Wayfarer

Interestingly, Werner Heisenberg referred to many of the adversaries of his and Bohr's 'Copenhagen intepretation' as 'dogmatic realists' - and with re...

It depends on the nature of the order it's defending! The reason I advocate an idealist philosophy is because I am opposed to philosophical materialis...

Where I take issue with dogmatic realism, is the extent to which it really amounts to a critical philosophy at all. It seems to me to be a form of 'ar...

And where does maths exist?

That was in the context of a discussion by Magee of why so many people do. His point was that 'even eminent philosophers', such as Popper, reject idea...

Schopenhauer's Philosophy

Truth statements depend on perspective. What we say about what exists and what doesn't exist relies on perspective. I can perfectly well imagine the e...

I know perfectly what Dennett says. The only thing I am perpetually bemused by, is why it is considered to constitute philosophy. The actions of a pre...

But it's a very similar argument. If you say that what humans believe to be true, is simply a consequence of adaptive necessity, then this undermines ...

So, is it OK if POTUS is a liar? Trump claiming that Clinton was beneficiary of 'millions of illegal votes', with not one shred of evidence or on any ...

While I agree with some aspects of what Hoffman is saying, I think there's an underlying inconsistency, which is this. If you argue that the real dete...

I'm coming back to this point, because I was referring to something more specific than the general (and vexed) question of 'philosophical implications...

They're all beyond my pay grade. But that article gives a pretty good account of some of the conundrums: What strikes me, is the adjective 'tiny'. Sur...

I was really not trying to cast aspersions - just to gently point out that mosty people look to 'naturalism' to defend 'normalism' - the idea that us ...

As soon as you get into Schrodinger's Cat territory, threads collapse into a Black Hole from which no intelligence ever emerges.

Hang on, I have an absolute bottler of an article about that very thing..... http://discovermagazine.com/2002/jun/featuniverse

Oh don't worry, it's just that it then gets hard to remember which thread is which! But, photons are cheap. X-)

Interesting! I might be reading something into Kant which isn't there. I first encountered Kant through an unusual source, namely, a book by the name ...

Thank you Aaron. But I wonder. If you investigate the word 'noumenon', it actually means something very much like 'an ideal object' or 'the object of ...

This thread has now been duplicated, courtesy of Marchesk.

But the point is, 'the past' is no different to any other object of perception. So the existence of the time 'before humans existed' doesn't refute Ka...

Samuel Johnson attended a lecture by Bishop Berkeley, and after having emerged from the lecture, when asked of his view of the good Bishop's sophistry...

The role of Taoism in Chinese culture is broadly speaking 'counter-cultural'. Taoists are often depicted as vagabonds or recluses, and some of the bes...

Acknowledging that knowledge has limitations is not global scepticism. Given that the world we know is the 'world of appearances', it regardless behav...

But again, they're not philosophers. Existence is more than, and other than, 'an array of information' or even 'a set of beliefs'. What is the organis...

there's a difference between philosophy and science fiction although it's sometimes a hard thing to explain.

If a physical law can't be certified as being true, how can it be computable?

I think what all of these 'thought experiments' and related threads loose sight of, is the somatic nature of experience - it's felt nature, the fact t...

That is the fundamental existential problem of life. Overcoming or healing that sense of otherness or separation is the goal of all philosophy in my v...

I recall the story of the extraordinary Matteo Ricci. He was the first Christian missionary in China, a Jesuit, who arrived in the early 16th Century....

Paradoxes often occur in respect of this question. A paradox might arise when there are two apparently contradictory statements, both of which appear ...

Well, I can't see it. Mind you I had something similar occur years ago when someone showed me a book of 'magic eye' images, that you're supposed to lo...

OK, then - what's funny? Please explain the joke. OK then, I will take a shot - the question about 'if a tree falls in the forest...' is a joke, right...

OK - none.

Oh, I get it. Now concentrate: you know that this is a 'philosophical question', right? And this is a 'philosophy forum', where people type in 'philos...

So, does that constitute an answer? We are supposed to be informed of what, by the fact that you find it amusing?

Correct! But I don't take the same conclusion from that as Hoffman does, because I don't believe that perception (or anything else) can be explained w...

According to who? It that something that requires validation, or can anyone say that?

So, it's a non-issue, or a silly question, why would it be asked on a philosophy forum? What is it a reference to?

Very good observation. But I think the technical term for that step is actually 'apperception' which is 'the process by which new experience is assimi...

Actually, 'The View from Nowhere' was a 1986 book by Thomas Nagel (although whether the saying has other meanings, I don't know.) Nagel's book is abou...

Scepticism at its most basic is doubting what is generally taken for granted. You can be sceptical about specific things, or sceptical in a more gener...

I don't think that is objective idealism; it is more like Berkeley's view that the Universe continues to exist in God's perception, in the absence of ...

'There anyway'.

It is true that Mah?y?na Buddhism distinguishes 'ultimate and conventional', but the distinction isn't quite like that. In fact it turns out to be a d...

Is that so? I would be interested in knowing the details of that.

I'm sure you do, McD. There are differences of opinion in my immediate family, although for us it's purely academic as we're not Brits. I understand t...

From today's Sydney Morning Herald: http://www.smh.com.au/world/us-election/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-us-election-exper...

I didn't change the subject, it's more that I am 'joining the dots' in a way you're not expecting. Regarding the two statements which I said were in c...

It's not a 'category error'. How do you separate truth from judgement? Can you point out anything which you hold to be true, whilst not judging it? Ca...