One also needs to accept certain assumptions about what enlightenment consists in, and whether it can really can tell us anything about the nature of ...
No, it's not. I define human knowledge as knowledge which is, in principle at least, open to anyone, It is also rationally defensible and defeasible, ...
I missed this earlier. Right, from a physicalist (I would prefer to say "empiricist and even rationalist") perspective it is bunk. It is bunk because ...
Knowledge must consist in valid reasoning from sound grounds if knowledge as JTB holds, and is the model under consideration. How do we know that grou...
We adopt grounds because they seem reasonable to us. This is where belief comes in. Can we count the "seeming reasonable" as an example of valid reaso...
Fair enough. The way I see it is that argument is the application of reason (logic), and in order to be a good argument must be valid (conclusions fol...
I think reason (which just is argument) and ground (premises) are the two ingredients (the others are reducible to those). Although reason does come i...
Altruism, in the sense of cooperating with and helping others in your tribe would certainly materially benefit the tribe, and thus be a good survival ...
I remember reading somewhere that Wittgenstein, when ask about his diet, said (paraphrased): "I don't mind very much what I eat, as long as it's alway...
:up: I think it's true that we model nature in terms of mechanism, and the notion of mechanism inherently involves the idea of lifelessness, lack of a...
Right, but there's nothing in that quote which tells against what I had said about Hadot. It is not claimed that Hadot thought that the sage knows any...
If the sage did know something determinate which could be discursively demonstrated, then we would have examples of such demonstrations, as we do with...
What you are missing in this, I think, is that a sage is one who has learned how to live well; so the esoteric knowledge they possess, that cannot be ...
No, of course a proposition and a jazz performance aren't exactly true in the same way, but "that's real jazz" is equivalent to "that's true jazz" whi...
That's true; the problem is that the idea of something being both exclusively beyond and also within rational discourse is simply self-contradictory i...
I get that that's your personal feeling, but there can be no rational basis for rejecting life unless it could be shown that suffering outweighs happi...
I don't see any reason to reject life on the basis that it involves some suffering. How much suffering would it need to involve in order to warrant re...
Because it is not a logical, merely an emotional, reason, given that your premise (feeling) that life is overall more suffering than joy, cannot be su...
But what could philosophy be other than rational discourse? If the esoteric is outside the bounds of rational discourse, and if philosophy cannot be a...
The problem is that if there can be direct knowledge of reality, and that knowledge is deemed by the practitioners themselves to be esoteric, meaning ...
As I said, no calculus is possible, so I wouldn't presume to be able to decide whether a potential life will have a greater portion of joy than suffer...
If existence was nothing but suffering, then your point regarding the undesirability of creating new life would stand. In that case existence would st...
Interesting question! Many people seem to be drawn to those who show a complete confidence in their understanding of things and people. If I unfailing...
I agree with this, but I was referring more to radically altered states of consciousness. You might think of them as egoless states. Nice story about ...
You are thinking too simplistically: ignoring the fact that there may be objective truths about subjects and their subjective states.'Objective truth'...
I think expereinece with psychedelics (and meditation, the arts, fasting and other practices) can alter our ways of seeing. These altered ways often s...
Why "higher consciousness"? Why not instead 'altered consciousness', which we know is possible courtesy of psychedelics. If it is possible with psyche...
The Buddha claimed or was said to claim that on becoming enlightened he could remember his past five thousand lives. This is certainly a claim to poss...
I pretty much agree with you. Joe, and I have been arguing as much on here for quite a while. I think such "certain direct knowledge" consists merely....
You are a fuck'n fool, Buttlicks. Ethical naturalism, in ethics, the view that moral terms, concepts, or properties are ultimately definable in terms ...
Your "critique" of naturalism is stupid. Moral naturalism doesn't claim that moral injunctions come form "the lifeless (sic) natural world" but from t...
Yeah, and about as much as this piss-poor "response" has to say about what it is "responding" to. Actions are done by individuals. The question about ...
Moral norms (when it comes to the "big" issues like assault, rape, murder, child abuse, theft and so on) are dictated by necessity: that is by the nee...
This is basically back to the "is/ ought" distinction. Laws, as it is with social conditions, working conditions, economic conditions, environmental c...
Are you merely saying that laws are not necessarily moral? Or is there something more to it? Do you agree that laws should be moral? If not what could...
The contradiction consists in saying there is no reason to believe anything, and yet I believe something, if the claim is that one should not believe ...
Sure, that applies to the person who believes normative skepticism is true, For a start, the very idea of normative skepticism is self-contradictory, ...
Yes, but this is tendentiously put: making it out to necessarily be a positive belief when it need not be. It could be phrased "I find no reason to be...
Yes imaginary, fictive, nonexistent things do have properties: imaginary, fictive, nonexistent properties. They also have real properties; the propert...
I would agree that the whole does not exist, but not that real composites are composites of nothing. Real entities can be broken down into parts, but ...
All things exist. From that it does not follow that existence is all things, as though there is an entity "existence" or "all things" over and above a...
Comments