scope of what is moral is broader than what can be expressed in quan...

Psychopaths feel no compunction about killing and it is known that psychopathology is common in society. So, have you considered the possibility that ...

They’re good questions. In traditional moral systems, it was assumed that one was subject to judgement by God, or would endure the consequences of the...

I think this forum is great except for the times when I get annoyed by it. But overall I think the quality is very good considering that the only entr...

Science imagines the world exists without us but philosophy reflects on how we bring the world into being.

BTW just discovered a rather fascinating blog which I’m sure will be of interest to many here https://voegelinview.com/

I’ve done plenty of explaining, that was a remark.

Only in the laboratory of life - but who will be the judge? There's the rub.

You caught a boot.

I thought they lost in 1944.

The unfortunate fact is that it’s complete bollocks. There was no such myth about the Buddha, who Nietzsche grossly misinterpreted. (This is the subje...

Actually that ref to the Bell Curve was from a blog post I wrote some time back. It was a response to Sigmund Freud's well-known quip that 'the aim of...

The Christian in you dies hard, eh?

yells the mob.

The same kids who think that cotton comes from sheep and meat grows in plastic packets probably. I like Pinker, and also science, democracy, and progr...

Here's someone who agrees with you. https://www.booktopia.com.au/covers/big/9780525427575/0000/enlightenment-now.jpg

I have the idea that normality is bell curve. Those on the left - the mentally ill - are dis-integrated from society and inhibited in normal functioni...

There can be empirical evidence that you have lied or that you have killed. But that you ought not to do so is a matter of principle. And such princip...

Hey I’m not out by aeons. Only a few centuries.

Your definition of what constitutes woo is only an indication of the narrowness of your horizons I accept Pierre Hadot’s notion of philosophy - a way ...

Another hack :-) As I say, there are many scientists with profound philosophical acumen but I don’t rate Hitchens for any kind of philosophical acuity...

My view has been influenced by non-dualism, but it's a rather difficult principle to elucidate. Speaks volumes. I recognize 'methodological naturalism...

I guess, but it’s a term I use sparingly.

Besides, @"180 Proof", my beef has never been with science, but with scientific materialism as a philosophy - the attempt to apply the methods of scie...

Luke Barnes critique of Stenger. https://arxiv.org/abs/1112.4647\ https://mathscholar.org/2018/03/has-cosmic-fine-tuning-been-refuted/ Wallace dissent...

I was thinking of passages like this:

The very one we’re discussing! Socrates refers to ‘an ancient myth’ and also ‘the mysteries’. ‘The mysteries’ are a reference to the Greek ‘mystery re...

Dang. Looks like I've ended up in the wrong century. :cry:

I think it signifies that it is something other than what us moderns think of as a 'myth', by which we mean, something that could never happen. The wa...

Well, first, I'd be wary of 'objectivity' in this context. Objectivity is part of what 'the transcendent' is transcendent in respect to. Objectivity i...

I was going to suggest that Wittgenstein's passage above is distinctly Platonist in character; that 'the idea of the Good' is an example of the kind o...

According to Pierre Hadot: The reason being that in today's culture, the cosmos could not be conceived as rational, and our place in it is a consequen...

So why do you take issue with that passage from Wittgenstein? It appears to me a diagnosis of the problem.

Yeah I thought you’d find it an inconvenient passage.

Surely the expression that ‘there is an ancient doctrine that we’ve recalled’ signifies something more than here-say, in the context of one who believ...

I very much doubt that. Think through the implications of 'correspondence' and you will see that it must have profound problems: in what sense does an...

Yes, when I was a boy the milk was delivered in pails.