Janus

Yes, that is what we know as the soul. The existence of the soul is not like the existence of a thing; a satisfactory analytical account of it cannot ...

Do you think that verse expresses the idea that God does not play favorites? Humans tend to "respect persons", for example the Queen much more than th...

In Christianity it is always the soul that is saved by the truth of the spirit. "And the truth shall set you free". In Christianity the individual sou...

Nowadays I don't think in terms of barriers or membranes or separation of any kind between the empirical and the transcendent. I see them as two diffe...

:-} Appeals to authority, as if I'm going to go off and search Hume's works! It's like trying to get blood out of a stone...what is the evidence...???...

Well, then I'm still completely in the dark as to what the "good reason" for your belief is... For me the situation as outlined provides good reason f...

Oh, yeah, right so your "default" belief is based on self-acknowledged ignorance? So it is nothing more than a baseless leap of faith just like its op...

Great, we wouldn't want you to be losing that oh-so-precious skin off your back, now would we? For me it's really all just like water off a duck's nos...

Yes either it is or it isn't possible, and you don't know which. This is just what I said. The default position may be for you to believe it is possib...

You are missing the point. There may be constraints on what could ever be actual (possibility), apart from the obvious purely logical ones, that are a...

You need to explain the differences and what relevance you think they might have to what I said if you want me to respond to this.

No, it may be possible that you would not fall or it may not be possible; the thing is, you don't know which, and it is the context of that lack of kn...

If nature is bound by laws, what imaginable (and obviously outside those laws) force could cause them to suddenly change?

I guess it depends on how you define "normal state of consciousness". Is the normal state of consciousness a state of skepticism or openness. The heig...

Figures like Christ and the Buddha are purported to have "known the nature of reality", but since we do not know, isn't it always going to come down t...

Granted he may not state it, but I think the presumption is implicit in his view. The declaration that it is legitimate to wonder whether life has a m...

I think we will never have exhaustive knowledge of the laws of nature, and even if we did this would tell us nothing about their origin. Whether they ...

Cases of the kind you cite are, for me, cases of cause and effect operating in the empirical world. I haven't denied. or even questioned, those. My qu...

Is that inference an inductive one based on what has been observed to happen with some past scientific theories? ;)

Yes, I pretty much agree. :)

In that case things must have invariant natures, no? I would count that invariance as natural law. Or perhaps you are thinking of the laws as explanat...

To say that nature is governed by laws already runs against Hume's pseudo-problem. If I believe nature is governed by laws then I believe that the exi...

The indifference which Camus imputes to the universe is based on a view which sees it as brutely material and not at all as spiritual, both in essence...

If we believe that nature is governed by laws then I would say we have very good reason to think it is actually impossible for those laws to suddenly ...

It's not so clear to me that we can say that all intentional actions have consequences, but rather something like intentional actions reflect who we a...

Or the laws of nature could have suddenly changed in which case nothing would be what it had been any more. That this might happen is not from a purel...

Camus criticizes existentialists such as Kierkegaard, Heidegger and Jaspers for recognizing the absurd situation and then, as he sees it, betraying th...

Ahh, you're going on the nod? I'll take that as a "yes", then....

Our current understanding (taken as a whole and not in regard to details) may or may not be fallible. You need to make a distinction between knowing a...

I've come across the idea of a "storehouse consciousness' before. It seems to be the idea of something like a universal memory. The interesting questi...

This is a very silly argument because light passes through glass just as it does through air or water. You say instead that there is an images project...

I haven't really thought extensively along this line yet, but at first strike I would probably say that memory itself would be the sense of unity and ...

It's certainly not logically impossible per se but if the laws of nature form a unified and interrelated whole then it is impossible without the compl...

(Y)

If water suddenly started boiling at 30 degrees at sea level most life on Earth would be dead real quick.

So, the problem here seems to be that the sense of "sameness/ identity" which is purportedly prior to memory, and in fact to be responsible for its ve...

OK, so you say that identity is not a matter of having a particular body, idea about oneself or set of memories. And yet all you know of your self (at...

OK, then just to make a very tentative start, there is the paradox of sameness and difference which has already been alluded to. My future self will b...

I'm sorry I couldn't have been more help to your inquiry csalisbury; I'd love to be able to say something more, but every attempt I have made over man...

If you are reborn in a different body and with no memory of your past (that is, no memory of what is for you now, your present) identity, would you sa...

We know intuitively they are the same person, we just can't explain to ourselves how it is possible that they are. I guess my answer would be that it ...

I would say you worry about the child you're looking at now and for the future child that will be tortured because you understand them to be one and t...

I'm not sure exactly what you are asking with the question as to whether I might exist again after I die, so I can't really answer it except to say th...

:-}

I think you misunderstood me; what I meant is that there appear to be heads with brains in them; that's what actually appears to us. And they appear t...

So, the question seems to comes down to whether we have good reason NOT to believe there is a real head with a real brain in it that causes the percep...

:s :-} :-d

I disagree with you because I believe some differences that are not 'worldly' can be known intuitively. This is what enables the knowing of aesthetic,...

I haven't thought and don't care about how old you are or how long you have been doing this kind of thing. Doing something for a long time does not, b...

The very coherence of the notion of philosophical discussion relies on there being principles in common, that are not merely subjective opinion, that ...