Your faith is touching, but I'm not falling for the schtick.

He's the frontrunner, — frank

In the polls. But as I said above, there are many, many other factors in play in this case.

There's a good chance he'll be the next president. — frank

Zero chance, I say. Let's revisit later, because it won't become clear for a few months. But he's only ever won one election, every one since has been on a downward trajectory and he hasn't done anything to convince anyone other than his fanatics that he's worth voting for. He would be on a loosing trajectory even without having to juggle multiple federal and state lawsuits.

Enough bickering. I've excised a couple of pointless back-and-forths.

Jesus was an apocalyptic who preached that the end of the world was immanent, and that the Son of Man (who later became known as Metatron) would help him usher in the Kingdom of God and the Messianic Age. — schopenhauer1

My anthropology of the figure of Jesus was as (to adopt a phrase from popular Eastern philosophy) the 'god-realised man'. His mode of life was a wandering ascetic very much along the lines of other axial-age sages (although that period is customarily a few centuries earlier). So the speeches about the kingdom of Heaven were not political - they were pointers to the state of realisation that he had reached, similar in some respects to those of the Vedic rishis. (I don't necessarily accept the New Age theory that he went to the East for some years prior to his teaching mission, although it can't be ruled out, as there was communication and travel along the Silk Road.) In any case, I think to see him in any terms other than as a harbinger of a revolution in consciousness - as a frustrated political revolutionary, for instance - is a misunderstanding of what he was communicating, in my view.

With no God, there is no sin. — GRWelsh

Right - nor anything corresponding to 'the fall', which, I think, is a real lack in natural philosophy, as I think it says something real about the human condition albeit in mythological guise.

If the Devil was able to convince humanity... the supernatural realm...doesn't exist by making us believe in evolution and naturalism... — GRWelsh

Naturalism, yes - evolution, not necessarily. There are plenty of theistic evolutionists (as distinct from creationists), such as those who maintain and staff Biologos.

Trump faces more charges over Mar-a-Lago secret documents case

'Six weeks after he was indicted in Miami on 37 charges relating to sensitive documents taken from the White House after he left office, Trump has been hit with an additional charge of “wilful retention” of national defence information and two new obstruction charges.

The additional charges form part of a “superseding indictment” that was returned by a grand jury in Florida.

As part of the latest indictment, a third person, Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker Carlos de Oliveira, was also charged in addition to Trump and his valet, Walt Nauta.'

It's like a strange limbo contest. — Leontiskos

'She loves to limbo, that much is clear
She's got the right dynamic for the New Frontier' ~ Donald Fagen, the Nightfly.

I agree with Pagels assessment that John itself is a "Gnostic," Gospel, — Count Timothy von Icarus

In Beyond Belief, she actually says the opposite - that the Gospel of Thomas represents the gnostic schools, and the gospel of John the mainstream which won the political battle for dominance in the early Church leading to the banishment of Gnosticism under Iraneus and Tertullian. The Gospel of John emphasizes the divinity of Jesus Christ and the importance of belief in him as the path to salvation. It portrays Jesus as the eternal Word (Logos) of God who becomes flesh and reveals God's love and truth to humanity.

In contrast, the Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, without a detailed narrative or reference to Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection. It leans more towards a wisdom-oriented approach, focusing on secret teachings and hidden knowledge that lead to spiritual enlightenment. The Gospel of Thomas is not concerned with the historical events of Jesus' life but rather with his teachings as a pathway to a higher understanding of oneself and the divine.

(Also interesting to note that after Jesus' ascension, the Apostle Thomas crossed the Indian Ocean and established one of the oldest continually-existing denominations of Christianity in Kerala on the western shores of India, where it is still extant to this day. Although I'll add that I do agree that demarcation of what is and isn't spefically gnostic is very challenging.)

There's a cultural dimension to this as well. There are different worldviews vying for supremacy. Sam Harris et al are evangelically atheistic, in that they present religion tout courte as an evil and something to be destroyed. I suppose their counterparts are the radical theists who declare the secular state the enemy (the West as 'the Great Satan' of Iranian theocrats). They're the extremes but there are many points along a continuum between those two.

Where I'm at, is that I question a lot of what is taken for granted by modern industrial culture. That tends to put me more on the religious-or-spiritual side of the ledger, although I'm open to a kind of secular spirituality (like some of the emerging streams of scientifically-grounded idealism). But I don't think you can pretend that there's not really a substantive dispute about the nature of reality (or being) at stake, because there really is.

It does not follow that there is any substantial entity thinking, sensing, feeling, experiencing, — Janus

What does 'substantial' bring to 'entity' in this statement? Recall the Aristotelian term that was translated as 'substance' was 'ouisia' which is much nearer in meaning to 'being' than what we normally mean by 'substance' ('a material with consistent qualities'.) So does this mean that there's no being who thinks, senses, feels, etc?

Kant saw the I as a kind of master thought that is implicit in all the others. — Janus

Isn't this where Kant's theory of transcendental apperception comes in? Which is designated in Kant as the transcendental ego, and was also accepted by Husserl.

Pagel's has some interesting stuff on how the Gospel of John can be seen as a "Gnostic" text, and how Valentinian Gnostics read I Corinthians as a Gnostic text, but TBH, I think this only works if we stretch the definition of "Gnostic" so broadly that it makes most of the Patristics, even the main developers of Nicean orthodoxy, into "Gnostics." — Count Timothy von Icarus

I also mentioned Pagels. I have a book A Different Christianity, Robin Amis, which was drawn from the author’s research and experience residing at the famous Mt Athos Orthodox monastic complex. There's quite a bit of discussion of gnosis in that context.

Interestingly, I think that Indian philosophy provides something which might defuse the vexed relationship between 'pistis' (faith-based) and 'gnosis' in Western culture. I read Swami Vivekananda's books in my youth, and he talks about the various 'schools of yoga' (where 'yoga' signifies 'union' rather than the physical poses associated with yoga in Western culture.) There's raja, karma, bhakti, and Jñāna yoga (and I think a couple more). They are said to enable aspirants of different kinds and levels to relate to the Vedanta on their own level. Bhakti is devotional, of which the Hare Krishna sect was a famous example. And you can see a lot of resemblances between Indian Bhakti yogis and Southern European popular Catholicism (notwithstanding the cultural dissimilarities). Jñāna yoga is said to be the 'yoga of discerning wisdom' (the source of Vivekananda's name, as 'viveka' is Sanskrit for discernment). Raja was said to be the 'royal' yoga synthesising elements of all the schools. And so on. (I guess that the well-known modern gurus such as Ramana Maharishi would be Jñāna yogis. Also worth noting the linguistic connection between 'gnosis' and 'jñāna' as they come from the same Indo-European root.)

Likewise in East Asian Buddhism, there is the idea of the '84,000 (= a magic number) of "dharma doors"' through which the Dharma can be approached depending on the type of aspirant. (One of the volumes of Buddhist Abhidharma is called 'Types of Persons' - Buddhists have many of those kinds of categorial lists.) Another point is that in East Asian Buddhism, the most popular sect is Pure Land, which is aimed at attaining rebirth in the Western Paradise through faith in Amitabha (Buddha of Infinite Light). So that would correspond to the Bhakti cults of Hinduism, and also to the faith-based orientation of Christianity.

I think a case could be made that Christianity developed into a kind of faith-based autocracy at the expense of the other kinds of religious mentality that are represented in those variants that are found in Asian religions. Due to its universalising tendency, it really only validates and allows 'salvation by faith alone' (especially since Protestantism). The scholastic mystics, of course, also drew on and incorporated elements from (neo)platonism (via Pseudo-Dionysius and the Greek-speaking theologians). But then, many of the Scholastic mystics also flirted with, and were even accused of, heresy (e.g. Meister Eckhardt, St John of the Cross). That's why I've spent a lot of time re-tracing the steps, so to speak, to understand these stages of development in history of ideas. Christianity has ended up as a very 'all or nothing', 'our way or the highway' as a consequence of those developments - probably the reason why so many have sought out alternative religious models and conceptions from the East and elsewhere.

Why or why not should the above be taken seriously, philosophically speaking? — Mikie

I think it indicates incomprehension of the formative role of Christian philosophy in Western culture.

Christianity is the most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history. Even the increasing number in the West today who have abandoned the faith of their forebears, and dismiss all religion as pointless superstition, remain recognisably its heirs. Seen close-up, the division between a sceptic and a believer may seem unbridgeable. Widen the focus, though, and Christianity's enduring impact upon the West can be seen in the emergence of much that has traditionally been cast as its nemesis: in science, in secularism, and even in atheism.

... Ranging in time from the Persian invasion of Greece in 480 BC to the on-going migration crisis in Europe today, and from Nebuchadnezzar to the Beatles, it will explore just what it was that made Christianity so revolutionary and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mind-set of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that has become increasingly doubtful of religion's claims, so many of its instincts remain irredeemably Christian. The aim is twofold: to make the reader appreciate just how novel and uncanny were Christian teachings when they first appeared in the world; and to make ourselves, and all that we take for granted, appear similarly strange in consequence. We stand at the end-point of an extraordinary transformation in the understanding of what it is to be human: one that can only be fully appreciated by tracing the arc of its parabola over millennia. — Jacket copy, Tom Holland: Dominion - the Making of the Western Mind

Recently, I saw a Christian use "the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled..." quote and it got me to thinking about how such a Christian will argue that both the Devil and God want to stay hidden to explain the lack of overt evidence for them. But it is odd that they would argue that both the Devil and God want the same thing since you would think hiddenness would benefit one but not both — GRWelsh

Right - now I see your reasoning. I guess my analysis would be that the ‘divine hiddenness’ and the denial of the reality of Satan would arise from different sources. The decline of belief in Satan maps against the overall decline of religion in secular culture. Likewise for the belief in sin (which I think is the most politically-incorrect term in the English language, isn’t it?) Whereas the divine hiddenness of God is due to God being altogether transcendent.

My old friend Wayfarer would have agreed with me... maybe not. — T Clark

I try to avoid 'throwing grenades' nowadays although it's something I've often done in the past. I attempt (not always successfully) to differ tactfully.

(BTW I devised a new user name because I had to pick an ID after joining reddit, and of course Wayfarer was taken so decided to adopt it here also. And besides I will own up to tilting at windmills.)

I came into forums not as 'pro religion' but as 'anti-materialist', specifically in the aftermath of the new atheist books in the 2000's. Richard Dawkins said in his intro to TGD that he hoped Christians who picked up his book would put it down atheist - it had rather the opposite effect on me (not that I read all of it, and not that I identify as Christian in any but the cultural sense.) But due to my overall stance, I often find myself on the same side of the argument as Christian philosophers, even though I don't share all of their articles of faith.

That's because religious philosophy only has meaning to the religious — Janus

Subjectivism.

I think what he means is that all human endeavor comes to nothing, it helps nothing, and it ultimately means nothing. — frank

No, that's not what I meant. I meant what I said - there's a taboo on ideas associated with religious philosophy.

:up:

Again, this ASSUMES we’re facing this philosophically, in the same way we’re facing the fossil record scientifically rather than through creationism. — Mikie

Right. So what I said earlier - a brief analytical statement of what is important about the religious idea. That essentially the human being is not only or simply a physical phenomenon. That the human embodies or is directly related to the governing intelligence of the Cosmos (whether concieved of in personalistic terms as God or as an impersonal principle such as Dharma or Tao).

Would you consider that idea as philosophically significant?

But statements like this

Santa Claus isn’t anything special. — Mikie

comparing God to Santa Claus only conveys lack of insight as far as I'm concerned. Sure, God may mean nothing to you, but trivialising belief in God doesn't recognise the formative role that Christianity has had in the history of Western culture.

using scripture, revelation or other religious authority in an argument — Banno

I agree that citing scripture in support of a philosophical argument is generally bad form. But conversely, the tendency to take the whole content of religion in the history of ideas off the table is also a pretty dogmatic attitude, and it's often on display here. There's a kind of implicit or unstated taboo on certain lines of argument based on this prohibition.

You can make the case and indeed I think that many of the Gnostics would claim Paul as one of their own (although I'd have to research it). But the main argument against the gnostics was against their elitism - the idea that only those perfected (which was the meaning of 'Cathar', from which we get 'catharsis') were 'saved'. Whereas the mainstream doctrine was that 'all who believe will be saved'. This is a tension in Christianity which has existed from the very outset. I think to propose a kind of middle ground is to recognise the role of spiritual insight. That term 'gnosis' has a counterpart in Indian religions, 'Jñāna', which is recognisably from the same indo-european linguistic root. But I think the Indian religions did a much better job of preserving the importance of that insight, overall (hence the upsurge of interest in them since the Enlightenment. See American Veda, for instance.)

The demiurge is a creator of some sort, but he is a sort of evil one that creates the world in a way that is flawed because the deity himself is capricious and flawed in some way. However, there is the Universal One or the God of Light who is above and beyond all creation that is the real deal God. And he is all Good. — schopenhauer1

But that's much nearer to gnosticism than Pauline Christianity. Gnostics identified the OT god as a kind of demiurge, and the suffering of life is seen as a consequence of either malevolence or ineptitude, whereas the 'true God' revealed in the life of Jesus was thought of as absolutely transcendent.

Pauline Christianity often cites the Genesis verse saying that God 'saw the world as good' (Genesis 1-4) in refutation of Gnosticism. As to why there is evil and suffering, Pauline Christianity has plausible theodicies, for instance John Hick's influential Evil and the God of Love.

I'm an atheist — GRWelsh

So, I'm interested in why you would start a thread on this topic. Is it to polish your polemical skills against Christian opponents?

FWIW, I'm not a traditional believer, or try not to be, but I see many of the ideas, themes and inhabitants of religion as embodiments of archetypal and perennial themes. They don't simply cease to exist, they morph into new forms which are easier to comprehend against their cultural context.

Anything that shows even mild respect for religious ideas is attacked and ridiculed. — T Clark

Like tossing bits of bloodied meat into the Piranha River, I've sometimes said. ;-) (Although I think you're exagerrating a bit, despite the efforts of the various evangatheists there are some interesting philosophy of religion discussions here from time to time.)

The question of whether there is a "governing intelligence of the Cosmos" is answerable only by faith. — Janus

There's an interesting internet anecdote about a well-known atheist philosopher, now deceased, by the name of Antony Flew, who's convictions were changed towards the end of his life by this very observation. There are large numbers of respected scientists who share the conviction. It's not empirically demonstrable, but then, it's not an empirical question (although of course for positivism, if it's not an empirical question, then it's nonsensical.)

There can be no evidence of such a thing — Janus

From the theistic perspective, the Universe is the evidence.

There are important religious questions entailed by religious beliefs. But I wouldn’t call them philosophical. — Mikie

But that itself is tendentious. You're asking others to question their beliefs, but taking your own for granted. 'Science' didn't even become separated from 'philosophy' until the 1830's.

Here's a brief analytical statement of what is important about the religious idea. That essentially the human being is not only or simply a physical phenomenon. That the human embodies or is directly related to the governing intelligence of the Cosmos (whether concieved of in personalistic terms as God or as a principle such as Dharma or Tao). Something like this was believed by a great many of the philosophers of the Western canon, and it is of high philosophical significance.

I’m assuming people who do philosophy assume it’s myth as well. Nothing wrong with myth and stories — they’re important. But let’s acknowledge our privileging it over many others simply because we were raised in it. — Mikie

You misunderstand the role of myth in culture. There are any number of myths active in cultural narratives. A lot of it is now pop culture rubbish about cartoon heroes, instead of morally edifying narratives. Furthermore the fact that ‘millions of people don’t believe in religion’ is no more an argument against religion, than ‘millions of people do’ is for it. There are substantive philosophical questions entailed by religious belief. Ideas have consequences. The case can be made that Western culture provided fertile grounds for the scientific revolution due to the kind of metaphysics it had (per Stanley Jaki, a polymath Catholic monk.)

I don't concur. I agree that debates about religion are often irksome but trivialising or dismissing it is not helpful. 'It's just a bunch of old myths, there's nothing in it, forget about it'. To a lot of people it's the most important fact about life. There's an asymettry - you don't see it as anything other than myth, whereas for those who believe it, there is something real - and vastly important - at stake.

One of the best books in the history of ideas that I've read since joining forums was The Theological Origins of Modernity, by M A Gillespie. 'Exposing the religious roots of our ostensibly godless age, Michael Allen Gillespie reveals in this landmark study that modernity is much less secular than conventional wisdom suggests. Taking as his starting point the collapse of the medieval world, Gillespie argues that from the very beginning moderns sought not to eliminate religion but to support a new view of religion and its place in human life.' And that mainly manifests as the religion of technology and science.

Thanks. I'm not all in on Vervaeke but I think he's worth the listen. I'm sure learning things from him. I'll bear that caution in mind.

I don't believe such a thing is possible these days, and I also don't think such frameworks are necessary for personal transformation. — Janus

Which would comprise what, exactly? Transformed how? Into what?

In any case, I don't want to convey the impression that the dialogue in the OP concerns religion, because it doesn't. Vervaeke says here and elsewhere that he's committed to naturalism, but that he doesn't accept materialist reductionism. They talk about 'extended naturalism' - the general gist being a move away from the reductionist idea that wants to account for everything in terms of the bottom layer - 'suggesting that our understanding of reality isn't limited to what's derivable from hard sciences but also includes what these sciences presuppose'. They discuss the energy-information nexus and its connection to Shannon's theory in a way that actually helped me to see that it isn't only applicable to electronic information transfer but that something like it exists in molecular biology. Also the idea that the order of the intellect conforms to the order that science sees in the world, drawing on neoplatonism - 'Conformity theory: how the principles governing the mind and the world mutually participate in the same governing principles.' And much more. This episode is basically a synopsis of what will be covered. Also provides a references list.

I do understand that by ‘religion’ you mean ‘religious organisations’. I’m more interested in the philosophical aspect of the question.

There are a great many important elements in the Western philosophical canon which have become associated with, or absorbed by, or even appropriated by, religion over the millennia. Because of these associations they become ‘tarred with the same brush’, as the saying has it. But what remains after all of those elements are redacted out barely worthy of the designation of ‘philosophy’.

What secular reason is missing is self-awareness. It is “unenlightened about itself” in the sense that it has within itself no mechanism for questioning the products and conclusions of its formal, procedural entailments and experiments. “Postmetaphysical thinking,” (Jürgen) Habermas contends, “cannot cope on its own with the defeatism concerning reason which we encounter today both in the postmodern radicalization of the ‘dialectic of the Enlightenment’ and in the naturalism founded on a naïve faith in science.”

Postmodernism announces (loudly and often) that a supposedly neutral, objective rationality is always a construct informed by interests it neither acknowledges nor knows nor can know. Meanwhile science goes its merry way endlessly inventing and proliferating technological marvels without having the slightest idea of why. The “naive faith” Habermas criticizes is not a faith in what science can do — it can do anything — but a faith in science’s ability to provide reasons, aside from the reason of its own keeping on going, for doing it and for declining to do it in a particular direction because to do so would be wrong.

The counterpart of science in the political world is the modern Liberal state, which, Habermas reminds us, maintains “a neutrality . . . towards world views,” that is, toward comprehensive visions (like religious visions) of what life means, where it is going and what we should be doing to help it get there. The problem is that a political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another.

The Liberal state, resting on a base of procedural rationality, delivers no such goals or reasons and thus suffers, Habermas says, from a “motivational weakness”; it cannot inspire its citizens to virtuous (as opposed to self-interested) acts because it has lost “its grip on the images, preserved by religion, of the moral whole” and is unable to formulate “collectively binding ideals.” — Does Reason Know what it is Missing? Stanley Fish, NY Times

Australian academic John Carroll wrote a vicious tirade against humanism back in 1993 - Humanism: The Wreck of Western Culture. — Tom Storm

I used to pick up that book at the venerable Bookocino bookstore in Avalon when I lived up that way. I hadn't been aware of such critiques until then but have found a few more since. Some of the French Catholic social philosophers, like Remi Braque and Jacques Maritain, make similar criticisms. I must say, I'm sympathetic to them (even though I'm not in the least drawn to the Catholic religion).

Incidentally I've just been listening again to a (long!) online debate between Vervaeke and Kastrup. It's reasonably congenial, although Vervaeke throws up many objections to Kastrup's idealism.

I think the most important challenge we collectively face is dealing with the practical economic and ecological consequences of the 'continuous growth' paradigm — Janus

I think so, I tried to make a similar point in another thread about consumer economy and addiction. That's why I think it's so important to find a basis of real values other than continued growth and economic improvement. But there's nothing necessarily within liberal democracy or naturalism which provides a basis for that, other than better technology and engineering. Like, there's no rationale corresponding to the role that mokṣa plays in Hinduism.

Yes, I've also run into him in my many years of web surfing. I think he used to be associated with a quirky site called 'speculative non-buddhism'.

Is Vervaeke a Platonist? I forget. I'm not sufficiently immersed in any of the important literature to get all that much from these on line sages but Vervaeke is an improvement on fellow Canadian Jordan B Peterson, who (and I may be wrong here) often seems to attempt a similar project, a type of restorative transcendentalism. — Tom Storm

He does a lot of sessions on resurrecting neoplatonism, so I guess he must be. (He has mentioned Peterson once or twice, although I think Peterson has gone a bit off the rails with his political obsessions.) Anyway, Vervaeke's main concern is 'awakening from the meaning crisis' - that Western culture is undergoing a crisis of meaning, which manifests in a huge number of ways, rooted in the 'scientistic' view that the Universe is basically devoid of meaning. But in that introduction that I've linked to, they're proposing an alternative which is compatible with, but goes beyond, current naturalist models. Basically it's a synopsis of what they intend to cover in the forthcoming talks (which I mainly listen to while exercising.)

The Gnostic gospels, as discovered in Nag Hammadi, are important, as was the philosophy of Gnosticism. The Gnostics took more of a symbolic interpretation of ideas in scriptures. — Jack Cummins

There’s a professor of religious studies, Elaine Pagels, who has written many books on this subject, notably Beyond Belief and The Gospel of Thomas: The Hidden Sayings of Jesus. These are both based on the Nag Hammadi manuscripts.

Pagels explores how early Christian leaders and orthodox factions suppressed certain texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas, in favor of the texts that would later become part of the New Testament (what we now know as 'the Gospels'). She analyses the political and theological motivations behind the selection strategy, shedding light on the process of the formation the Christian canon out of the ferment of competing creeds in the early Christian era.

In the Gospel of Thomas, the emphasis is on immediate presence of the kingdom of God within each of us, and that individuals can discover this divine spark through self-awareness and self-knowledge (somewhat similar to Indic religions). It suggests that one can attain spiritual enlightenment and salvation by looking inward and seeking the divine within oneself. The Thomistic tendency towards a more individual and introspective approach to spirituality, focusing on personal insight and understanding of Jesus' teachings has, since its discovery, become New Age favourite (online edition can be found here.)

What became the mainstream, on the other hand, represented the perspective of the Gospel of John, which is one of the canonical gospels in the New Testament. The Gospel of John emphasizes the divinity of Jesus, focusing on his identity as the eternal Word (Logos) of God made flesh.
According to the Johannine Christians, Jesus is the Son of God and the savior of the world. They emphasized the importance of faith in Jesus as the means to attain salvation and eternal life and attacked the gnostics are heretics (and also as elitists, on the basis that only the few can ever attain gnostic insight).

If you had to select which model to serve as the basis for a powerful 'centrifugally-based' organisation, the Johanine model would obviously serve better - and that is very much what happened. But the gnostic sects lived on as an underground movement - indeed Dan Brown draws on that in his popular literature (which personally I never liked). The Catholic war against the Cathars of Languedoc was a notorious example.

So, in this context, I am raising the philosophy questions of how was Chrisianity was constructed, and may it be deconstructed? If the emphasis on the supernatural is demystified, how does the traditional stand as a philosophy and foundation for ethics? It may be connected to a belief in God and life after death, but these are components and how do they come together? — Jack Cummins

I encountered these books studying comparative religion in the early 1980's. At the time, I was also studying Eastern philosophy, which I was interested in due to its emphasis on the experiential aspects of meditation. I formed the view that this experiential aspect had been important to the gnostic sects but was downplayed by their opponents (who were designated 'pistic' after the Greek 'pistis' meaning 'belief' or 'opinion', as opposed to 'gnosis' meaning 'knowledge'. You can find an explication here and while you're there, also have a look around at that website, formed from the residue of the Gnosis Magazine which was published from 1985 to 1999. Much to read there, if you're interested. )

:up: :100:

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi dedicated his life to studying that. See here.

Yes, I have noticed that one as well. But, for instance, Brian Greene still includes a discussion of the differing conceptions between Newton and Leibniz in his 'The Fabric of the Cosmos', and I seem to recall (though can't be sure without looking it up) that he said it was relevant to the subject. Anyway, just a footnote to the broader topic.

At the moment, I'm reading that chapter I mentioned, which (as always) is a pretty hard slog, but as I keep promising myself to read more of Kant then I will stick with the source at the moment, so if I do read Schopenhauer's criticism I will better grasp it.

In my opinion, Kant's epistemology never successfully demonstrated how the subsequent reality of any empirical entity could be generated by simply applying the transcendental forms of intuition and the transcendental categories of the understanding to a given manifold of sensation. — charles ferraro

What do you mean 'subsequent' reality? Subsequent to what? In this online edition, do you mean the chapter 'Of the Schematism at of the Pure Conceptions of the Understanding'?

For the moment, while I try to adjust my worldview, I'm just allowing that there's a contradiction if you look at it from a non-pragmatist point-of-view, and I remind myself not to care that there's a contradiction. — Srap Tasmaner

Give this a listen.

Leibniz v Newton is still a topic in history of ideas and physics, to do with their competing understandings of time.

For some reason, Freud springs to mind here, but I have to go and engage in other cultural pursuits (i.e. gym) so I'll come back to it later.