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Tag Archives: philosophy
A Wikipedia list
Monday, May 3, 2010
For a time during the 19th century it seemed like Pantheism was the religion of the future, attracting figures such as Wordsworth and Coleridge in Britain; Fichte, Schelling and Hegel in Germany; Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau in the USA. Seen as a threat by the Vatican, it came under attack in the notorious Syllabus of Errors of Pius IX.
Whatever underlies consciousness in a material sense, i.e., whatever it is about the brain that gives rise to consciousness, must necessarily be present to some degree in any other material thing.
Berkeley stated that individuals cannot think or talk about an object’s being, but rather think or talk about an object’s being perceived by someone. That is, individuals cannot know any “real” object or matter “behind” the object as they perceive it, which “causes” their perceptions. He thus concluded that all that individuals know about an object is their perception of it.
Phenomenology, in Husserl’s conception, is primarily concerned with the systematic reflection on and analysis of the structures of consciousness, and the phenomena which appear in acts of consciousness. Such reflection was to take place from a highly modified “first person” viewpoint, studying phenomena not as they appear to “my” consciousness, but to any consciousness whatsoever. Husserl believed that phenomenology could thus provide a firm basis for all human knowledge, including scientific knowledge, and could establish philosophy as a “rigorous science”.
Compatibilists often continue and argue that determinism is not just compatible with free will, but actually necessary for it. If one’s actions aren’t determined by one’s beliefs, desires, and character, then it seems that they aren’t one’s real actions…
Schopenhauer Mysticism
Sunday, May 2, 2010
… we see all religions at their highest point end in mysticism and mysteries, that is to say, in darkness and veiled obscurity. These really indicate merely a blank spot for knowledge, the point where all knowledge necessarily ceases. Hence for thought this can be expressed only by negations, but for sense-perception it is indicated by symbolical signs, in temples by dim light and silence, in Brahmanism even by the required suspension of all thought and perception for the purpose of entering into the deepest communion with one’s own self, by mentally uttering the mysterious Om. In the widest sense, mysticism is every guidance to the immediate awareness of that which is not reached by either perception or conception, or generally by any knowledge. The mystic is opposed to the philosopher by the fact that he begins from within, whereas the philosopher begins from without. The mystic starts from his inner, positive, individual experience, in which he finds himself as the eternal and only being, and so on. But nothing of this is communicable except the assertions that we have to accept on his word; consequently he is unable to convince.
– Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Vol. II, Ch. XLVIII
List of Recently Visited Wikipedia Articles
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Bipolar Disorder;Depersonalisation;Diotima of Mantinea;Evolutionary Neuroscience;Evolutionary Psychology;Free Will;Gravitational Singularity;Heraclitus;Herman Hesse;List of Coca-Cola Brands;Lysergic acid diethylamide;Movable Singularity;Orphism;Plane of Immanence;Psychedelic Experience;Psychoeducation;Sappho;Singularity Theory;Singularity University;Soma;Steppenwolf;The Glass Bead Game
Altruism
Monday, February 22, 2010
One of the grimmest monuments to altruism is man’s culturally induced selflessness: his willingness to live with himself as with the unknown, to ignore, evade, repress the personal (the non-social) needs of his soul, to know least about the things that matter most, and thus to consign his deepest values to the impotent underground of subjectivity and his life to the dreary wasteland of chronic guilt.
- Ayn Rand, The Romantic Manifesto