It seems an oxymoron to me. Would you refer to the proverbial chair or table as 'a being'? Is a piece of fruit 'a being'? I suppose, arguably, a tree ...
I can't see how that can be the case without there being mind in the first place. When Peirce says that 'matter is effete mind', this does seem to be ...
How would it be possible that 'being is not an object of the study of the sciences', if there were no difference between 'being' and 'beings'? What is...
Not at all. Humans are designated ‘beings’, and other types of things are not, according to naturalism. In ordinary English, whenever we use the noun ...
Dare I point out, this is a philosophy forum, not a place for evangelisation of the Gospel. One is free to argue for or against religion, but evangeli...
But what ‘being’ is there, in the absence of humans? I think the answer according to evolutionary bioogy is - none that we know of (other than the hig...
Fair enough. I would interpret it as follows. First, it is a Sutta, meaning it is said to be something the Buddha really taught. In the Alagaddupama S...
Belief is only a stepping stone - it's instrumental in the sense of 'pointing you in the right direction'. Like, you have to believe in something enou...
To all those who said that Trump's lies are 'no different to other politicans....' https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/2017/10/10/opinion-lies-2/02b...
What? He presents the whole idea of the Forms as 'only a likely story'. Platonism might have its dogmas, but Plato's views and ideas were constantly e...
You wouldn't say that laws are expressions of latencies that is actualised by concrete instances? I'm having trouble understanding 'emergent' as that ...
I’ve been reading the chapter from Feser’s book on universals. First up, I agree with all the arguments that universals are real, and that nominalism ...
Brains are not objects as such. The human brain only operates in the context of being an embodied organ in the human nervous system, in the environmen...
But it’s neither a computer nor a device. As they have been programmed to do by humans. The laws of physics are mathematical descriptions of the behav...
Does a universal computer exist? Is it something found in nature? When you say it ‘evolved through natural selection’, are you saying it’s an organism...
Not so much that there's anything wrong with it - it's just that it implicitly amounts to a utilitarian ethic, i.e. what is good is the well-adapted, ...
It shouldn't be forgotten that many of the preoccupations of Greek philosophy were ethical - the nature of justice, virtue, goodness, and the best way...
That's not the point I am trying to make, although the point I'm trying to make is a difficult one. Physicalists will generally insist that 'mind is w...
Reason never has been said to go 'all the way down'. Isn’t that one of the things that falls out of Godel’s theorem? That any system will always have ...
Plato is transparently non-dogmatic. The Platonic dialogues often entertain widely divergent viewpoints, and frequently encounter aporia, questions ab...
They’re the instrument of minds. Were there no mind, there would be no computers. Which, I am saying, cannot be accounted for with reference to only p...
Strange! Works for me. I think you'll find it relevant. It might be useful to first re-visit the Analogy of the Divided Line in the Republic, which is...
It's the leap from the second paragraph to the third that I take issue with. The mind deals with meaning and symbolic logic, which is not inherently p...
From an essay of mine about Buddhism on the West: often remarked to my Buddhist colleagues that the empirically verified insights of modern cosmology ...
He was genuine about it. It's in his book The Universe in a Single Atom. The problem with the idea of re-birth is that it's doubly taboo in Western cu...
That's really a discussion for Dharmawheel. Suffice to say, I have met Stephen Bachelor, and heard him speak, he's a very nice guy, and I think he pla...
Hi Mitchell - I am a casual student of these matters, and feel an affinity for Platonic realism. But there's a passage about Augustine which I think c...
Are you familiar with the Buddhist 'parable of the raft'? One of the Buddha’s most famous teachings is the Parable of the Raft. In it he likened his t...
He might have said that, but that doesn't mean the explanation is going to be what we now understand as a scientific one, for reasons that I won't beg...
I think Buddhist philosophy can indeed overcome many of the dichotomies and dualities in Western philosophy, but it's not that easy a matter to apply ...
He wasn't being condescending, so I wouldn't condescend on his behalf. The point he makes is valid, and one which I have been trying to explain ever s...
I'm actually pretty anti-modern. I have studied Freud at undergraduate level, read something of the others. Tnankyou, and I return the compliment. Kie...
No, it's because he's the best-known representative of scientific materialism applied to philosophy of mind. So he's representative of the overall pos...
Sure, that's a very famous aphorism. Heart Sutra is one of the quintessential sources of non-dualism in the Eastern tradition. But the philosophical b...
Well I just think that is completely backwards. It pains me to side with conservatives on anything, but in this matter I do. Actually I am highly susp...
Thanks, plenty of food for thought there. Right - I read up on embodied cognition and it makes a lot of sense to me. A side note - Varela and Maturana...
I don't think philosophical materialism is something to be celebrated. Technology and science, and the marvellous inventions, medicines, means of tran...
'Love it or hate it, phenomena like this exhibit the heart of the power of the Darwinian idea. An impersonal, unreflective, robotic, mindless little s...
In any case physicalism is nothing so much as a way of dodging the mystery - the kind of mystery that Dennett wants to dispose of. Put a bag over it, ...
It might be the case that it's forever mysterious. Alternatively, we might be obliged to understand that knowledge has intrinsic limits, even regardin...
But, you see, DNA is not actually 'software', but is a metaphorical description. So not being able to distinguish the metaphorical from the actual is ...
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