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Manuel

['Member']Joined: January 09, 2021 at 22:47Last active: February 25, 2026 at 16:0214 discussions4376 comments

Favourite Philosopher

Arthur Schopenhauer, John Locke, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Richard Burthogge, Bertrand Rusell, Ralph Cudworth, Noam Chomsky, Galen Strawson, Raymond Tallis, Bryan Magee

Favourite Quotations

"It's always night or we wouldn't need light."

- Thelonious Monk

"You may reasonably expect a man to walk a tightrope safely for ten minutes; it would be unreasonable to do so without accident for two hundred years."

- Bertrand Russell

"Enchanted by its rigour, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigour of chess masters, not of angels."

- Jorge Luis Borges

"...From all which it is evident, that the extent of our knowledge comes not only short of the reality of things, but even of the extent of our own ideas. Though our knowledge be limited to our ideas, and cannot exceed them either in extent or perfection; and though these be very narrow bounds... tied down to the dull and narrow information that is to be received from some few, and not very acute, ways of perception, such as are our senses; yet it would be well with us if our knowledge were but as large as our ideas, and there were not many doubts and inquiries concerning the ideas we have, whereof we are not, nor I believe ever shall be in this world resolved."

- John Locke

"But then if I look out of the window and see men crossing the square, as I just happen to have done, I normally say that I see the men themselves… Yet do I see any more than hats and coats which could conceal automatons? I judge that they are men. And so something which I thought I was seeing with my eyes is in fact grasped solely by the faculty of judgment which is in my mind."

- Rene Descartes

"Submission ends it all..."

- The Stone Roses

"And, that these cogitations of the... soul called sensations, are not knowledge… is evident by experience... For if [sensations] were knowledge...then all men would rest satisfied in the sensible ideas... of them and never inquire any further… as when we see the clear light of the meridian sun, or hear the loud noise of thunder, whereas… one dazzle our eyes, the other deafens our ears, but neither enlighten or inform our understandings."

- Ralph Cudworth

"But, concerning what you think to be the truth of the thing, or the ultimate nature of honey, this is what I ardently desire to know, and what remains still hidden from me..."

- Pierre Gassendi



Discussions (14)

Comments

In: Currently Reading  — view comment
It's a bit difficult, but he is a superb writer, no doubt!
January 14, 2026 at 16:06
In: Philosophy has failed to create a better world  — view comment
This is not true. The reason why it looks like philosophy has no made progress is related to a terminological issue. When natural philosophy became to...
January 14, 2026 at 14:55
In: Currently Reading  — view comment
Solenoid - Mircea C?rt?rescu
January 14, 2026 at 14:46
In: Non-Living Objects in an Idealist Ontology: Kastrup  — view comment
For my own clarification: I think we are talking past each other. Now you're talking about trees rather than structures, which is not a distinction I ...
January 01, 2026 at 04:33
In: Non-Living Objects in an Idealist Ontology: Kastrup  — view comment
Well put! What you are saying closely matches my own intuitions. It is hard because what we see is so obviously that it is very hard to step out of it...
January 01, 2026 at 02:14
In: Non-Living Objects in an Idealist Ontology: Kastrup  — view comment
Dogs (or other animals) do not need language to discriminate, individuate or make attributions to objects. I also, repeatedly have said that they perc...
January 01, 2026 at 01:55
In: Non-Living Objects in an Idealist Ontology: Kastrup  — view comment
Yeah that's fair enough. I'll give Kastrup props for making idealism a topic of debate, but there are other formulations which are more interesting.
January 01, 2026 at 01:15
In: Non-Living Objects in an Idealist Ontology: Kastrup  — view comment
Because (some) animals sometimes react to things in a way that resembles what we do (which says little about what we perceive when we do that thing) d...
January 01, 2026 at 01:13
In: Non-Living Objects in an Idealist Ontology: Kastrup  — view comment
Yep. I watched it (twice) and I thought that Kastrup does what he claims Maudlin did to others. Which is fine, but then don't complain about it. Doesn...
January 01, 2026 at 00:45
In: Non-Living Objects in an Idealist Ontology: Kastrup  — view comment
I don't see this. I am trying, but I can't imagine it as you describe it. I can't attribute stairs to a dog, surely as you would admit, on a conceptua...
December 31, 2025 at 12:32
In: Non-Living Objects in an Idealist Ontology: Kastrup  — view comment
Sure, for each species of animals, us included, we share the same pool of empirical evidence as it were. That is, I think it is reasonable to say that...
December 31, 2025 at 01:30
In: Non-Living Objects in an Idealist Ontology: Kastrup  — view comment
I'm not taking sides but, is this not solved by us being the same species? As in, when we use medical trials on a few patients, we assume they'll work...
December 30, 2025 at 23:37
In: Absolute Presuppositions of Science  — view comment
That Burtt book is fantastic - a must read to better understand the problems Descartes and his contemporaries were dealing with, including Newton's ow...
December 30, 2025 at 19:27
In: Currently Reading  — view comment
Oh man, it hit me like thunder and that was soon after finishing The Magus which was also shocking. It reads like a book David Lynch would write, but ...
December 25, 2025 at 03:36
In: Currently Reading  — view comment
Top ten novels I read in 2025: 1) The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro 2) The Magus by John Fowles 3) The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño 4)The Brothe...
December 22, 2025 at 03:56
In: About Hume, causality and modern science  — view comment
And Hume was a mitigated skeptic to boot. He is sometimes caricatured as being a total skeptic. But this is not what he says: “Shou’d it here be asked...
December 20, 2025 at 17:12
In: Can you define Normal?  — view comment
Can you fully define any word, outside of mathematics? One can stipulate a definition, but it remains a definition. What a word covers is remarkably c...
December 17, 2025 at 21:33
In: Currently Reading  — view comment
That's not ideal. I loved Mason & Dixon but not Against the Day. Still going to give it a shot. Thanks for sharing info though.
December 15, 2025 at 13:15
In: Compressed Language versus Mentalese  — view comment
Of course. We can speak ungrammatically and even say nonsense: up the well, fire chills, or whatever. We tend to follow certain rules to be intelligib...
December 02, 2025 at 16:34
In: Compressed Language versus Mentalese  — view comment
I think taking a look at Polanyi's work, particularly The Tacit Dimension might be very interesting. At least the first half of the book. The second h...
December 01, 2025 at 23:45
In: The term "metaphysics" still confuses me  — view comment
What's hard about defining metaphysics as being about the (fundamental features of) world? At the end of the day, it's terminological preference, so I...
December 01, 2025 at 17:04
In: The term "metaphysics" still confuses me  — view comment
That's fine. But why do you think that?
December 01, 2025 at 13:37
In: Transwomen are women. Transmen are men. True or false?  — view comment
The issue can be debated politically and is. The matter of fact is much harder to settle. Although perhaps too tired a point, the distinction is that ...
December 01, 2025 at 00:13
In: Currently Reading  — view comment
Green for Danger by Christianna Brand Also dipping in and out of a book I read a while back: I Am: A Philosophical Inquiry into First-Person Being by ...
December 01, 2025 at 00:05
In: The term "metaphysics" still confuses me  — view comment
There's a further complication here because by the time Kant was using the word "metaphysics", it was already modified quite apart from Aristotle's in...
November 30, 2025 at 23:08
In: The term "metaphysics" still confuses me  — view comment
To be fair the term "metaphysics" confuses everybody. I still am not 100% sure what it is despite studying it as a profession for several years. You a...
November 25, 2025 at 14:26
In: A quandary: How do we know there isn’t anything beyond our reality?  — view comment
It would be a kind of miracle if what we experience is all there is - a kind of evolutionary freak accident. So, I highly doubt that there is not more...
November 13, 2025 at 22:53
In: What should we think about?  — view comment
We have kings of a sort, those who manage the world: the people who go to Davos and are found in Wall Street and The City of London, etc. They're king...
November 13, 2025 at 14:38
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
We've had a good row, and I see no significant issues remaining to clear up at the moment. So, I think we are good here M. :cool:
November 13, 2025 at 01:01
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
I think I follow. True one needs other people to activate consciousness "beyond simple animal enactive awareness." But what other people do is stimula...
November 12, 2025 at 21:42
In: Do we really have free will?  — view comment
We do and it ought to be evident. I think the simplicity of an act of free will can get obfuscated by big questions pertaining to who we are, regrets,...
November 12, 2025 at 16:21
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
Being not dead is good. Unless you are an anti-natalist. Which if you are, well, good riddance. I suspect you may be right, there'd be almost nothing ...
November 12, 2025 at 13:56
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
It is quite remarkable how much language is tied to thought. I haven't read Keller in a long time, so the critiques may be true to some extent. But it...
November 12, 2025 at 13:51
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
And I agree with that. I do think mental stuff is physical stuff. Just like gravity is physical stuff or anything else is physical stuff. I don't see ...
November 12, 2025 at 13:42
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
Well, far from comatose, we do have examples of people like Hellen Keller, who managed to become a wonderful writer while being deaf-mute. It's more s...
November 11, 2025 at 17:59
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
It may be neural. It may be computational - below the level of the neural, as Randy Gallistel suggests. There are some who think neurons alone don't s...
November 11, 2025 at 03:04
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
I get that. And that sounds to me to be a reasonable definition of "mental". All I'm pointing out is that without these unconscious processes the ment...
November 11, 2025 at 00:50
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
Ok but, there is a big difference between once having developed your senses, losing them for a while (comatose) and never having developed the senses ...
November 11, 2025 at 00:44
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
You may have loosed what counts as brain when you say: "the manifold of sensitive body, nervous system and brain plus the environment which acts up it...
November 10, 2025 at 01:15
In: Reading group of Wittgenstein's Blue Book  — view comment
Is reading The Blue Book necessary for this?
November 09, 2025 at 22:44
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
That's fine. But what do you in a hypothetical scenario in which the traditional five senses aren't working, say a coma, but there's reason to believe...
November 09, 2025 at 16:37
In: Can a Thought Cause Another Thought?  — view comment
Of course, I think there are instances in which we enter trains of thought which are real and causal, otherwise I don't know how we could think ration...
November 09, 2025 at 16:29
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
That's probably true when seen from a more micro-scale. But I'd suspect that both acts are creative - in the broadest sense of the term. They create s...
November 08, 2025 at 23:50
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
That could be technically correct. My goal is more general, and it would be to say that to construct something (whether it is a phenomenon or through ...
November 08, 2025 at 18:30
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
You can pick - there's no limit. Well, maybe not moral philosophy, I find that stuff a bit dull for the most part. Yeah, it gets tricky. On the one ha...
November 08, 2025 at 02:49
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
Likewise, dude. I learn a lot.
November 07, 2025 at 17:45
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
I use the words "metaphysics" and "epistemology" as narrowly as I can. For metaphysics I mean the world. For epistemology I mean aspects of knowledge....
November 06, 2025 at 23:48
In: Bannings  — view comment
Damn, I did not know. The exchanges I've had with him were serious and substantive, but I didn't read all his posts or follow him at all. Good to know...
November 06, 2025 at 21:02
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
I wouldn't deny that we think in dualist terms - maybe mistakenly, maybe ingrained as a kind of "folk psychology" (incidentally I hate that term, it m...
November 06, 2025 at 20:59
In: Idealism Simplified  — view comment
I agree, it is stupid. But the discussion here is framed as if "idealism" and "materialism" - whatever they are - are somehow opposites. As in if we a...
November 06, 2025 at 15:09
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