Wayfarer

Well, he’s a bona fide Gnostic Christian Bishop, but I don’t see anything in what you write which bears any resemblance. Gnosticism is certainly oppos...

The idea of 'necessary being' is most clearly laid out in Anselm's ontological argument. It's based on the axiom that 'being' is a good, and that 'non...

Relocated from here I believe there is an 'eidetic realm' in the same sense of there being 'a realm of natural numbers'. In other words, 'realm' is he...

response to Fooloso4's post about Platonism moved to this thread which is about Platonism.

The purpose is to find something purposeful. It's not necessarily a given, or a pre-set, although individuals might have aptitudes. So if you've got p...

Is that so? I have been searching in the NYT archives for a reference to that story. I did find one later editorial, a mea culpa of sorts, which said ...

I think I can try and help here, in terms of the 'history of ideas'.

Sure, absolutely. There was a depressing special on Australian TV Monday about the extinction rate here, and it's a national disgrace. It's a strong r...

A review notes:

Time Magazine has a story on the 11 myths about the Mueller Report. 'Myths' is a euphemism: what they actually are, are ‘lies", and furthermore, lies ...

It comes from the religious conception that "Jesus died for all mankind". When that idea was introduced, it was extremely radical, as ancient Rome cer...

Does the name Stephan Hoeller mean anything to you?

A note from the SEP entry on John Scottus Eriugena. He was an early medieval philosophical theologian and translator of arcane Greek texts. He says of...

Anyone who believes that statements about the identity of Son and Father are simple ought to read up on the Filioque Controversy.

as if by magic!

Thanks. An interesting reading, but I'm not convinced by it. Raphael Demos notes that 'Plato hardly claims the power to grasp absolute truth for himse...

On second thoughts, I have decided not to create another new thread, as duty calls and I won't be able to pay much attention to it. So I'll respond he...

You have to be able to consider the meaning of actions for the idea of morality to mean anything. That’s why insanity is a defense.

He thought someone said ‘deliberation.’ He never does that. ;-)

Can you provide examples of animals acting immorally?

I generally agree with your post. But I'd like to consider the sense in which morality really is a result of evolutionary processes. Evolutionary theo...

I see this conception of modernity as being very much a product of the European Enlightenment, elements of which, in turn, originated in the tradition...

I have created a new thread starting with your response, as it's tangential to the topic of this thread - is it OK if I post that?

So glad you see this, because it’s actually not generally recognised in analytical philosophy. I think it’s key to many things. (But unfortunately spo...

That's the point of the criticism, though. If you have to underwrite 'reason' by appeal to 'what helps us survive', then how much confidence can you h...

I quite agree - but this only supports a point made in the Aeon essay - that 'if ‘physical reality’ means reality according to some future and complet...

They’re quite different. Understanding why is the kind of question that might make a term paper in Kant or early modern philosophy. Kant criticised bo...

No - he criticized them. As is evident from the very material you provide: Which is precisely what the empiricists claim. They’re not equivocal about ...

You're most welcome, and thanks for your comments. The problem with Cartesian dualism is the very idea of there being a 'thinking substance'. It is an...

Not 'a mess of sensations' but the 'tabula rasa' principle of Locke was and is a firm dogma of empiricism. Organised sensations, with the organising p...

I did a semester on philosophy of matter in which we read that 'the atom' was a way of resolving the paradox of the One and the Many. The One (c.f. Pa...

How do you deal with the claim that this is simply relativism, that the only truth we can know is the truth 'for us'? There's two things here - the no...

This is strongly connected to the original post. The faith you speak of, is the faith that reality is physical and objective, or in any case, is amena...

A Heraclitus quote which has always stuck with me is ‘whilst the many live each their own private world, the wise have but one world in common.’ (Quot...

‘ Mach also became well known for his philosophy developed in close interplay with his science. Mach defended a type of phenomenalism recognizing only...

There were quite a few German scientists of that period who opposed atomism on philosophical grounds. I seem to remember this attitude was one of the ...

It's not a matter of ignoring it, but of extending it beyond it's domain of applicability. This is precisely what many a 19th century scientific ratio...

I think I was incorrect, that Mach wasn't a materialist but a naturalist and monist. I think that abstraction is more than simply a technique. The abi...

reading that passage from Tolstoy again, a caveat - when Tolstoy says 'things do not exist', I would say 'things do not have inherent reality'. It mea...

That is consistent with my post of yesterday, which expresses a very similar idea.

Here, gOd, as one of the few omniscient beings on this forum, you will appreciate the delightfully-named Afrikan Spir. The three short paragraphs on h...

Isn't that mainly used in compression algorithms? Like, given a 'q' the odds of the next letter being 'u' is 99%, or something like that. Where we see...

Balderdash! Mach was a rank materialist, which I discovered when I first encountered him in 1979, Notice the reference to 'ideal mental-economical uni...

I often feel as though you don’t understand what I’ve written, and then accuse me of sidestepping or not answering. I think my post addresses the ques...

Only to be measurable and countable, which covers an enormous range of things. It's that it lends mathematical certainty to any subject to which it ca...

well if you were a child brought up by wolves, then your character would presumably reflect that. 'no is an island' but only exists in and through a n...

I do want to address this, not by way of challenging you or saying that I think you're mistaken about it, but to entertain a possible perspective. As ...

Objective idealism, thank you. Ideas are real, material objects their poor simulacra. (Furthermore I'm sure without this understanding, mass productio...

For Husserl, naturalism is not just only partial or limited in its explanation of the world, it is in fact self-refuting, because it has collapsed all...

Heading is Critique of Naturalism p142 (Routledge Intro to Phenomenology Ed. Dermot Moran). It's basically about how Husserl rejects the idea of treat...