Basically you're casting yourself in the role of philosophy lecturer, trying to set the poor newbie straight, who's being fed useless disinformation b...
Where did I imply that I thought that they were imbeciles? Google the term 'empiricist philosophers', and they are the top two names! It doesn't help ...
Thanks. My main source for Benecareff's paper is the article The Indispensability Argument in the Philosophy of Mathematics. It makes many straightfor...
It was Locke's phrase is that men are born 'tabula rasa', a blank slate, on which knowledge is inscribed by experience. Locke is a textbook example of...
Where's that from? An image I have contemplated, although not turned into verse, is that of the discovery in some obscure alleyway, in some obscure an...
I always say 'fundamentalists argue with rocks'. What I mean is, when they take issue with carbon dating and other forms of empirical science then the...
I think empiricism and rationalism are quite sufficiently defined, and that Locke and Liebniz, respectively, are exemplars. Furthemore, that Locke's (...
I heard that in one world, Wigner's Friend adopted Schrodinger's Cat, and they lived happily ever after. That'd be the world I'd choose, although I pr...
Not true. Religions are notorious for dictating what you're obliged to believe. In Christianity, that is the meaning of 'orthodox'. In times past if y...
Thanks! I've heard of that book, I will certainly take a look. :up: (Although he qualifies that further down in the speech when he says 'If modern sci...
I might have mentioned before David Albert's review of Lawrence Krauss' book Universe from Nothing which makes exactly this point. Krauss also talks a...
Apokrisis is a gun when it comes to this subject. I'm also interested in Penrose's cyclical cosmology model. One big bang is creation ex nihilo, cycli...
I think it's an important idea but the following observations come to mind. First, the term 'thought' is rather vague, isn't it? I'm not asking for a ...
Bollocks. LeMaitra’s work was never ‘debunked’. It was elaborated, improved, refined - in exactly the same way as many other foundational papers in 20...
Richard Dawkins has written a number of books about exactly that - if not ‘proving’ that God does not exist, then strongly suggesting it: As you haven...
I’ll get to the point. Religious fundamentalists believe they can use science to prove God exists. Scientific materialists believe they can use scienc...
Thanks! I barely understand it myself, but overall I'm a fan of Kelly Ross, and I thought it was worth airing a dissenting voice to the standard opini...
There is a big difference between the conception of reason in ancient philosophy and modern. The ancients intuitively felt that there was a relationsh...
I was attempting a response to But the page I should have linked to is The Ontology and Cosmology of Non-Euclidean Geometry, where we read that: I don...
The duality of ‘self-and-world’ develops in infancy. Interestingly, in translations of the early Buddhist texts, the expression ‘self and world’ is so...
It's because we can choose. Not only can choose, but have to choose. Regarding wether there is a faculty of discrimination, as distinct from mind/mana...
I think it is natural to divide subjects between what is 'in the mind' and what is 'in the world'. What is 'in the world' is said to exist independent...
Phenomena are ‘what appears’. I think what is supposed to become clear through Buddhism is not necessarily the subject of experience per se, but an un...
you have to allow for the fact that not all 'intelligible objects' are real, because humans have imagination as well as intellect. Given imagination a...
It is common knowledge that Frege's logicist project failed. Frege 0, Godel 1. And guess what? Besides, the point I was illustrating from Frege is tha...
Bare assertion with no supporting argument. You simply referred to behaviourism, which has been obsolete since the 1940's. It's not clear to you. The ...
Tosh. When Einstein discovered relativity, he was not ‘behaving’ or ‘acting’, or rather, his ‘behaviour’ and ‘action’ was mainly sitting and writing, ...
Indeed! But the principles that Socrates articulated in the Apology were then to become central to the works of Plato, thence Aristotle, and ultimatel...
In pre-modern cultures, individuals were not expected to 'forge their own destiny', it was handed to them as a result of their caste, social status, a...
What does the Euclidean theorem look like? The ability to grasp a rational idea of that kind is different to a sensory impression, surely. Also the Bu...
There nevertheless must be an element that discerns the meaning of dharma and elects to pursue it. Furthermore it’s a Buddhist dogma that only humans ...
I agree with you, but thousands wouldn’t. I’ve had many exchanges with others on this Forum who believe that ‘existence’ and ‘reality’ are synonyms, a...
Not if you subscribe to fictionalism. The whole debate is exactly about the ontological status of abstracts. Mathematical Platonism says that the real...
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