Janus

Cheers, it seems we agree? I don't have anything further to add.

Right, it's not as though we can claim that the world is absolutely intelligible?to claim that would be to claim that we know everything there is to k...

You've contradicted yourself. Non-existence may indeed be merely a conceptual construction, but when it comes to existence, it is the idea of existenc...

I am not claiming there are no sound inferences from religious experiences to religious beliefs or metaphysical positions; I'm saying that I can't see...

You are not answering the question. If the "signs and milestones" constitute evidence and are not mere handwaving you should be able to explain how th...

How could you know that if you haven’t successfully completed the journey yourself? Seems like it must be down to faith. If you want to claim that tha...

Some cryptic answers there! Regarding the Berkeley quote, I see no reason why the secularist cannot appreciate the order, the beauty and so on and lea...

'Can be read as' does not equate to 'used the term'. I already explained that I am not claiming that Spinoza thought precisely in modern materialist t...

It's as though you don't read what I've written. :roll:

I never claimed that Spinoza thought in such modern terms, but merely that his philosophy is not inconsistent with that modern conception.

:up:

I am not going to disagree, except to say that we have what seem to be coherent conceptual distinctions between reasons and causes, distinctions which...

I don't agree. Spinoza can be read as thinking that material substance has the potential for both the attributes of extension and cogitation. Your "mo...

I have nothing further to add in response to the rest of your post, but I'm wondering when you say that we understand things in the human sciences you...

I seem to remember that you said you had not studied Spinoza, and were not familiar with his work. You have never quoted him directly as far as I reca...

What that characterizes the religious life do you think is missing in the secular life? :100: Yep apart from one or two religionists on these forums t...

I think you miss two critically important points in your etymologically based purported potted history of the idea of substance. First the inquiry int...

Regarding the question about "one correct interpretation" of texts; I can't see how that could be supportable. What could it mean to say there is only...

That would be in accordance with Aristotle's understanding of a substance as an individual entity. Spinoza understood substance more in line with the ...

Racism was not held on account of the science but on account of sedimented centuries old prejudices, some of them religious. For example when the Chri...

It would depend on whether there was another, better explanation for what they witnessed. Even scientific theories are not proven, and it seems that w...

I didn't answer that because it is irrelevant to us. Given it is plausible that some of the ordinary historical events detailed in the bible did happe...

I'm not at all pissed, just nonplussed by your apparently poor comprehension. You are either cherry-picking or not understanding what I have been writ...

If all you guys are looking for is a circle jerk I'll gladly dip out.

More empty assertions. I'm looking for an explanation, not unnecessary history lessons or vacuous claims. Totally irrelevant and a classic example of ...

Sure, perhaps the bible does present good evidence that certain historical events occurred and that Jesus existed and had a ministry. But that says no...

I wouldn't suggest it is bullshit unless they argued that I should accept it. There seems to be no rational way to argue that when it comes to scriptu...

The point is being missed that testimony about what is perceived is more corroborable than testimony about religious feelings. That's right?the assump...

The problem is that authority is not evidence unless it can itself be backed up with evidence. And by evidence I mean anything that an unbiased person...

It seems the problem with hermeneutics lies in specifying what criteria there could be for a reading to count as a correct reading. Would it be gettin...

I think this kind of intuition?your intuition about the job candidate and my intuition about the soundness of your intuition are both based on our acc...

I've always liked to draw a distinction between being able to be absolutely certain and feeling absolutely certain. I think it's possible that people ...

That's an important distinction. Intuitions which are based on accumulated experiences and prior processes of reasoning are different than intuitions ...

Yes what the body experiences pre-cognitively is unknown to us in vivo. Of course we can study it after the fact so to speak. But the critics will say...

This is a really good point; it focuses the issue nicely. I would say that intuitions are certainly feelings and the question would be as to whether t...

More labelling. Seems to be all you are capable of. Oh well, back to the ignore-ance.

I see...we see through a glass darkly but you don't. :rofl:

You seem to be trading on an equivocal idea of intuition. Self-evidence obtains when something is true by definition. We don't need intuition to see i...

Well, it seems fairly plausible that the idea of reality derives form our perceptual and somatosensory experiences. But it also seems plausible that t...

:roll: From my point of view you certainly seem to see through a glass darkly.

:roll: It was a question. You posited a sense we can have no sense of. Given that it seems a fair question.

Why would you say that? I haven't made any claims about what others should accept.

What use is a sense we can't apprehend ? what could it be to us?

It's not a matter of "which"; I don't hundred percent believe there is no afterlife, because I have no way of knowing if that is true. And because non...

I don't 100% believe there is no afterlife, but it really is nothing more than a fantasy, whether oriented towards the pleasant or the unpleasant, for...

It is obvious that we comprehend the world, both in an everyday sense and in the enormously complex web of coherent understanding we call science. Som...

I can't make sense of the idea that the Universe had a beginning in time, and certainly not "philosophical time" (whatever that is meant to be). The b...

Consistency consists in simply not saying things that are logically incompatible, mostly not saying things which contradict one another. No intuition ...

This cannot be true. The validity ("authority" makes no sense) of reasoning rests on consistency. In any case any authority is either imposed by force...

It seems we can do philosophy without bothering about metaphysics. We don't need metaphysics to do ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of language, history...