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Janus

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That makes sense to me.
March 03, 2023 at 02:51
:up:
March 03, 2023 at 02:50
Is that an enlightened form of solipsism? If so, you are not living down to your name :razz:
March 02, 2023 at 22:19
That's very romantic. Good luck trying to explain something that is beyond human experience and understanding in terms of human experience and underst...
March 02, 2023 at 22:16
:lol: No we need them to make it appear difficult to explain dinosaurs. Maybe dinosaurs were conscious subjects and so there was time in their time. :...
March 02, 2023 at 22:08
I agree that we don't know the transcendental, in the sense of the independent-of-our-experience-and-understanding, conditions for the existence of th...
March 02, 2023 at 22:00
The government agencies might just be proposing a different aesthetic. It brings up the question as to just what aesthetics deals with. The simple, pe...
March 02, 2023 at 21:50
No more than our experience of matter tells us anything "ultimate" about matter I guess. I'm not clear what the distinction would be between "objects ...
March 02, 2023 at 21:44
I would agree that it is generally considered to be a fact, but I think that, strictly speaking, it is an inference to the best explanation for fossil...
March 02, 2023 at 21:34
It's hard to imagine, since all our explanations are given either in terms of causes or reasons. Might be problems just regarding some parts of physic...
March 02, 2023 at 01:49
But it's not an empirical fact. Emprical facts are observables. So, what is it? I'm not asking you to explain time, I'm asking you what you mean by ti...
March 02, 2023 at 01:11
Are they not facts of human experience? I mean, what else could they be? On the other hand I'm finding it difficult to see how "a time before humans e...
March 02, 2023 at 00:38
It depends on what you mean by 'time'. If it is taken to mean the subjective sense of duration, or the conception of past present and future, then of ...
March 01, 2023 at 23:25
Perhaps, but good luck trying to identify just what they are.
March 01, 2023 at 23:05
I don't recall claiming not to be able to see where the purported conflation originated, since I don't think there is any such conflation. The way I s...
March 01, 2023 at 22:56
I think you are placing too much significance on the etymology; many "general idea" (as opposed to "specific object") words have multiple usages, and ...
March 01, 2023 at 22:32
For me the way around such contradictions would be to say that if we had been around a hundred and fifty million years ago we would have seen the dino...
March 01, 2023 at 22:04
Do you mean as opposed to indirect translation? :wink: As far as I know it means "thing" or "being"; so you have res extensa: extended thing or being ...
March 01, 2023 at 21:41
The problem is that logic cannot be coherntly thought to be subordinate to God. In other words God cannot logically be omnipotent, and in Spinoza's sy...
March 01, 2023 at 02:54
I agree. :100: The conflation of substance with subject is completely alien to Spinoza, and I can't think of anywhere else it could be found. The clos...
March 01, 2023 at 01:36
That such acts do have a physical cause is understood by neuroscience. I don't subscribe to the "spooky" libertarian, absolutist notion of free will, ...
February 28, 2023 at 22:42
Exactly! The question is, though, do we merely imagine that we know what we are talking about with such projections? So it seems that Kant could have ...
February 28, 2023 at 22:38
If I were one of those who subscribe to the idea that seeing the tree collapses the wave function and determines how many branches it has, which I'm n...
February 28, 2023 at 22:17
If we didn't perceive the tree we wouldn't know it has three branches. So, the statement about the tree in question cannot be informedly made absent h...
February 28, 2023 at 07:44
Yes, but all that "objectively verifiable fact" and its verifiability on a strong reading of constructivism is itself constructed. Right, for Berkeley...
February 28, 2023 at 01:25
Fair enough: I don't have much time for Theravada Buddhism. but I agree with the poisonous snake analogy: if you just think you don't have to make any...
February 28, 2023 at 01:04
Yes, but you have the idea in Buddhism that nirvana is samsara, and the notion of interdependent origination which begins with avidya or ignorance. An...
February 28, 2023 at 00:46
Introducing Buddhism is an interesting line, The ultimate telos in Buddhism (if there is one) would be karma I think. Karma is understood to be driven...
February 28, 2023 at 00:16
If the tree is an idea in God's mind (pace Berkeley) then it either has three branches or it doesn't. I could still misperceive the tree in that scena...
February 28, 2023 at 00:06
It is about the commonly perceived tree and is either true or false, as can be confirmed inter-subjectively. If I say, "the tree I perceive has three ...
February 27, 2023 at 23:56
Cheers javra. I think this is relevant: Our understanding of the nature of physicality cannot deal with intentionality, either in its phenomenological...
February 27, 2023 at 23:39
I don't see why not if we acknowledge that what we think of as a "purpose" could be a constraint on possibility due to the nature of things. Something...
February 27, 2023 at 23:02
Can you present an actual example of such a cause? Learning and understanding are not all or nothing. I don't see that. If the final cause of somethin...
February 27, 2023 at 22:01
Well, leaving aside the possibility of intelligent alien species, nowhere of course. But that wasn't what I've been driving at. Maybe an example will ...
February 27, 2023 at 21:39
If I understand you aright I think we agree. Let's see if you agree with the following: there can be no justifiable universal claims that purport to o...
February 27, 2023 at 06:53
I acknowledge that in regard to thinking about human behavior we encounter the domain of reasons, whereas we think about events in terms of causes. Ca...
February 26, 2023 at 21:29
If Kant thinks that the metaphysical a priori reasoning from principles is apodeictic, would that not be to posit that such reasoning yields universal...
February 26, 2023 at 21:13
I wouldn't count causality as metaphysical because I see causality as intimately tied with, indispensable to, the understanding of the physical, and I...
February 26, 2023 at 04:21
I think it should be noted that Whitehead did not identify as a panpsychist, but as a panexperientialist. From what I remember reading in Whitehead (m...
February 26, 2023 at 03:35
I haven't mentioned positivism, I am not remotely a positivist, so I don't know why you have brought it up. I think that metaphysics is undecidable, s...
February 26, 2023 at 02:42
I see a priori reasoning to principles as phenomenological and pragmatic, not metaphysical. But here we come up against the fact that exactly what is ...
February 26, 2023 at 02:30
That's nothing more than arrogant copout. Nagarjuna, if I recall correctly, rejects the principle of dependent origination and the ??nyat? is an apoph...
February 25, 2023 at 23:34
Methodological naturalism is not the idea that we see the world as it is completely separately from us, it is simply the bracketing out of such questi...
February 25, 2023 at 22:35
This does not constitute not an argument; it is mere hand-waving. Firstly, I said that it is to be expected that we see that our worlviews are in fact...
February 25, 2023 at 22:07
The point was that there is no body of the rainbow: it is not tangible, cannot be bodily felt, even in the subtle way that clouds can be felt.. It loo...
February 25, 2023 at 21:09
This is not true in my view. Not all empirical phenomena are corporeal. A rainbow is not corporeal, for example. An atom, an electron, a photon, a qua...
February 25, 2023 at 06:44
I think this is misleading in that it suggests the deliberate adoption of one attitude over another. On the contrary it seems much more plausible to t...
February 25, 2023 at 06:25
:up: Yes, anything that involves actual logical contradiction can certainly be ruled out.
February 25, 2023 at 05:47
I agree 180; methodological naturalism or materialism is most useful for understanding the physical. Should we be surprised about that? Granted, for u...
February 24, 2023 at 22:59