Wayfarer

But the question is, what role does 'the observer' play? (Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271)

And I took issue with it. And you said 'hey that's not my view'. So I quoted you, to show that it actually was. Your move.

Oh, right. I took this to be the meaning of: Perhaps it's a distinction that I'm missing?

So, you're demanding an objective basis to believe that there are indeed objective judgements, having already declared that there's not really any suc...

There was a long thread last year, I think before you joined, on post truth, which had just been declared Word of the Year for 2016, mostly on the bas...

Meet Kevin. It also brings to mind the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly...

You’re welcome. It’s a powerful undercurrent in Post-Enlightenment thinking.

Economics is frequently referred to as 'the dismal science', a saying coined by Thomas Carlyle. The term drew a contrast with the then-familiar use of...

Without wishing to appear a Christian apologist, this is really not so. According to Christians, God doesn't torture anyone, or inflict any pain whate...

Mainly it's a consequence of positivism - not the specific and very narrow doctrine of 'logical positivism', but the underlying notion that science is...

Well spotted. It might indeed been due to some other form of help.

Agree! But aren’t they exactly the kinds of benefits that globalisation and neo-liberalism were supposed to have provided? Wasn’t the idea to ‘make a ...

True; the promise was fulfilled.

Well, I agree that the kinds of solutions that need to be sought, are through international development, political stabilisation, and like measures - ...

One point I have noticed. If a displaced person arrives in a developed nation, be that Europe, America, or Australia, from an impoverished nation, or ...

Sure, agree. I recall that one of the main underlying attributes of psychopathic behaviour is the absence of empathy.

There's a couple of alternative etymologies for the word 'sin'. One is that it is connected to Old English synn "moral wrongdoing, injury, mischief, e...

True enough, but hardly the basis for an ethical philosophy. Sometimes a situation might require the endurance of pain, or even voluntarily submitting...

Incidentally, what the Rosenberg mentioned in the OP argues is

It is 'utilitarian' in the sense that it is only concerned with biological ends and means. I suppose what I'm arguing, is that religious ethics is anc...

I didn't say it was. What I'm saying is that it's a biological theory, the aim of which is to give an account of speciation, right? So while it has so...

The problem with your account, is that it doesn't come to terms with the fundamentally sisyphean predicament of being human. Like all evolutionary the...

I would edit this to remove #2 and 3 and make each of them separate topics. Far too much content here for a single forum post.

As you start with this sentence, it would be useful to say who 'Rosenberg' is, and what his or her views are on the matter. In any case, I am dubious ...

Nobody really supports many of the things that Trump proposes. The staff and bureaucracy try to cope with it as best they can, often having to scrambl...

'I'll tell you if I'm an atheist, if you tell me what it is I'm supposed not to believe in' ~ Noam Chomsky.

Well, the obvious answer - although I suppose not that obvious - is ‘gnosis’. The handy Wikipedia entry says ‘Gnosis is the common Greek noun for know...

That definition, forgive me for so saying, is rather fideistic. But that said, I don’t want to disagree with the substance of the rest. The problem I ...

as a non-American, I wish Hillary would retire and take a post lecturing or some such. Her continued presence can only aggravate the situation. ‘Ride ...

And you can thank the radical rightists who have taken over the GOP for that. Sure there are plenty of ratbag leftists as well, but it was first of al...

It’s a very simplistic way of thinking about it, probably from one who has been drilled into that belief over years and has reduced it to a slogan. In...

But it doesn’t. That is what I’m trying (and obviously failing) to explain. The point I am trying to make is that number is real in a different way to...

I'm not arguing for intelligent design if it amounts to any form of biblical literalism. I am saying that the logic, mathematics, and the like, are of...

Which abstraction will be true in all possible worlds. Impressive, eh? I've just be re-reading Manjit Kumar's book Quantum, which I mentioned above, a...

The way I express it is that the natural numbers (and the like) are the same for anyone who can count - hence, they exist apart from minds - but they ...

The problem here, as I see it, is treating a number - 6, in this case - as ‘an entity’ in the same sense that an object is an entity. However, a numbe...

Whereas, there are very many mathematical physicists who are indeed Platonist of some variety, with some of them adopting such views because of the di...

Well, Armstrong’s major thesis was ‘A Materialist Theory of Mind’ (and as it happens he was professor of the department where I was an undergrad in ph...

Apropos of which: Richard J. Bernstein coined the term in his 1983 book Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis.

This was the essay that lead me to read Gilson’s book in the first place - Why Gilson? Why Now?, Dr. Peter Redpath. He identifies Descartes as the roo...

I do understand how difficult it is to fathom current mathematical physics (although discovered a useful PBS video series on ‘strings’ yesterday.) But...

The Wikipedia entry on 'ontology' is relevant to this point: I think what's particularly interesting is the derivation from the present participle of ...

I think the ‘principle of falsifiability’ is a perfectly sound idea - it simply says, if you can’t test a theory against empirical observation, then i...

Interesting to note also that in the current disputes over 'string theory', doubts are being cast on the validity of falsifiability. So much so, that ...

Worth a read :wink: //particularly the last sentence.//

As I said, a lot of positivism is tacit - it’s not defended as a formal philosophy but is implicit. It’s worth recalling who invented the term ‘positi...

Logical positivism was one of the things Popper was responding to. The Vienna Circle were mainly active between the wars, and A J. Ayer published Lang...

All I'm saying is that your 'argument' is a result of an affective issue - a matter of feeling, not of logic at all. I tried to illustrate that with t...

I don’t think the problem has anything to do with logic, but with affect. Hence, out of scope for philosophy as such.

I revise my opinion. As you’ve gone to the trouble of spelling out your objection in such detail then I don’t think you’re writing nonsense but that y...