Wayfarer

You frequently treat my posts with loathing and disdain. What I am advocating is not venomous, it's not regressive or any of the other negative epiphe...

And again, that is not a reductionist explanation. Physicalist reductionism has to be understood historically as having developed as a consequences Ca...

It's not 'hatred and fear of the world' but recognition and acknowledgement that nature doesn't contain its own cause. That is what is behind sceptici...

That's reductionist!

I don't see subjective idealism as reductionist. It has many issues and may indeed be untenable but for reasons other than being reductionist. Reducti...

Any examples of 'idealist reductionism'?

It's more that the scientific populists are still advocating the reductionist view. Dennett, and others like him, get a lot more press than actual phi...

I don't see that as 'reductionist', though, because there are no 'primitive elements' being proposed. It might indeed be criticized for authoritariani...

Some commentary on the above by a physicist: http://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2016/06/28/why-a-physicist-hopes-that-the-lhc-discovers-no-mo...

What other kinds of reductionism are there? Incidentally, one of my favourite quotes, from one of Dennett's books, speaking of what we see 'through th...

Interesting observation, and why Oxfam created Fair Trade coffee. I think it illustrates the inter-dependent nature of things. Agree about the cessati...

Democritus' model was very influential but has been shown to be wrong.

I don't know for sure, I would have assumed that even the most basic organisms experience pleasurable and painful sensations. Any animal will experien...

The issue is clearly materialism - having declared the universe devoid of meaning, and only identifying with the material, leads to that state of 'pan...

Sorry, I have been caught up with other things. 'Avidya' is the noun form, not the adjective - I'm not sure what the adjective would be. The situation...

Well, what would a stoic make of that? Isn't the whole point of stoic apathea to rise above that reflexive understanding?

The stated aim of Mahayana Buddhism is 'the enightenment of all sentient beings'. It differs from the older forms of Buddhism which were concerned wit...

That is not a philosophy so much as fatalism. Nietszche foresaw that the 'death of God' and the abandonment of Christian ethics would usher in an age ...

Oh, hadn't thought of that. Don't know!

Such thinking is based totally on hedonism, i.e. 'pleasure=good, pain=bad'.

No, it's not that. That is how it was understood by European scholars who discovered the texts in the 19th Century; Nietzsche characterised it as 'the...

It's neat how folks can talk about how Buddha-hood 'never happens' whilst evincing no knowledge, argument, or insight, beyond kvetching about what a p...

you can download your own posts as threads. There's a command in there somewhere which still works.

I'm failing to see anything 'philosophical' about your pessimism. I think it's just plain old garden-variety pessimism.

These are metaphors of agency. Parallels from the Origin of Species: 1876 edition, 68-69

Not 'something more' in some tantalising way ('hey, what do you have in that box?) Simply 'something more' than the apparent hopelessness of the human...

when it's a choice between a cockup and a conspiracy, it's always a cockup in my experience. That's what I think we're seeing here.

Consider the paradigmatic relationship between the sage and the aspiring philosopher, in many traditional schools. It is that the sage/teacher sees or...

I think a Buddhist, or a Stoic, might answer that whatever we currently imagine, is only a partial truth; we are, said one teacher, 'always the philos...

With all this talk about suffering, there ought to be some recognition of the 'cessation of suffering'. That expression is found in Buddhism but the i...

The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society by Brad S. Gregory https://amzn.com/0674088050

I think the historical reasons for the decline of the stoics are pretty clear, really, but would probably constitute at least a long essay, if not a b...

It would be interesting to hypothesise as to what the reaction would have been a decade or so back, if some technology company had announced that in t...

I don't want to depreciate stoic principles, but it is a matter of historical fact that stoicism died out in part because of its lack of vitality - an...

I agree with the OP *except* that we have crossed the Rubicon already, there's no conceivable way of going back. Besides I was lucky enough to earn a ...

From the OP: I should also add that the name of divine Reason was also frequently referred to as the Logos. I think this entails a somewhat religious ...

Surely you couldn't go wrong following such principles.

I think the over-arching philosophical issue is actually a very simple one: why? Why do living things exist at all? Not 'why do pelicans have capaciou...

Inspiring post, anon. Great to hear accounts of those for whom philosophy really is a path.

The difference between the market and traffic, is that the former has connotations of persons meeting for an exchange of goods and services. So it exi...

In my experience with any kind of 'spiritual' practice - your understanding changes all the time as you do it. What you thought it was going to do, is...

However dogs (etc) are pre-rational; yogis (etc) trans-rational. 'Falling short' is not the same as 'going beyond'. However, as you say, biological sy...

There's a nice book that I bought as a gift for a friend a little while back, A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy by William B. Irv...

I think that is one of the reasons for the decline of stoicism; it was unable to provide a kind of positive philosophy or source of philosophical vita...

I am not generally averse to your point of view, MoS! And i thought your first post above was well-stated. I think the problem with the OP is that it ...

I would take a synoptic approach to Aristotle and Aquinas. The volume of their works is enormous and daunting. Although I do agree with @Thorongil tha...

If your neighbour invest hundreds of thousands of dollars buying lottery tickets, and you buy the occasional one, then her chances are going to be muc...

Get it! So 'chance' is actually a name for 'causes yet discovered'. I like it.

Beware the tangled roots.

I think it's obviously felt to be chance as distinct from design. As Nagel comments in his essay, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion, 'D...