Wayfarer

Oh, is that what you mean. There is actually a reply to that, although I suspect it will also be categorised as gibberish, so I’ll leave it.

Sorry, I do forget to adjust for the reading age when I drop by here. Reminds me why not to bother.

Aquinas vs Intelligent Design

Tossing a bit of bait into the fishpond and watching the action. In the context of the history of ideas, I think it's important to get an understandin...

the question is, why did 'evolution' result in the ability to, oh I don't know, understand the age and size of the Universe? Amazing the things you pi...

They are many and varied, but it would take a long essay to spell them out. Hindus and Buddhists debated each other for millenia and each influenced t...

What needs re-thinking is the notion of what constitutes the self. As I said, the Buddha rejected what he described as 'eternalism' - this is the view...

In those times, the orthodoxy was the Vedic religions - those traditions derived from the Hindu Vedas and also the Upanisads, which were philosophical...

(Y) Glad to be of assistance.

??nyat? is one of those quintessentially Buddhist terms that doesn't have a direct equivalent in English. It is often translated as 'emptiness' but th...

Thanks! I have come to the view that I am at odds with most of the contributors here, because in my view philosophy has a spiritual or religious aspec...

Touché :-d

I am agnostic, but not atheist. So I know I don't know that God exists; but the way I see it, for those who believe in God, the Universe is evidence. ...

That whole dialogue reminds me awfully of Alva Noe's book 'Out of our Heads - Why You are not your Brain' - which I bought way back and never got arou...

Also Michael Polanyi and Thomas Kuhn.

Yes part of a series, doing a bit of summer reading....

Simply the fact that it exists, along with the commentarial tradition that grew up around it over the centuries. You can be agnostic (as I am) but sti...

If that isn’t the meaning of ‘life eternal’ then what is? And the mystics were frequently at odds with the ecclesiastical authorities.

Ever the authoritarian, eh? It seems to me you so readily associate anything about spiritual values with 'the supernatural and the afterlife'. Here's ...

There’s a quote from E F Schumacher which I think is relevant here. As you may recall, Schumacher was a British economist whose book Small is Beautifu...

Spiritual principles don’t have to rely on ‘threats of divine punishment’. The Renaissance humanists, whom the term ‘humanism’ was named after, were i...

Actually the quotation is this: Source I think what we tend lose sight of, is the possibility that the explanation of phenomena can't be complete even...

One of the interesting essays of 2017, The Strange Persistence of Guilt, Wilfred McClay, touches on this. I think it originates with the Christian pri...

I don’t claim to be an authority in philosophy. What I do is refer to such materials in support of a general approach or perspective, which I believe ...

Do they have any place in philosophy at all, then, or they simply passed over in silence?

This review Consciousness: Where are Words? seems relevant.

It’s simply your mindset against anything you deem ‘supernatural’, which includes an awful lot.

So, what you're saying is that whilst science doesn't have all the answers, talking about what is beyond science really amounts to saying nothing - wh...

No fuss at my end.

But those scientists and thinkers did not say that. The notion of there being 'eternal truths' was already antiquated by the mid-Nineteenth century, i...

Well, if you think naturalism is the answer, then fair enough. As it happens, I don't.

I should try and articulate what I had intended to say a little better, then. I am referring to the kind of attitude that was expressed in Bertrand Ru...

Fair enough. Although current cosmology does seem to suggest that time had a beginning.

My feeling is that it’s because you see it as ‘something imposed from above’ or always a matter of authority, that is behind a lot of what you say. I ...

I see your point. But on the other hand if you consider the cosmology of Plato, it is not hard to see how it was transposed into the later Christianis...

the notion that God DID NOT create the universe only became thinkable with the advent of modernity. Indeed it’s one of its defining ideas.

‘Among philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche is most often associated with nihilism.’

Well, it was a throw- away line, as they say in comedy, but it has a grain of truth. As I'm a Boomer, who grew up in the 60's, I identified with the C...

I live in a nice home for the time being, and grateful for it.

Yeah, don’t know what happened..... ;-)

That, incidentally, is a pretty accurate account of the reasons I bailed out on 'Western Culture'.

I don't see any philosophical insight in that. I think there is a generalised problem of the human condition, the malaise which philosophy has set out...

An excerpt from the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

You should tell that to the anti-natalists and nihilists, not me.

What I am getting at is the idea that there is a telos towards life and mind implicit in cosmic evolution, as a kind of final cause. Thomas Nagel floa...

It's pointless arguing against convinced unbelief. It's the mirror image of the conviction that it denies. So it amounts to holding an anti-religious ...

Never stops anyone here :-) From Wikipedia entry on E F Schumacher's book, A Guide for the Perplexed, slightly edited.

Right - but these are not "questions about the world", which is the initial proposition that I was responding to.

Beats me, but it seems to happen. I was given his first book, Proof of Heaven, for Christmas, 3 years ago. I must confess I found it uncomfortable rea...

Always loved that story. Stoicism, of a Confucian variety, I always thought. (BTW you mis-spelled 'consequentialism' in your OP.)