Wayfarer

I acknowledged that. We know all kinds of facts about all kinds of things. Let's cut to the philosophical issue here. What we're discussing has been d...

'The world'? You might narrow it down a bit. I can make true statements about all kinds of things, but statements about 'the world' are by their natur...

And then there’s the faculty of reason, which, arguably, is not reducible to biology, even though it’s an evolved capacity. In any case, the contentio...

That it's not a 'puzzle' to be solved, or a game to be played. But there's an unavoidable paradoxicality in Buddhism, which 'goes with the territory'....

Oh, I did find it. Yangyi is mentioned on page 112, although I don't think he's credited with everything you attributed to him. But, as the essay says...

Thanks. There’s hardly been reporting on the talks, it was eclipsed by the ‘new strain of COVID’ story and the related border-closing. Diabolical conf...

I'm reading the Piya Tan article, which is very detailed, and quite lengthy (and I'm sure a good article as Piya Tan is a respected independent schola...

Well, all due respect, I don't think you've really clarified it. But then, it's a very deep question. Did you notice the brief discussion of Hubert Yo...

So it looks like the dreaded ‘no-deal Brexit’ has actually come to pass. Media is oddly silent on this fact, if it’s true.

BUT, this is not philosophy, it’s data science, about transmission of data through electronic media. Out of his theory grew the algorithms for data co...

Thanks. I've read Piya Tan's articles previously, he seems a careful scholar. //excellent and informative paper. There’s a poster by the name of Astus...

I’d need to see the reference.

Some of your imaginative leaps are tangential, to say the least. Let’s re-wind. Parable of the raft. What impresses me about this parable is its self-...

:scream:

That's not my interpretation, it's canonical. As I said before, I think it’s one of the most distinctive ideas in Buddhism, I can’t think of a paralle...

I'm meaning to study Heidegger's take on metaphysics. As I understand it, he says that metaphysics since Plato has been systematically misleading culm...

So your advice is that it's best to ignore this thread? In which case, you're not following your own advice. :wink:

There's been a sudden outbreak in Sydney's Northern Beaches area, which includes my neighborhood. After nearly a month with no community transmission,...

More here.

Although Shannon's work was specifically about transmission of information through communications systems. Again, I'm questioning whether information ...

:up: One of my favourite Buddhist authors, Gudo Wafu Nishijima, always stressed that S?t? Zen, the school established by Dogen, was very much a philos...

Yes. There is much discussion of that idea on this forum. I've learned a lot from Apokrisis about those kinds of ideas. To be pedantic, they're symbol...

I very much doubt this applies to ‘most people’ on this forum, although I’m probably one of those to whom it does. You generally read prose with Truth...

:up: Imaginative writing!

The expression is 'tosh'. Not 'posh'. 'Posh' means 'well-to-do', 'upper-class', 'snobbish'.

The succession of the Sixth Patriarch, Hui Neng, is a very lengthy story and not one which can easily be summarised, but I'll give it a try. Hui Neng ...

About which you could say nothing, were you not to employ the very laws of logic which you now say are merely contingent.

What Aristotle does or doesn't discuss, is not the point - it was precisely much of Aristotelian science that was demolished by Galileo, was it not? A...

The point of Zen is 'transmission outside words and letters'. It's an esoteric tradition so what is 'transmitted' is strictly speaking indescribable, ...

I quite agree that they are examples of irreducibility. I think that this is what the atom came to signify - the atom being 'indivisible' and 'unchang...

But that doesn't allow for the fact that in Zen/Ch'an Buddhism the basic principle of the practice is 'special transmission outside the scriptures'. I...

:up: I think that is correct. It was pointed out on Dharmawheel by Meido-roshi that this is not a koan at all, but an anecdote. It was among those pub...

The question 'where?' indicates a spatio-temporal location. The nature of logical rules and numbers is such that they give order to thought itself, so...

I did a couple of semesters under David Stove - David Hume and something else, might have been ‘positivism’. I recall his analogy about philosophical ...

The capacity to reason evolved, plainly. But what of the 'furniture of reason' itself - the laws of logic, natural numbers, and so on? They did not co...

See William James, 'A Pluralistic Universe' https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11984 Well, the 'idea of the forms' is central to Platonism. (The wiki en...

Or, we can't see the world as it really is, because we take delusory appearances to be reality. Which is much more likely, given our cultural context.

Have a read of God, Zen and the Intuition of Being. It's the book that first informed me about Jacques Maritain. (I had the paperback, it's now free o...

The point about designating something physical is that it is able to be described by (or reduced to) the laws of physics. And 'physicalism', which is ...

'Thoughts must be physical'. There's the problem. Reasoning from premisses to conclusions or making valid inferences - how can these be physical? You ...

I can’t see it, but never mind. That is interesting, I hadn't encountered these nuances. I'm very interested in the medieval notion of the 'rational s...

And I would agree! I think the rejection of the idea of purpose is one of the profound mistakes of current evolutionary theory. I only made the point ...

From that dictionary page entry on 'agapasm': Leaving aside that 'agapasm' is a most ungainly word - sounds something like a hernia or spasm! - I thin...

My bet is, no crime is there to be discovered, but the investigation must proceed and if there is, then it should culminate in prosecution. I think if...

That is what is called 'methodological naturalism' which is perfectly fine. It doesn't make any claims about the world in general - but then, it proba...

Consider that not everything in the intersubjective world was created by humans; a good deal of it is discovered - principles such as non-contradictio...

I thought it was more because intellect, nous, is what grasps the forms and the final cause, the senses receive the material impression as per sensibl...

I get all that. I understand well Peirce's attitude towards formal or organised religion, but he was also not a materialist nor atheist - belief in a ...

I think there really is a basic difference between objects and subjects. It’s an ontological distinction, and that not everything has or is a mind. I ...