Janus

The first passage is your statement; you did not mention Spinoza in it. I was responding to your statement about the incoherence of the idea that spir...

Can you cite the passage where I say this?

Good for you! What points exactly do you disagree with?

This is absolute nonsense; mystics don't say anything like what you are claiming they do. Have you ever read the mystics? Honest answer now...

I said just a few posts ago that I don't believe Spin talks about spirit, and I have never claimed that he say the same about the spirit and world as ...

OK, then your understanding of things is so different from mine that I fear we can have no productive conversation. As I already have said many times,...

Any rational deduction must be valid. To be sound it must be based on true premises. The premises themselves are cannot be deductively proven, they ar...

You are claiming we are capable of infallible intuitive knowledge; this is nonsense, we are not God. We may be able to know, but we can never know tha...

None of this has anything to do with what I have been saying, or even with what Hegel says. And I'm pretty sure that Spin doesn't even talk about spir...

The 'world as spirit' suggests that the world is spirit. This is not to say the same as that the world is an expression of spirit. In the first formul...

No one knows who is right, except God, or the person who really knows. Obviously it can never be proven since intellectual intuitions, as is well ackn...

I always understood that Spinoza regarded seeing sub specie aeternitatis as the highest form of rational knowledge, so yes it would obviously "also in...

Yes, I like to say, with Hegel, that the world is an expression of spirit. It makes no sense to say that spirit ( or mind) causes the world. But we ha...

I's a very long time ( about twenty years) since I studied Spinoza, but my memory tells me that he thought that seeing things 'under the aspect of ete...

Maybe, but I am saying that effectively this is then not really significantly different than Berkeleyanism.

Yes, this just is the intuitive intellectual insight that goes beyond merely empirical investigation and logic. Even Spinoza acknowledges this with hi...

Is there any other coherent view? Either things as experienced just 'brutely' exist (whatever that might mean) and there is no in itself, or the in it...

Can the thing in itself have a point of view?

It means that intuitively it feels right. If we are made in God's image why should we not be able to know the nature of and truth about ourselves by w...

So, you believe on the basis of authority and not on the basis of your own intuitions? I cannot relate this; it is not how I operate at all. I lean to...

The logical conclusion of that is that you should believe in nothing that is not either empirically given or given by scriptural authority. In which c...

I think Kant scholars would all agree on one thing; that Kant was not very clear about anything. I think you're still not getting the point that the m...

I haven't read that Tolstoy work. If you believe Christ was "God in spirit, Man in flesh" in a sense that other humans are not, then i can't see how t...

So Christ was not actually God Incarnate, but just a man, according to you?

Again this is an interpretive subtlety I would say. Space is not an empirical object, but the empirical is spatial. If there are parts of the empirica...

This is the predominant Christian idea of God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, three-in-one. I'm puzzled that you would say it is nonsense, since I have ...

No problem. :)

Firstly, what exactly do you mean by "if the categories are not ideal"? Kant is a very subtle thinker, and there is no general consensus among scholar...

But that passage says nothing at all about the world. :s

Does Schopenhauer think space. time and causality are, exhaustively, functions of the human mind, such that they can have no existence or properties b...

What do mean by "world as spirit"; who promotes that idea?

Any transcendental realism in Kant can really only a be a kind of transcendental empirical realism, though; and that is what I have been trying to get...

So, to return to an earlier question I asked you: are the Platonic Ideas noumenal or phenomenal? It seems odd to say they are noumenal if they are mul...

That's right, and for Schopenhauer the world seems to be Will and Representation, and then over and above the world there seem to be the Platonic Idea...

OK, that's obviously true, but I haven't said it does, so I don't see the point of your post

Sure, except it doesn't address anything I've said although it purports to do so. I find that frustrating to have someone continually disagreeing with...

It is always such a joy seeing people live up to their titles.

I think it is I who should be sighing! You really haven't said anything here. Except for your disagreements with what you think I or Kant have claimed...

What you're failing to grasp is that I don't disagree that we know how we think the in itself (and that we know it in this way is all that what you ar...

Then how does it differ from the 'unknowable X' that Kant postulated? Kant did not deny we know this is our situation with regard to our thoughts abou...

In case you hadn't noticed I'm ignoring any ad hominems directed at me and trying not to get drawn into exchanging personal insults. I'm really only i...

Of course, in a sense if there is a thing in itself then we do know it in all our experience, since all our experience arises from it. That is uncontr...

I haven't anywhere stated that I think the thing in itself is or is not timeless. It might be both temporal and eternal (immanent and transcendent) wh...

Now you are saying that we cannot know anything at all about the thing in itself, a position that you were earlier criticizing Kant for upholding. Thi...

How would I know? Perhaps God put them there to confuse us...or perhaps the science is simply wrong and will be corrected in the future, when we have ...

But where in an utterly undifferentiated timeless unity do those forms come from? This is the perennial Parmenidean problem with monistic conceptions ...

We experience effects, which we (perhaps incorrectly) infer to be due to curvature of space. All inferences are fallibilistic. We do not experience sp...

You haven't given any cogent account at all of how something completely timeless and undifferentiated can manifest itself in either individual spatio-...

I already know you think you are a genius. If only you could demonstrate it. :-}

But you have not shown that any experience, as opposed to merely inferences from mathematical models and observations, does refute Euclidean geometry....