Wayfarer

Nothing like The Philosophy Forum, which is an assembly of experts from all over the world, whose opinions are invariably supported by profound insigh...

Wikipedia is great. I donate to their yearly fundraiser. I’ve edited a few articles and even created one. Of course it’s not an authoritative source b...

Let us know when you do. After I read it - basically the day it came out - I followed the reviews and commentary, which are interesting in their own r...

there's been chat about the fact that up until now, Trump hasn't had a 'real' foreign policy crisis to deal with. Well, I think that's changed. The dr...

...and that the subjective pole or aspect is 'bracketed out' by the assumption that reality can be described in wholly objective terms - which is the ...

I think that the very idea of 'objectivity' is one of the hallmarks of modern thinking. The word itself didn't really come into use until early modern...

:up:

This is one of the themes explored in Thomas Nagel's 2012 book, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Cert...

I looked into the ToS last night (specifically in relation to this) and couldn't see anything, but it was on my iPhone. But I couldn't see anything.

Agree. It's a difficult thing that, with all the best will in the world, people are going to have some fundamental disagreements about these kinds of ...

I do see your point. I often tell myself, 'that's it for forums'. But I guess it's become part of my daily routine, and there are worthwhile discussio...

The first forum I signed up to was the Dawkins forum. That was an absolutely seething hotbed of 'fear of religion'. My feeling is, many people believe...

Well, those cases that the article mentions number in the hundreds. They’re documented and have been subjected to expert testimony. So they are a body...

well, like children who remember their last lives, we know it can’t be real, right? It doesn’t fit in with our picture of the world so it can’t happen...

The post above this one has a link to a NY Times article.

:hearts:

So you don't think evidence should have any bearing on the question?

The question is, WHAT ARE THEY? Name one, or more. And then we'll vote. Oh - hang on.....

Counter question: compared to what?

I'm with Churchill - it's the 'least worst option'. There are many things wrong with it, it often throws up pretty dreadful governments, and is easily...

That's not true. The prerequisite for canonization is that it has to be shown that at least two miraculous events can be attributed to a candidate for...

Well, good. I think about it in much the same way. I'm very aware of the fact that thinking this way puts one in the 'orbit of theism', so to speak, h...

I think you’re on a recruitment drive for an alternative religion.

The original meaning is simply that those who refuse to drink are condemned to go thirsty, but the idea became distorted over time.

My main philosophical interest is in the argument that numbers (etc) are real but incorporeal; the same for all who can count, but only perceptible to...

There's much more to it than that. We can infer and predict outcomes, based on mathematical analysis of observations - this is near to Kant's syntheti...

use of that word says something!

Note the reflexive equivocation of 'real' and 'physical'. You write from a perspective which assumes the reality of the sensory domain - as us denizen...

Kant lectured in a wide range of subjects, and indeed his nebular hypothesis still stands, but is known as a philosopher. And I am of the view that ph...

And interestingly, ‘ontology’ is derived from the first person participle of the verb ‘to be’ - which is, of course, ‘I am’. The significance being th...

well, you don't have the excuse of being young.... :razz:

I refer to that, because your statement is very much an expression of what Buddhism calls 'sunyata'. Heidegger's convergences with Buddhism are the su...

You don't seem a moron to me. You seem young.

I agree that 'methodological naturalism' is a perfectly sound working hypothesis, but where its limitations show up, is when it ventures into metaphys...

Thank you, although I didn't notice your reply because you didn't copy me in - apologies for that. There's a world of material to study there. Not lea...

read these two paragraphs. Substitute 'to exist' for 'to be'. No. The ancients meant something different to what we mean by 'cause' - they meant in a ...

Agree. There was a very interesting poster here previously, seems to have stopped posting, apokrisis. He's an expert in biosemiotics, and sometimes me...

Also note the ‘better designed’. I suppose he should have enclosed the word in scare quotes. :smile:

Herbert Spencer adopted ‘survival of the fittest’ not longer after OoS was published, and Darwin later used the term.

...because, as we know, everything about h. sapiens can be explained with reference to evolutionary biology, so musical ability *must* have biological...

:cheer: Have I shown you this before?

Lawrence Krauss became famous for a book called The Physics of Star Trek in the mid-nineties, which analysed how much physical data you would have to ...

'Information' and 'meaning' differ in significant ways. People nowadays will refer to 'information' as if it is a fundamental category in its own righ...

Yep. Looks like this: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/40/Traditional_bhavachakra_wall_mural_of_Yama_holding_the_wheel_of_life%2...

Sure, and I really do try to do that here, but it's tricky, and easily misunderstood. And also there is an element that is definitely out-of-scope for...

as far as Brexit is concerned, I'm sure the factor that tipped the referendum was basically xenophobia. But we ought not to point fingers on that acco...

Zen student: 'There's something you can learn, some vital insight, that you can only arrive at by disciplined za-zen practice'. Friend: 'Yeah? What's ...

i'm well aware of Emerson, I did thesis work on him and the transcendentalists. He saw through organised religion but he wasn't anti-religion; he was ...

To me, there's a lot of resonance between 'All is vanity' and the Buddhist teaching of emptiness (sunyata). I interpret them both to mean, those thing...