Wayfarer

I don't see how you can deny universals, and still have physical principles. The point about a physical principle is that it is universally applicable...

But the discussion is about universals so we ought not to divert it into mystical theology. I'm interested in what Terrapin Station has to say about i...

Wallace agreed with Darwin on the biological principle of natural selection, but he didn't believe it accounted for human intellectaual and moral fact...

The metaphysics Kant criticized were those of his predecessors and indeed the sholastic etc. But i think Kant was still recognisably part of a traditi...

I'm quite in agreement with the intuition, but I think in the context of philosophy, something something else needs to be said, which is what I have b...

They're very strong assumptions about what must be considered real. It's the ambiguity of the interpretation which realism can't stand - something has...

If you give credence to 'spiritual experience', then what is the 'object' of that knowledge? I might agree that there are such experiences and that th...

The point of philosophy is to draw such distinctions. Otherwise why not just be positivist about it? I'm interested in any philosophies that make this...

There might be a mystical sense in which it is true, as in Angelus Silesius' expression, but one of the distinguishing features of Christian mysticism...

it is still an implicit duality.

Perhaps. That second one could be transcribed directly from the Brahmanas, and the first would sit quite comfortably in the Dhammapada - quite in line...

If, however, the Universe expands and contracts through an endlless cycle of big-bang-and-bust, then there's your machine.

You're imbuing thermodynamics with the status of divine will, as always. The relations between forms, ideas, laws, and particulars are analogous to th...

but there are many things that are real that you can't 'have an enounter with'- like the Gross National Product, the inflation rate, and the probabili...

Several more quotes from Angelus Silesius 'O Man, as long as you exist, know, have, and cherish, You have not been delivered, believe me, of your burd...

Interesting - I also find it on this page https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Angelus_Silesius Many interesting quotes there. I'm reading Dean Inge on mys...

interesting that Me is capitalised. (Have to go out.)

I would like to know the provenance of that quote, I am highly dubious about it.

Mystics frequently flirted with heresy. (When I was enrolled in Comparative Religion I used to refer to it as the Department of Mysticism and Heresy)....

See this thread on Dharmawheel for a recent discussion of Buddhism and nominalism. I came to this conclusion about it:

My view of universals is that this term encompasses a number of things including grammatical laws, aspects of mathematics, and many concepts that are ...

Have a look at Belief and Truth by Katja Vogt, who is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University. Personally, I think the thing that is missing fr...

There doesn't need to be a valid argument against it. I already quoted the passage where Everett, 'after a slosh or two of sherry', sat around with a ...

Entailment is simply another term for 'logical necessity'. What this ought to entail is that 'entailment' is the relationship between ideas.

More physics as philosophy.

you get it.

God = the 'is' in existence. I always thought a great comparative religion essay question would be: 'this is the starting point for N?g?rjuna. Discuss...

But a consequence of that is that the world 'splits' at the point of measurement, and/or that there are countless 'parallel worlds'. Once again - does...

The second edition of Everett's thesis was published as “Wave Mechanics Without Probability'. Why do you think it was called that?

But that doesn't affect my point. They're not aimed at conversion. Nowhere does classical theology presume that you could arrive at faith without, wel...

True. There was a blog post, since lost, about how taking the proofs as proofs in a modern scientific sense (as Dawkins always does) is based on a mis...

But in saying that, you assume that it's axiomatic that the corpus of revealed religion is to be disregarded. Aquinas would never for a moment suggest...

Also notice that Aquinas, and 'classical theists' generally, freely admit that there's a lot they don't know. They're not describing a specimen in a b...

Whenever you go into detail of what it's 'testability' amounts to, it is always along the lines of a deductive argument about 'what the observations m...

That refers to the Wikipedia article on the 'Copenhagen Interpretation.' This is an open-source encylopedia, so anyone is entitled to edit it. But app...

Why the capitalised 'Reality'?

Laws against basphemy are routinely invoked for the most appalling savagery in Islamic states, such as Pakistan, where people are butchered or stoned ...

So, the first quoted passage is incorrect, in your view? (I ask because it seems to contradict what you said in the post before). But these are all in...

The WIkipedia entry on the subject states that: Further down in the same article, it is stated that: The reference there is to this quote by Heisenber...

But it's not. It is the result of a simple conjecture: 'hey, what if the wave collapse DOESN"T OCCUR?' That's all it is. One of the implications of th...

I certainly don't want to do that, MU. It's more that in this matter I'm excruciatingly aware of how much I don't know. It works, given that there are...

I really see how that is logically sound. We wouldn't know the first thing about laws of physics without first being able to grasp mathematical ideas ...

Fair enough, point taken. I'm aware of Lee Smolin's books, but I don't know if I'm up to reading them. I agree with you, but I don't think the likes o...

Bam! There's your slam-dunk McD. You're powerless in front of that. To oppose it is to be declared an 'enemy of reason'.

Who is 'we'? I know for sure I don't understand it, and I'm pretty sure I'm not going to find out the solution on a philosophy forum. (Not wanting to ...

But they only occur to living subjects, as far as we can tell. I mean, horses and dogs also seem to be 'subjects of experience', but they can't reflec...

But it may not be simply a mathematical issue. What is measurable might be only one aspect of what is there. Notice this comment that Wallace makes (q...

I don't think it will ever be refuted by argument. It will take something other than that to do it.

At about 2:00 Deutsch says that the existence of computation explains the unreasonable efficacy of mathematics in the natural sciences. I really don't...

....If they're called 'tegmark'