Wayfarer

There's comparatively little discussion of any real philosophy of religion on internet fora. Nearly all discussions begin from proclamations starting ...

But in saying that, you're simply setting up the problem in such a way as to exclude exceptions. You defined 'immaterial' in materialist terms: All of...

That is what I was taking issue with.

Especially in light of the fact that everyone knows that physics says the universe should not exist at all.

https://www.rep.routledge.com/articles/thematic/critical-theory/v-1/sections/critique-of-instrumental-reason

I was not arguing 'that minds are incapable of holding models that efficacious'. That wasn't my argument. So you started by misunderstanding something...

With all the good faith in the world, Isaac, I always have the feeling that you ask me for an explanation, I provide the explanation, you fail to unde...

I was responding to this: There is a broad tendency nowadays to assert that ideas are in minds, that minds are a product of the brain, which has evolv...

they're not outside the world, but only a rational intellect can perceive them. And they're 'prior to' in exactly the sense that without the intellect...

But you can't deny that the mythologising of scientific ideas plays a huge role in popular culture - especially today's. (Actually there's rather a pe...

where 'machinery' is a metaphor for a network of concepts and predictions that arise from them.

In what sense are ideas material? If I asked you to send it to me, or show it to me, would you be showing me a material thing, with mass, and so on? I...

I think that’s because it’s a fact that is inconvenient to naturalism. It’s the crack in the egg.

I don’t think of them as ‘substances’ at all, but as principles and regularities. What this doesn’t allow for, is the fact that they enable prediction...

So if there were none of these, would e still equal mc2? Do such facts only come into existence when discovered by us?

Thanks, very considerate response. I read a lot of Hesse in my 20’s, very much part of my corpus.

Do you agree that the general theory of relativity exists?

It's not their main concern, but it is certainly a factor. It's routinely invoked as a counter to 'fine-tuning'-style arguments by pop-sci figures. In...

Point noted, I'll take that on board.

It’s not ‘Whataboutism’, they’re different facets of the same issue. And I’m not arguing that on any of these grounds, that God exists. I’m simply poi...

...as do attempts to defray the appeal of the ‘fine-tuning argument’ by referring to the possibilities of multiverses, of which ‘this universe’ ‘just ...

Interesting point - Georges Lemaître first published his hypothesis of the 'primeval atom' (which Fred Hoyle would later name, sarcastically, as the '...

Your OP doesn’t really address what the title suggests, namely, immaterial substance. I bring that up because the use of the term ‘substance’ in philo...

What I wrote reminds me of just the kind of thing Jim Hacker would say (Land of Hope and Glory plays in the background.)

Anyway, on the question ‘does ancient philosophy still speak to us today?’ - there must be something about it that does, else it doesn’t really rate a...

Incidentally Tom Wolfe Sorry, but your soul just died

And what, pray tell, would a ‘stoic research program’ comprise?

As a matter of interest, what were the two paradigmatic theories that Karl Popper referred to, when he first framed his arguments about falsifiability...

I think Marcus Aurelius’ reputation nowadays is probably better than Freud’s. Many of Freud’s theories have been subsequently deprecated, if not dismi...

There's a blog post about Lawrence Krauss that evokes a concept from Lonergan about 'animal extroversion', which ties in with a lot of what I have pre...

Which is, oddly, just what positivism says about metaphysics.

Or, 'how you feel about it'. Routledge Ency. of Phi., Critique of Instrumental Reason.

Any excuse will do. (I write user manuals also, but only for money.)

Winger won a Nobel, and Von Neumann is said to have been one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century. Maybe few physicists would know what ...

If they thought about it in those terms, they would indeed be eccentric. But they don’t posit consciousness as ‘a component’. It’s the condition for m...

Yeah he did great water-drinking and no doubt could also have done an excellent ramp-walk if he really needed to. What a chimp champ.

I wish it was that simple. (Actually coming to think of it, I wish everything in life worked as well as software.)

It has to do with what is required by the very act of speaking. Universals are not strange medieval notions, but are basic to the mechanism of meaning...

The one posed in this post about 'the seeing of colors'. It harks back to the Mary's Room thought experiment.

It was one of those iOS typos, where I mis-typed the word and iOS corrected it to the wrong word, which I only noticed when I re-read it. No, it’s not...

It’s very simple. Seeing implies looking, looking implies someone who looks, and that observer is never part of the picture.

Thank you. I don’t think it does as a matter of course. There might be some scientists who do that, and some scientific areas where it happens, but ov...

Philosophy has never been of interest to many,

I have no argument with those who admit science can’t explain everything. Not my intent. Simply to make the rhetorical point that it’s the only kind o...

Major dude, man. Being a philosopher, he’ll be famous in about a century.

Cartesian dualism and its effects on modern thought is big underlying issue. Cartesian philosophy lays out a kind of model of reality - a ‘model’ some...

(To say nothing of the most embarrassing graph in modern physics....)

When Einstein Met Tagore. I am quite in agreement with this statement, with the caveat that only a rational intelligence is capable of grasping the Py...

It’s not so much ‘making a distinction’, as ‘dividing up the problem along those lines’. I mean, humans really do have minds, mental tendencies, menta...