It's sort of roughly contemporaneous with ancient Greek materialism (Leucippus was 5th century, and there are hints that Greek atomism may go back eve...
Personally, while I see the attraction of Theism (it neatly brings closure to rationality), I stick to agnostic rationalism. We just don't know enough...
Depends on what grain and standard you're using. If you're going down to the level of neuroscience, the actual "scanning" part of our sensory equipmen...
Hehe, I'm not being obtuse, I assure you. I used to be captivated by all this stuff myself, so I understand its attraction. A computer. Why would I de...
No, I proposed such a test in post 131625, and you even quoted it yourself en passant in a later post: "You can easily verify the existence of unperce...
I already told you: do something like take a picture while you have your eyes closed, and you will be able to verify that the object of your experienc...
I mean they're inaccessible to us in terms of being a shareable raw basis on which to build shared meaning. Obviously once we have shared meaning comi...
I didn't ignore it, I said that it's a flight of fancy you've given me no reason to take seriously. It's just a different definition of "doubt" from t...
Yeah but the similarities (as well as the differences) are inaccessible to us, all we have that we can share is the shared patterns of symbol use. IOW...
Doubt is not suspension of judgement, it's the questioning of the truth or validity of something based on reasons (e.g. some anomaly). Suspension of j...
Slavery has always had its detractors, and even at worst, most societies that have had slaves have had rules about not mistreating them. It would be a...
I don't think the Wittgensteinian angle Banno's flying the flag for would deny this, in fact Wittgenstein's way of looking at things almost relies on ...
Any "why believe that?" question can be answered normally. Why believe there's a table in front of you? Because you can see it, it's got the functiona...
Yeah, exactly. Global scepticism is a dead end in thought. It looks tempting, and it's instructive to poke around, but ultimately it just doesn't make...
"Grounded in" isn't at all the same thing as "determined by." I'm not sure if I can explain my position any better than I already did in that last pos...
The problem with scepticism is that doubt only makes sense if it's limited, because doubt about one thing requires a reason to doubt, which presuppose...
There's nothing wrong with sharing your ideas with others, or recommending things to them, however bizarre, I think the line to cross would be if you ...
Moral codes aren't actually all that different depending on where you are. There are certainly some differences, and occasionally bizarre differences,...
Children aren't more informed, they have access to more information, those are different things. Children still don't have the nous that comes from ex...
Yeah, the question though is whether we ought to allow ourselves to be driven by anything that's not rationally verifiable, whether we should allow ou...
No it's not biological determinism, it's that human nature is like a tether - you have a fair bit room to wander over possible-social-rule space, some...
The problem is that you have a God-shaped hole :) To unpack that: we are born with "why"-asking machinery in our brains, and that machinery, which nor...
That would presuppose a standard for "good" that's outside what's good for humans. But that would only be a standard chosen by some humans (e.g. natur...
I don't think there are any moral changes, what happens is that the relatively stable features of human nature and the world are always juxtaposed aga...
If something doesn't have any effect on perception, then it makes no difference to us human beings whether it exists or not; there can be no evidence ...
I think ethics does presuppose a human nature, and also a nature-of-the-world. It presupposes that things and people have innate tendencies, innate pa...
Generally speaking, I think non-physical things that are real are mostly patterns, relatively stable patterns of behaviour, of interaction, etc., of p...
There are two aspects to this, the first is the two world wars and their respective aftermaths, the second is the more purely academic cults of Critic...
Strictly speaking, "designed" is really just a shorthand for the evolutionary explanation for the existence of organisms. Nothing is actually designed...
The general etymology seems to be related to "faith, faithfulness, fidelity, loyalty; veracity, quality of being true; pledge, covenant," from Germani...
I think we can cut through a whole lot of bullshit about belief and truth by looking at the etymology of "true". It has to do with trust. Belief is a ...
Yeah, I think this is one of the few settled things we can say in all this area. Things like Idealism and phenomenalism are actually incoherent, since...
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