Janus

For a start you live in a city and I don't. And then everyone will not follow my example, which means that objection is irrelevant.

It's up to the individual of course. If your risk of contracting Covid is minimal, then the risks of the vaccines may loom larger and, for me at least...

The risk of short-term side-effects and death appears to be minimal at this stage, orders of magnitude less than the risk of short term complications ...

Sorry, missed these earlier: An apt and neat summation; thanks. Ha ha good answer to which I can think of no question! Seems this thread Is nothing bu...

I don't agree with this. Science is pragmatics, not metaphysics. It's like phenomenology; if you want to understand how things are and how they work, ...

Of course this is generally true. Most people don't want to think for themselves; and they should and inevitably will, follow the official line, which...

No, it's not absolute, it's contextual: it's a truth of human life. No it's not an absolute or fundamental truth in all domains, it's not a truth of p...

I'm not as confident as you are of the reliability of the "secondary and tertiary sources"; perhaps if I had more time to research I might be more con...

What I meant was that, as non-scientists, we are not really able to engage with the science in a truly informed way, unless we are prepared to spend c...

If you don't believe that most scientists and academics toe the line when it comes to politically or economically contentious topics, at least until t...

I trust the assertions and theories of science that don't appear to be politically motivated; geology, botany, zoology, biology, chemistry, physics, h...

Yes, you trust the official reports of science more than me it seems. I trust science itself only insofar as it is free from politics.

I haven't said that the vaccines are not efficacious or safe; so this is a strawman statement. I am obviously more cautious than you are in assessing ...

For an alternative account take a look at this passage from here: 4. The US role in funding the Wuhan Institute of Virology. From June 2014 to May 201...

Of course you would think that! In any case they are not my company, but yours, since this is your thread. BTW I think you are overly certain about th...

No, you're confused; the unity you've achieved is that of the braying ass.

I don't agree; lack of action is a kind of action, and in any case suspension of judgement does not entail that one would have no ideas that could be ...

I haven't denied that the assertions, or at least some of them, in any ism might be true, but truth is contextual, and the truth in any domain of inqu...

I agree that faith is not the absence of doubt or reason, but it is held in the absence of what we would count as evidence (i.e. empirical evidence). ...

Beliefs based on empirical observations can be confirmed or dis-confirmed by investigation to the satisfaction of any unbiased observer; the extraordi...

If pluralism allows for all the other isms within their proper contexts, (but obviously not as absolutes) then I still don't see how it would qualify ...

Proselytizing and propaganda is usually in the form of dogma, but dogma is not necessarily proselytized or propagandized, it may be just held as a per...

Are you claiming that the stories we tell each other never become dogma?

It was a question, not an assertion of my own belief. The point was, as I already stated, that isms becoming nothing-but-isms when they claim to be ab...

I'm not sure I did say that there is a difference. My main point was that faith is belief, not in spite of the (empirical) evidence (the implication b...

If the historical reality of the cosmic microwave background is accepted, then it follows that all physical properties are emergent.

No, Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son is the paradigm of faith in one's own imagination. It is entirely devoid of any rational conception of ...

I agree with you that there is no certainty, other than the tautological. You seem to be saying that we have faith in the experimental method, and in ...

You seem to have said above that what applies to consciousness does not also apply to life. Can you explain why you think that, if indeed you do?

It's 5.44 am here and I,m going to work soon, so I'll start working through responses in order. This is in response to the question as to whether all ...

Except for this body, you presume to know what you don't; the definition of a dogmatist.

You mean Bosom Of Abraham by Elvis Presley? Well you rock my soul Down in the bosom of Abraham Rock, rock, rock down in the bosom of Abraham You rock ...

:cool:

This is a very common misunderstanding of the situation: in the religious context it is more properly a case of faith in the absence of, rather than d...

How do you imagine that works? I would have thought that, when it comes to the existence of God, free will and immortality, there are no facts, since ...

Religion is no problem if it refrains from ignorantly and arrogantly claiming to itself the right to contradict the facts as revealed by science, the ...

I haven't said anything like that " the in-itself is rendered valueless by virtue of its absence from ordinary conversation". And Kant's argument is n...

I know what Pufferfish are; I've caught them when fishing as a kid. I also know, as I already said, that the Japanese eat them, very carefully prepare...

This sounds somewhat puffer-fishish.

My tool is not a method. :wink:

I don't understand what you are saying here, frank.The idea of the in itself, per Kant, is the idea that there must be things in themselves (noumena) ...

You mean a gradient of more or less 'in itself' and/ or 'for us'? How would we tell though, when all the telling is "for us"? Personally, I reject the...

Not an imperative, a distinction. The logical distinction between things as they are in themselves and things as they are experienced by us is not a f...

No, logically speaking it's either "in itself" or it's not.

There is much of philosophy which is, strictly speaking, poetic nonsense; it is definitely a genre, and not without its joys and benefits, but not to ...

Or poetry, or art, or architecture, or philosophy as an exercise of the imagination, or even sometimes as a stimulus to scientific investigation, as P...

I haven't looked at the Midgeley thread; I was simply responding to your comment here that Perhaps you were indulging yourself in a little hyperbole t...

Not at all! You have forgotten all about religion and the arts, not to mention science; many of the greatest works of the human imagination would not ...

I don't think @"Banno" is arguing that science, in the narrow reductive sense, can answer all questions; he merely seems to be asserting that science,...

Right, there is no reality that science is dealing with other than what @"Wayfarer" would term "reality for us". That just is the only reality, there ...