Wayfarer

You’re missing a basic distinction, ‘phenomena’ being ‘what appears’, and the ‘noumenal’, coined by Kant, meaning something like ‘the object of intell...

I wonder if he will break down when he can no longer avoid facing up to the reality of his loss. His ego relies on constant affirmation, on being surr...

OK here's a Trump update. His repeated claims that he was 'cheated' out of election victory have been utterly refuted by a statement from his own elec...

I presumed I was arguing the case against determinism. That is the usual form in threads about this subject.

The point is, human nature is a 'holistic' notion. It is about the human as a whole, what is his/her underlying esse, nature, raison d'etre. Whereas n...

But that is not an argument AGAINST free will. If your will is determined by conscious, emotional and rational influences, then your decisions are fre...

See if you can spot the implicit contradiction in this paragraph.

I understand the arguments - that the will is determined by pre-existing factors. It might be determined by evolutionary imperatives, or by cultural c...

Of your own free will, presumably. Not because anything made you come back.

Bolds added. https://www.cisa.gov/news/2020/11/12/joint-statement-elections-infrastructure-government-coordinating-council-election

Yes, well, tricky to fold the History of the Universe and Whether it was Created into a fortune-cookie sized aphorism with vague references to various...

Any suggestions as to who they were, and what solutions they proposed? You don’t need to spell it out but a reference would be helpful.

Antinomies can’t be solved. That’s what makes them ‘antinomies’.

My sketchy understanding is that zero was rejected by Greek mathematicians in part because of the philosophical implications of non-being or nothingne...

Naturalism - what you see out the window. Phenomenology - you looking out the window. Isn't the domain of ordinary, everyday experience precisely what...

Haven't you switched from 'rational beings' (i.e. humans) to 'natural things' here? 'Most natural things' could surely include non-rational creatures,...

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-time-to-stop-trumps-power-grab-is-right-now

Maybe! Hadn’t considered that. Note the very first sentence: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agen...

Much truth in that. The foundation of the Royal Society, the first truly scientific society, explicitly excluded consideration of anything 'metaphysic...

That's more in the domain of hermenuetics and comparative mythology. There are myriad facts but there will always be aspects of religious lore that ar...

I guess Trump is demonstrating, as if it wasn't abundantly obvious already, that any gesture involving or implying 'grace' - as in, 'gracious acceptan...

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/08/the-multiverse-as-imagination-killer/497417/

Spot on. Although refer to my last comment above.

Says you. The facts remain, and they're directly relevant to the OP. In fact, there were influential clerics who argued strongly against any censure o...

:up: That's something I didn't know. Don't agree with that. That's kind of fashionable reaction against so called 'human exceptionalism'. We have to o...

It's certainly true in many cases. But it became a major theme in Western culture during and after the Enlightenment. The conflict I see is between re...

As noted, Jacalyn Duffyn whose interest in these cases grew from her own expert testimony, found much evidence; she’s a haematologist, historian of sc...

Frames of reference are associated with the theory of relativity, not from Galileo, as I understood it. I don’t believe that Galileo deliberately soug...

But it’s there for very good reason, and it can’t easily be rejected. But it can be revealed through analysis. It was Galileo Galilei who wrote ‘the b...

Well, yes and no.

Oh, I’m well aware of that. I have plenty of criticisms of the Bush clan, although I’ve come to appreciate Bush snr’s lack of ego. I heard the other d...

Many accounts of miracles are rejected on the basis of scientific evidence. Jacalyn Duffyn, whose article I linked to, says: So I think it's a falseho...

I watched some of the 2016 presidential debates, I don't know how Jeb looks up close, but from afar, he came across as a kindly suburban accountant ty...

Well of course I'm in perfect agreement with you, yet threads about Dennett are like zombies that refuse to stop moving even though they're fundamenta...

But the distinction between primary and secondary attributes is hard-baked into our worldview. There’s no easy way to unscramble this particular omele...

I agree with his framing of the basic issue. (2011-11-20T23:58:59). Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter . W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle E...

even so, there are thousands of cases that are documented. That author I linked to is a self-proclaimed atheist and wasn't persuaded by her study of t...

this book looks good, I've downloaded the Kindle sample, if that bears it out I'll buy the whole edition and join.

yes perhaps I chose an overly blunt polemical expression but I thought there was a lot of truth in Mary Trump's warning that his re-election would hav...

This is a 'myth of the enlightenment'. The literature of world religions including commentarial materials and apocrypha, contain vast numbers of myths...

I expect that unless the Democrats actually do win control of the Senate - and it's still a possibiilty, athough slight - the GOP will continue as the...

Why not? Let's. The last four years have been a dystopian nightmare of mendacity and mediocrity which has cast a pall over the whole world. The fact t...

I wouldn't be surprised if Trump goes very quiet now. He's never broadcast from the loosers podium previously, and his only rhetorical skills are buil...

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ba/ce/57/bace57c5e51b79fa303026d754fef8b5.gif

I think there's a parallel between qualia and 'secondary qualities' - not that Dennett says that. The primary qualities are those which are subject to...

:up: You only ever read about 'qualia' in conversations by or about this academic clique. The old gag about behaviourism (of which eliminativism is ba...

You could always reflect on the notion that you’re the only being in the Universe and that all other beings are your projections is simply absurd.

Why wouldn't the response just be that there's nothing particularly special about one location over another. Unless location is specific to a question...

I think you're right. I read a remark by an Oxford don that every philosopher is one or the other, and I'm definitely the former. At least it gives an...

of half of the electorate. Would that it was less.