Wayfarer

There was indubitably Russian interference in the US Presidential election - cannot be credibly denied. As to collusion on the part of the Trump campa...

Interesting observation, but not really the point that I'm making. I'm interested in the history of ideas, and about when scientific materialism becam...

Hope you're right, M. My father - who had a big professional stake, as he was involved with WHO population dynamics - was very pessimistic about the b...

I think the unfortunate fact is that the world is so interconnected, and the scale of the issues so enormous, that global catastrophe is a real possib...

maybe you're right - the second time it gave me something different. I'll change it. I was being mischievous.

There's this thing, called Google Translate.....

Well, I am willing to take criticism, but everything I have read from you is only ever that. I would like to think this is a place for friendly discus...

I do make an effort, but on the other hand, this is a public forum. The last time I did any degree work, 2011 - 12, in a different but related subject...

What indeed? When you come up with something original, I shall return the favour.

Franklin (article cited above) says that: I think the Platonist rebuttal to that is, that 'the domain of form' is not beyond space and time, but ontol...

:up:

And I think you're among the majority. That would be a very good question for a term paper on Aristotle 101! My knowledge of classical literature is s...

And that is what I am taking issue with. The reason the conversation veered into evolutionary biology, is because this is what is almost universally i...

Krishnamurti was a sceptic in the same sense. When the Dalai Lama first came to India, he was told about Krishnamurti (this is in the late 50's), and ...

My deep conviction is that there are elements of Platonism (broadly defined) which are essential to the Western intellectual culture, and the loss of ...

No kidding. Aristotle was a ‘moderate realist’, believing that the intelligible forms of things constituted their real essence. Where he differed with...

...doesn’t provide a solution to the problem articulated in the OP.

I said the two are 'sometimes compared', and I think there's a very good argument for that relationship. See also Pyrrhonism: How the Ancient Greeks R...

‘By any objective measure, Donald Trump’s conduct of American foreign policy, particularly over the past six months or so, has been a catastrophe. He ...

That’s pretty right, but it’s also more than that. Logic would be impossible without abstraction and generalisation, which in turn are constituents of...

If this were true, then deductive arguments would have no application in empirical science. However, deductive arguments do apply to empirical science...

I’m reading some of the coverage - it’s possible that Trump still doesn’t believe that there were Russian agents hacking the process, because he doesn...

I think I could take issue with this, as I think that the whole idea is extrapolated from 'monotheism'. This is the idea that there is but 'one true G...

The Buddha criticized the Brahmin teaching on many grounds, one of which was just this unclarity. The way ?tman is depicted in the Vedas and the Upani...

There's also the fact that at the time of the infamous Don Jr meeting with the Russians promising 'dirt on Hillary', Trump promised a campaign audienc...

'Astonishing creativity' and 'blind but ingenious processes' are expressions of the same kind of projection. Surely it can only appear to be 'astonish...

Talk about grasping at straws. The whole story about Peter Strzok was that the NY Times published an account of how he was taken off the Russian inves...

I hope to have provided some pause for thought.

But evolution is not that ‘something’. It is not an actor. At best it is an illusion of agency. Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of...

Agree with those blog posts. Incidentally in terms of cross-cultural analysis, see Buddhist Analogues of Sin and Grace: A Dialogue with Augustine John...

Gowdy's analysis is pathetic in this case.

Peter Strzok hits the conspiracy theory out of the park. http://time.com/5337253/peter-strzok-congress-testimony-hearing/ https://thebea.st/2uhTTNA

If logic is circular - find another pastime.

Me too.

We’ll see about that. Guliani is already greasing the wheels by saying that Mueller’s team is ‘incredibly corrupt’. There is some suggestion that Muel...

Of course is correct. Logic has to rest on something. It’s not controversial, although it never ceases to surprise how many people seem to think it’s ...

That scandalous accusation is very old news Posty. The Steele Dossier was leaked to Buzzfeed in, let’s see, January last year. Personally I never thou...

:ok:

Again - there is an implied agency in this sentence. I often notice nowadays reference to the amazing things that evolution has done. But evolution do...

Paywalled.

Something to recall is that the notion of 'intelligibility' is one of the things that fundamentally changed between the Middle and Modern ages. To quo...

And there’s certainly nothing I can think of which might cause you to change that opinion.

So, something compelled you to join the forum and ask this question?

That book I referred to above (last paragraph of this post), by philosopher Thomas Nagel, does consider this idea. 'Each of our lives', he writes, 'is...

:up: One of my favourite Zen anecdotes. One day a student finally had the long-awaited satori, a glimpse of the Original Nature. He excitedly awaited ...

It is on the last page of Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy (which I read immediately before commencing philosophy formally). The exp...

But I want to go further than that, because what I'm saying is that belief only has instrumental value. It is only a means to an end, not an end in it...

Couldn't help notice the similarity :-)

That was what the Buddha spent around forty years of his life doing, so in one sense it can be communicated. But there is a saying that ‘the Buddha on...

That is what has to be discovered. Don’t forget the origin of the word ‘person’, which is from ‘persona’, the masks worn by dramatists classical Greec...