For what it’s worth, the English word ‘Enlightenment’ was introduced into translations of Buddhist texts by T W Rhys Davids, founder of the Pali Text ...
That's a central idea in Platonism, Notice that you have to put "real" in quotes. When you do that, you're doing philosophy! In actual fact, one of th...
As one of the kind of 'spiritual if not religious' types who posts here, there is one observation I would like to make. I have often in the past refer...
I’m interested in, and often participate in, topics with religious aspects. (I often say, and believe, that there’s a tacitly religious dimension to m...
The current Republican Party is not, in fact, ‘the Republican Party’. They’ve become ‘the Trump cult’. He, meanwhile, is utterly convinced that he’s u...
My guess is - not going to have to wait long. With any luck, next week, Brexit will fall through, and Trump will be finished. The whole 2016 nightmare...
superb post. Your work is coming along really beautifully. Now you’ve explained your point, I think I am in agreement. (There’s a topic in comparative...
That's a really good analysis, especially the different perspectives on subjectivity, especially that idea of 'dia-subjectivity'. I haven't heard that...
I don't know, it's a pretty good list! At this period in life, I am trying to concentrate on a few seminal classical texts, chiefly Mahayana Buddhist,...
well my guess is I’m probably a generation older, baby-boomer. So I’m a pretty quintessential sixties type, eclectic, picked up ideas from all over th...
Generally I’m in agreement, but I think that’s rather a caricatured version of free will. Even those who accept the reality of free will - I certainly...
But you can't say what things are 'determined by' other than And what science describes those? You've noted elsewhere that you've broken from the phys...
I always feel that people turn up here and contribute from their own free will. Do you think they're compelled to do it? That no-one really decides to...
I think neo-darwinian 'explanations' for the nature of knowledge and ideas are wholly inadequate. Darwinian theory is concerned with the origin of spe...
Actually placebos are often used, but they don't always work. However the point in relation to your original comment about things being detetmined by ...
Yes, but do calves or children 'know reality'? Isn't there a sense in which philosophy calls into question our innate or inherited sense of what that ...
In the case of the placebo effect, it seems that a predisposition or belief actually has the opposite effect. Say for example you give a patient a pla...
Nor does it reflect on experience. :up: Well stated OP. Quite similar in content and spirit to the opening paragraphs of World as Will and Representat...
One of the major interpretive themes of the Republic is the city as a metaphor for the soul, and the struggles for dominance as representing the strug...
The notion that ‘the universe has no purpose or meaning’ is simply a consequence of reading philosophical conclusions into methodological axioms. For ...
This argument is strangely reminiscent of Calvinism, for whom any really altruistic motivation is impossible, due to the ‘total depravity of the will’...
The problem I see is that ‘identical to’ is itself a judgement. If it were not metaphorical, you could could actually find an idea in a brain, But you...
The idea of ‘non-material existents’ is in a way self-contradictory, because ‘to exist’ is to assume a material form – even if that is in the form of ...
Distinctions ought to be recognised between conscious awareness, subconscious and the unconscious. In any case, the main point at issue is, I think, a...
I wonder where numbers are located. Silly question, of course - they have no location, as they’re abstractions. But nevertheless they’re real; the dev...
And the other, crucial, ingredient, is reason. From here. Reason, logical inference, and the like, cannot be understood in terms of physical interacti...
It's tangential to this thread, but the question was raised about 'the form of clouds'. I don't think they're the kinds of 'things' - if they are inde...
Isn’t there a sense in which today’s ‘folk metaphysics’ hails back to Cartesian dualism? What I mean is that it was this model which neatly divided ev...
Well, here are two: And another: No doubt there would be many more, but life’s too short for me to waste time reading back to you what you actually sa...
Do you understand the sense in which your response to Berkeley is similar to Samuel Johnson’s, and why that matters? You’re basically saying: ‘c’mon ,...
No problems, it’s been a great discussion of a tricky topic. I think that any school of idealism requires a kind of gestalt shift. Realists struggle w...
No the point about Locke was 'representative realism' - that the idea represents the supposedly real material particular that is sensed. Remember it w...
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