Tom Storm

You may not have intended it this way, but that comes across as both dismissive and tangential. I’m not generally a consumer of news, and this perspec...

Yes, that's hwo I read you as well. Agree. It's an intriguing idea. My own tentative view is that we do not access reality directly, nor can we claim ...

Yes, that's an improvement. I'm not attached to my wording. I quite like this as an approach and it seems to avoid scientism.

Indeed. Part of me believes that the animal is in a superior position to the human. They have what they need. They require no gadgets, no psychotherap...

I like what you say here. I believe it was the philosopher Simon Blackburn who said that even the idealist philosophy professor adopts realism the mom...

Well that's your conclusion, not mine. If pushed, and speaking from a human perspective, you might say the world appears designed and calibrated for d...

OK. I imagine meaning includes both: creation and intrinsic.

But meaning may not arise from any deep metaphysical structure, rather from the ordinary, improvisational practices that help us stay oriented in a wo...

Human beings are endlessly creative. Random thought: It's interesting how often Christian apologists seek to contrast "accidental' life from divinely ...

I don’t spend much time with atheists these days, but I used to. Many are, frankly, dull zealots. That said, the more thoughtful ones today typically ...

Well, atheists I know would not say, as you write, “there isn’t any personal god.” They would say instead that there are no compelling grounds for bel...

I've known a lot of those sisters and priests through my work and watched them closely. I'll have to mull this over, since I don't immediately recogni...

It does seem odd that a god understood as a nonspecific intuition, let's say, could be presented as a meaningful relationship with the divine/ultimate...

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking or hoping for, but if life is beginning to slow down and cease, it might be helpful to focus on finding comfo...

True. But equally, it's hard to understand Western history, music, art, and architecture without understanding slavery, autocracy, colonization, relig...

I think a lot of people share this intuition. I personally don’t and I don’t encounter any transcendent meaning in life or the universe as I understan...

What do you think is the best reason for trying to understand this? I think it's fair to say that humans are sense-making creatures, we interpret ever...

Yes, and I think science's inability to answer these will have many of us reaching for our gods and our Platonic forms until the end of time... (or th...

Well, I don’t understand it, so there’s that. :razz: Logical fallacies aside, I suppose my intuition is that we understand some things. We’ve learned ...

Standing on a platform while sawing though it may well be an appropriate action. Your metaphor is poetic but an act of high risk defiance or nihilism ...

I personally don't know that the world makes sense, but I accept that humans have some pragmatic relationship that allows us to get certain things don...

If you want. Humans are a social species who organise and flourish in family units. Not hard to see how love has survival pay offs. But what do we do ...

Indeed. And we all come to different conclusions. :up:

Don't know. I was just reporting what I have seen. I suspect the ability to give and receive love is innate in most people. It takes many forms and do...

I hear you.

People become so overwhelmed by problems and the fashionable "everything's fucked' thinking that they are oblivious to what's actually better. But I u...

The word progress is obviously a context-dependent, imprecise term, it refers to improvement, but not to some kind of transcendent force driving us to...

I'd say it is about setting aside big claims and just looking at what shows up in human experience, for instance feelings of awe, moral responsibility...

:up:

My only comment is the glib observation that in my experince Marxists are less interesting than anarchists. I am not someone who believes in utopias o...

This is extremely well written and interesting and I think I agree.

Well, the obvious answer to this is that you can't have issues with things you don't follow, right? I'm not a philosopher, and I don't have anxieties ...

Lots of conservatives hated him for his advocacy of a republic which made him anathema to Liberal tradition. And they also hated him for his popularit...

What makes you think fuzzy is a bad place? I don't read much philosophy, regardless of the country. But if you're advocating for continental philsophy...

Isn't this a fancy way of saying that we created the idea of God to manage our anxiety?

I come to this largely from outside philosophy, with unsystematic reading and a lot of quiet festering, so naturally I would assume my ideas are proba...

Well, this is a familiar criticism, and the usual response is that infinite regress is probably unavoidable since we don’t have any ultimate grounding...

I’ve not pursued his work, but would you say he was one of the first in the more recent wave of anti-modernists who'd like us to return to a more ench...

Subject to certain purposes, you might say. But there aren’t facts about usefulness in the transcendent or metaphysical sense. What we can point to is...

What I got from @"Banno" seems to be that pluralistic or context-based truths don’t mean that every contradiction is true. Instead, truths depend on t...

I don't have strong views on this. Americans seem really activated by discussions about freedom. I am sympathetic to some forms of censorship. I like ...

That is a helpful frame for "what is real?' Personally, I don’t find the question to be a useful one. I have no choice but to accept the apparent phys...

If true, why does this matter? Describe the problem to me. I'm not sure I see a lack of seriousness myself, but perhaps what you mean by this is many ...

You'd imagine this is fairly common today. Why do you find this more pernicious? Seems fairly benign to me if accurate, but it would be interesting to...

I don’t think the Libs are pragmatic. They seem driven by hard ideology and certain people they are in the thrall of. They need a skilful, charismatic...

I think this one.

Winged chariot? I don't think any subject in philosophy is undisputed and undebatable. That's a circular argument. E.g., Truth is what true statements...

I’m saying that they are abstractions because they are not physical things, they are ideas and there are dramatic variations in what people recognise ...

Thanks for expanding on your idea. It’s easier to follow with some texture. I guess for me, rock 'n' roll is rooted in specific influences: a particul...

These are two separate matters. Yes, I am saying that some people never experience love. As for the beautiful and the good—no doubt some people attemp...