Wayfarer

OK - fair enough, my bad saying the post ought to be removed. I apologise to the Forum and take it back. But do realise what we’re dealing with here. ...

I do have an MA in Buddhist Studies, but am honest enough to admit ‘I don’t know much about the history. But it’s blatant propoganda. Even the way it ...

What you reported by the professor is simply the CCP party line. It is what is churned out on campuses and through Chinese state media, all over the w...

But you should have enough to recognise propoganda when you hear it. We’re lucky we’re not conducting this conversation inside the boundaries of the P...

A note on ‘noumena’ - the root of this term is ‘nous’, the Ancient Greek term for ‘mind’ (with the caveat that the ancient understanding of ‘mind’ is ...

Some Brief Arguments for Dualism

(Y) Fair comment, but ‘whatever it is constituted of’ remains something observed. You’re still instinctively perceiving the question from the realist ...

Do you think existentialist classics, like Nausea, are persuasive? I can't find anything persuasive about them. I kind of admire Sartre for his honest...

Can you specify anything which isn't contingent? Or some category of things which aren't?

(Y)

The original quest of philosophy has been generally forgotten. Notice the etymological link between ‘quest’ and ‘question’; the original question of p...

Esse est percipe doesn’t strictly imply that things pass in and out of existence. The idea of them doing that, depends on assuming a perspective from ...

It is also worth mentioning where the word ‘therapy’ comes from: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutae Similarly, in Asian cultures, the Buddha ...

Well, has been said already, that’s not really the point. There is no logical reason why the Earth might not be annihalated by some cosmic catastrophe...

Google Jules Evans, Philosophy for Life. Specializes in exactly that.

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The abrogation of causality in quantum mechanics was what caused Einstein to exclaim that he couldn't accept that 'God plays dice'. (Bohr repiled, 'st...

I have to take issue with this statement. The ‘massive advances of science’ have been made in respect of objective and physical discoveries about many...

-Washington Post I believe Trump thinks that he’s entirely innocent - because he has never taken the time to understand what is being investigated. Be...

Essay question, right? That is an inductive inference based on (1) having seen many such questions and (2) the fact that it is a very well-written que...

Have you ever delved into Berkeley’s dialogues? He has questioners raising many of these kinds of arguments and he always manages to answer them. See ...

If I got to write the headline: President Attacks FBI, Justice Deparment in Attempt to Deflect Investigation into Improper Contact between Russians, S...

Well, it is getting nasty indeed. The notorious Nunes Memo is clearly a stich-up, intended to muddy the waters, dim the lights, and cast suspicion on ...

It seems simply obvious to me - rationality, language, story-telling, meaning-seeking, technology and science are the salient attributes of h. Sapiens...

I suppose the fact that you don’t recognize the salience of rationality doesn’t really come as a surprise :-)

I was hoping it would come to you, but it is the Greek definition of man as the rational animal. And in this case, it is a difference that really make...

I've mentioned this before, but it's worth having a read of The Intelligibility of Peirce's Metaphysics of Objective Idealism. Lays it out pretty well...

There's a one-word answer, which is specifically relevant to philosophy. Re the 'head of a pin' myth - basically it was a debate about whether two ang...

Close - but no cigar

Incorrect - Missed a qualifier there.

I think to view the hard problem as something that can be 'solved' is to misunderstand what kind of problem it is. It's a hard problem, because it is ...

And also that humans are designated ‘beings’.

Also we should remember Berkeley’s original aphorism was esse est percipe, to be is to be perceived. The word ‘exist’ doesn’t come into it.

Old-fashioned i.e pre-Cartesian dualists didn’t think in terms of ‘objects’; that really came about because of Newton and Galileo. But I agree with th...

I would think that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason would be still considered amongst the most significant philosophical texts on that question. Not tha...

Sounds rather like this, doesn’t it?

It’s worth recalling that Kant was a polymath who lectured in science as well as many other subjects, and whose theory of nebular formation is still c...

I’ve encountered him mainly through mentions on forums. He seems worth knowing about, he’s on my ‘must get around to reading’ list. (Right now I’m rea...

One senses that the matter is coming to a head, and that it’s going to be very, very nasty.

But you’re still speaking from a realist perspective - whether scientific or not. The whole point of so-called ‘idealist’ arguments is to turn the att...

Nirv??a is customarily described as inconceivable or impossible to imagine - ‘the Tathagatha’, which is kind of an honorific description of the Buddha...

‘Not understood’, more likely.

But that is precisely what is in Peirce. Note that bolded phrase in the passage two posts up: 'mind pervades all nature'. It is pretty close to pan-ps...

Agree up to this point. I don't think that second statement stacks up in the least against what Peirce thought. Mind being 'evolved matter' is what ne...

Good idea! My only recommendation is - start with Socrates and the Greeks first, if that is an elective.

Russell reports that G E Moore once mused 'do the train wheels cease to exist when everyone is inside the train?' And that is exactly the way you're s...

The trusty old Samuel Johnson refutation.

I think Kant’s distinction between empirical realism and transcendental idealism is useful in this context. In simple terms, this allows for common-se...

It is not a Buddhist truth that ‘you don’t exist’. That is a common misreading, but the belief that ‘you don’t exist’ is a form of nihilism. The Buddh...

I don’t see anything there in which Peirce is said not to be idealist. Universals have to be ‘transcendent’ insofar as not being characteristic only o...