Your original comment was a rephrase of the NRA canard that ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’, which inclined me to think that you were def...
So how is his philosophy not just natural philosophy, or science, for that matter? Valid observation. But this is where the role of the spiritual prec...
I'm not talking about the comparison of gun death rates between various cities in the USA, but between the USA and the rest of the developed world, wh...
Of course I don’t dispute the facts of evolution. But the influence of evolutionary biology on philosophy, ethics, psychology, and culture in general ...
see also this review. Basically there’s a philosophical distinction at play here which Krauss shows no sign of getting. His popular science writing is...
Tardigrades arguably arrived via interstellar spores. There's some thought that the octopus family might have as well. In fact if panspermia is true, ...
Yeah but it is actually. Western culture seized on evolutionary theory as a way to bring human beings within scope for science. That is why the 'new a...
I don’t know if it must be ‘opinion, feeling or metaphor’. Actually I think one factor that needs to be made explicit is the possibility of higher kno...
Hey McD - did you notice the writings of Karen Armstrong on these issues, about 6-7 years ago now? A couple of short reviews that go to the point you'...
Hence, 'transcendent'. That doesn't mean 'vague wishy-washy amorphous entity'. Not objective, because firstly, not an object but a subject; and second...
Utter nonsense. The evidence is overwhelming and indisputable. It's a sad fact that so many otherwise intelligent people are convinced, somehow, to de...
There needs to be a distinction between objective and transcendental. I think understanding of Kant is important in this respect. In particular the de...
Of course. There are legends of miracles throughout ancient cultures, but here the question was specifically in regards to a discussion about Christia...
Surely it is the accounts of the miracles of Jesus Christ, including walking on water, bringing the dead back to life, feeding the multitudes with a l...
One of the subjects I studied was the suppression of the gnostics in the early Christian Christian era. There was a large cache of ancient manuscripts...
I don’t think life itself is described as a delusion, anywhere in Buddhism. What’s delusory is attachment and attributing the wrong value to things. A...
Insufficiently gnostic, in my view. Well, that’s my only beef with it. Insofar as it doesn’t do that, I don’t have any issue with it. Two very good ph...
Actually the etymology of Nirv??a is ‘blowing out’ - extinction of the flames of greed, delusion and hatred. Most often it is described in negative te...
You would take it to be fundamentalist. I perfectly understand how the glaring shortcomings of Western religiosity have inoculated millions against an...
Spot on. The 'way of negation' is such an important thing to understand. 'He that knows it, knows it not'. But if we really aren’t simply and only ‘pr...
Very much so. Buddhism is fundamentally dialectical in its approach, meaning there are different perspectives depending on the state of development of...
The thing which got me started on philosophy forums was the emergence of the 'new atheist' books in about 2006-7. I felt they were pathetic books and ...
Rationality is the ability to ‘see reason’ - to make inferences, to say ‘because of this, then that must be the case’, to say that ‘this means that’, ...
Not reality: phenomena. Phenomena comprise the objects of experience, but reality includes the observer. And that is not a scientific statement, but a...
Perfectly agree. All organic life operates according to reward and punishment. That's one of the reasons I detested behaviourism so much - I wanted to...
The problem with that is that Nietzsche denied the possibility of a reality beyond the self. I read his analysis of Buddhism, which he professed to ad...
No, but Freud too was a scientific materialist. I studied his essays as an undergraduate, they are of course brilliant and very profound in their own ...
Another point about karma that ought to be mentioned - karma is not fatalism. It is often taken to be a fatalist attitude and indeed can become that -...
In actual fact, the final aim of Buddhist teaching is neither heaven, nor hell, but Nirv??a: Buddhism and the God Idea. But, on a day-to-day level, I ...
I'm focussing on the sense in which logical laws, real numbers, and so forth, comprise the laws of thought. They dictate or are constitutive of our ab...
'Substance' in the philosophical sense, was originally translated from Aristotle’s ‘ouisia’ which is more akin to ‘being’ or perhaps even ‘the subject...
This is a discussion that Janus and I have been having for months, on and off, for example: So that exchange included a Biblical quotation, to the eff...
Agree. A = A isn't about whether a particular instance of A 'is equal with itself', which seems absurd to me. Again, the passage from the metaphysics ...
I have read enough of the sources to believe that your interpretation is incorrect. The law of identity doesn't have anything to do with individual id...
Oh I certainly agree with that. I think 'evangelical atheism' has nothing much to recommend it. But I can't agree at all with the repeated claim about...
But maths is NOT empirical. That's the whole point. There is no empirical proof required of - it's purely intelligible, it comprises truths of reason ...
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