Well let’s see what the OP has to say about that.

That’s the whole question isn’t it?

Can you identify an example of a revealed truth so I can understand what you are thinking of? — Tom Storm

General term - applies to the Bible, Koran, Bhaghavad Gita, for example

True, that, Hadn’t paid much attention to it but Smartmatic is very bullish.

https://wapo.st/41mwKXC

The only way for the legal system to be fair and righteous would be to get rid of the jury system and have the people at the top consist of a balanced group of judges who are ONLY working by the law and have absolute legal power. — Christoffer

That’s more the French model, isn’t it? A tribunal. But I can’t see it. They won’t even adopt metric, they’re amazingly conservative in some ways.

Greetings Epicero and welcome to the forum.

I think your point makes sense on paper, so to speak. The problems arise when we ask what we refer to as evidence for the claims of religion.

To take a step back, what are religions claiming? Obviously a vast question and not one to answer in a throw-away sentence or two. But I think we can agree that basic to it, is the relief from or ending of fear of death and suffering in all its forms. The Semitic religions speak in terms of salvation and Heaven, Eastern religions more in terms of liberation (mokṣa or Nirvāṇa). In both cases the promised good is beyond all suffering and the vicissitudes of life. In all of those religions, there are accounts of the miraculous, such as the resurrection, or of the Buddha's attainment of Nirvāṇa, which personify or depict the end to which the aspirant is to strive, and also the accounts of the sayings and doings of prophets, anecdotes and histories of prophetic visions and doings. They comprise the sacred texts of those religions.

And now comes the problem. It's establishing the truth of those claims where evidence is in short supply. Secular culture will generally begin by assuming that revealed truth and sacred lore are not to be believed as a matter of principle. They will put such accounts to one side as mythological or traditional. So the question is if you were to try and meet the standards demanded by secular culture for the truth of those claims, without recourse to any of that body of sacred lore, then how would you do that? You can't conduct peer-reviewed laboratory studies of the central claims of Christianity, for example. You can conduct such studies of, for instance, the purported health and well-being benefits of meditation, but then are we still operating in the domain of religion at all?

As you say, one can reasonably establish some moral tenets, such as, it is wrong to harm others, steal, or kill, and other such truisms. But such tenets don't by any means comprise the totality of any faith. At the end of all of it, the religions are making a claim - 'life eternal through faith in the Lord' or liberation from all the vicissitudes of existence. And without the case studies, so to speak, of the founders and examplars of those traditions, then I'm afraid you're grasping at straws.

Disappointing ending to the Fox News trial. Yes, Murdoch has to shell out $700 million and eat a certain amount of crow, but the cast of clowns that spew lies and pollute the electorate don’t have to own up to their bullshit on their own stations or in the witness box. Still, it’s something.

Talk of ‘what brains do’ was called ‘the mereological fallacy’ in a well-known book on neuroscience and philosophy. The mereological fallacy is to ascribe to parts of the body what only agents or actors are capable of doing. ‘The brain’ becomes a kind of explanatory unit, an idealised black box which ‘does’ this or ‘produces’ that and so on. But ascribing thoughts to ‘the brain’ is like saying your computer writes your entries in this thread. Humans think, humans write. They need normal brain function to do so, but it’s not ‘the brain’ which is doing that. Brains are always situated as part of a whole, which is precisely what ‘mereology’ refers to.

And, memories are not ‘phenomena’. Phenomena means, strictly speaking, ‘what appears’. The northern lights are a fascinating and colourful phenomena, caused by radiation from the sun reacting with the Earth’s ionosphere. But the explanation is not ‘a phenomenon’. What appears as a consequence of those reactions is the phenomenon.

I agree with 180 Proof to the extent that science, philosophy, and religion aren't clearly defined in the OP. — Hanover

Those distinctions really only become visible in relatively recent times. I suppose there was an implicit distinction between dialectic and peity in Plato, but science as a separate mode of knowing as distinct from philosophy only came into being in the 1830's.

I've noticed a book, Philosophical Religions from Plato to Spinoza, Carlos Fraenkel, which addresses this question (introductory chapter preview provided). Part of the jacket blurb says 'Many pagan, Jewish, Christian and Muslim philosophers from Antiquity to the Enlightenment made no meaningful distinction between philosophy and religion. Instead they advocated a philosophical religion, arguing that God is Reason and that the historical forms of a religious tradition serve as philosophy’s handmaid to promote the life of reason among non-philosophers.' You see the continuity of reason and revelation in Aquinas' philosophy but the antagonism between them is very much assumed in the Enlightenment philosophers (and still a dominant approach).

I've found that in the early Buddhist texts, there is, on the one hand, a recognition of the value of reason (or dialectic) in that the dialogues themself are often scrupulously rational. But there's also a recognition of a sphere 'beyond mere logic', namely, the actual content of the Buddha's teaching (the 'sasana' or dispensation). Buddhism, more so than other religions, says that the Buddhist aspirant can validate the principles of the teaching by realizing them for him/herself (albeit this is understood as a rare occurence).

But the problem with declaring the sovereignty of human reason (or science) is that it essentially reverts to the Protagoras 'man as the measure of all things' type of attitude. I also notice that in much modern philosophy, generally, any notion of purpose or intentionality (other than those entertained by individuals) has been ruled out, so the scope of 'reason' becomes narrowed to 'instrumental reason' i.e. what works for particular purposes.

I am exploring the notion that Plato's ideas or forms are instead an intuitive grasp of what we now understand as principles and laws. The 'fallacious reification' only enters the picture when we think of them as being objectively existent - which they're not. Maybe they are constraints - they delimit what is possible for something in order that it exists and performs a function, i.e. a wing must be flat and light if it is to provide lift. 'Flatness' and 'lightness' are not objectively existent things separable from their instantiation in wings, but nevertheless all wings must 'participate' in the forms of flatness and lightness if they are going to achieve flight.

Yes, I think he's on to something - I've been aware of that book a long time but only just reading it now. Find myself nodding along with the text a lot of the time.

That George Harrison song had a big impact on my teenage self.

You might be interested in reading up on Terrence Deacon, Incomplete Nature.

As for the avoidance of rational insight altogether, Quine 1981, “…abandonment of the goal of a first philosophy…”, re: naturalism writ large, relegates all rational insight to the back burner, when the goal of a first philosophy is the deduction of principles by which natural science itself is possible, which seems a perfect way to shoot yourself in the foot. — Mww

That's pretty much what I thought. Glad there's someone else who sees the point.

Surely some scientist or philosopher has investigated the roots of a priori and a posteriori knowledge. :smile: — Gnomon

That would be Immanuel Kant, it was the subject of the Critique of Pure Reason.

Plato believed that we had mathematical knowledge because the soul acquired it before birth. I sometimes wonder if that is poetic analogy for the existence of faculties which had actually been acquired during the course of evolution. (I'm sure someone has thought of that.) Notice also that Noam Chomsky is a proponent of innatism via his (contested) theory of universal grammar.

There is a 'compromise' to this problem with "rational insight" which allows for both of these positions, it's called dualism. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think I subscribe to a from of dualism, with the caveat that I reject any idea of a 'spiritual substance' or objectively-existing mind, or of mind and body as separate substances. Mind is the capacity to grasp meaning and is present in very rudimentary form even in the simplest organisms. In rational sentient beings it attains the capacity for reason and self-knowledge.

We live in or as 'spirit' (deeply and essentially in a socially constructed and preserved symbolic layer of the lifeworld). — plaque flag

Yes, the meaning world. I quite agree. Thanks for the discussion.

How typical is such crudity among serious philosophers though? — plaque flag

What is behind the requirement to 'avoid any appeal to rational insight?' Why is it that mathematical insight is said to call into question our nature as 'physical beings'? Isn't that the very point at issue?

Not at all.

We 'know' what rationality and being are, but we aren't done knowing what they are. — plaque flag

To put that another way, although science relies on the efficacy of scientific law, the nature of scientific law is not itself an empirical question. As soon as you wonder whether the laws we know - like Newton's laws - could be different to what they are, then you're straying into metaphysics, knowingly or not. I've noticed articles come up in my news feed by physicists calling the idea of scientific or natural laws into question (e.g. this one). They seem motivated by a similar impulse to that which prompts scepticism about mathematical knowledge.

I think, maybe, it's because reason is the faculty which explains, not something to be explained. And that this sits uneasily with naturalist philosophy.

What's needed is a detailed case for rational insight (some kind of platonic organ) and not accusations of bias. — plaque flag

It's not an 'accusation of bias', I'm trying to understand the rationale behind the article, and why the faculty of reason was called into question in the first place. And, pray tell, how could one make a 'detailed case' for reason, without relying on reason to make the case?

Still feel as though the point I was labouring has somewhat slipped the net here
— Wayfarer

How so ? — plaque flag

The question I was asking, is how come esteemed philosophers, such as W V O Quine, sought to 'avoid any appeal to rational insight?' Why does the paper that this article was based on deny that there could be knowledge of mathematical objects? What is behind those denials?

Hey just saw your reply now.

I assume in the article that the ultimate ground of existence is an objective reality. At this point, I believe I’m still doing philosophy, not theology. — Art48

I think it must transcend the subject-object distinction, because it includes both the cognizing subject and the object of cognition. Hence frequent references in the literature to the union of knower and known. Objectivity, as a criterion for what really exists, is very much an artefact of the modern mindset with its emphasis on individuality and empirical validation.

But accepting the testimony of the mystics implies that a human being can have a direct experience of the ultimate ground. How can this be possible? How can a human being have a direct experience of something below quarks? — Art48

I think the idea of union with the supreme, whether that is cast in Christian or Advaita terminology, is not necessarily a similar kind of cognitive understanding to that divulged by experimental physics. There might be poetic or symbolic resonances between them, but they arise from a very different kind of stance or understanding. But,like that passage you quoted from the Schop. essay, there is a sense in which the being of the world also comprises your being (something made obvious in Vedanta.)

How to relate to the ultimate ground? — Art48

There are some pitfalls with the comparative approach, in trying to equate the often divergent images and metaphors of different traditions with each other. There are those who do, typically the 'perennial philosophers' and the 'traditionalists' e.g. Frithjoj Schuon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Huston Smith, to name a few. Buddhists, for instance, would not use the term 'ultimate ground' at all, in fact their philosophy is built around the absence of it. Taoism is very much interwoven with many other aspects of specifically Chinese culture. But on the whole, I do agree that what the perennial traditions have in common is more important than what divides them - provided one doesn't fall into a kind of a la carte syncretism. The real paths are very specific and definitely have boundaries, I think.

As regards 'which path', that's something I'm still wrestling with, and may never solve. I had a long interest in Buddhism, but I've also come to realise that I owe a lot to my own Western heritage. All deep and difficult questions.

That 'existence' is not univocal is stressed in the intro of Being and Time. — plaque flag

Take your point. Obviously different kinds of existence are considered in philosophy, but on the whole, naturalism and popular philosophy tends towards a flat ontological structure, rejecting the kind of Aristotelian distinctions between different kinds of being, doesn't it?

(Still feel as though the point I was labouring has somewhat slipped the net here.)

The issue becomes clarifying how they exist. — plaque flag

That's right. But the problem is, in the current lexicon, 'existence' is a univocal term - something either exists or it doesn't. There is no scope for different kinds of existence, or I don't think so, anyway. But don't you think the requirement for there to be an argument for the indispensability mathematics says something? What makes it necessary to defend mathematical insight? Don't you think this is an ideological argument?

Platonism sometimes seem to merely assume its own conclusion. — plaque flag

Have I ever discussed this article with you - The Indispensability Argument in Mathematics? It makes reference to a 1963 paper by Paul Benacerraf which is apparently canonical. The maths experts on this forum generally know it and judge it accordingly. But some of the statements made illustrate what I see as the basic philosophical point, to wit:

Standard readings of mathematical claims entail the existence of mathematical objects. But, our best epistemic theories seem to deny that knowledge of mathematical objects is possible.

Why is this? Because apparently our 'best epistemic theories' include the assumption that

human beings [are] physical creatures whose capacities for learning are exhausted by our physical bodies.

Whereas,

Some philosophers, called rationalists, claim that we have a special, non-sensory capacity for understanding mathematical truths, a rational insight arising from pure thought.

The basic drift of the remainder of the article is this:

The indispensability argument in the philosophy of mathematics is an attempt to justify our mathematical beliefs about abstract objects, while avoiding any appeal to rational insight. Its most significant proponent was Willard van Orman Quine.

What am I not seeing here? Why would it be that one of the purportedly major 20th c philosophers wants to 'avoid any appeal to rational insight?'

knowledge of the divine? — Tom Storm

Why 'divine'? Everyone does that when this idea comes up. Why is it associated with religious philosophy? That's the really interesting meta-question. ('Divine' is related to the Sanskrit (proto-European) 'deva' or god.)

I've explained numerous times that my particular epiphany about Platonic mathematics was a very simple one: the objects of mathematics are not compounded and are not subject to change. For the ancients, this signified that intelligible objects have qualities and attributes which were not found in the corruptible objects of sense, all of which are conversely composed ot parts and subject to decay. But I don't think that in itself is a specifically religious idea. More a philosophical insight, or 'quasi-religious' in the sense that Spinoza was. I suppose it is associated with rationalism in philosophy, and Western, specifically anglo-american, philosophy is overwhelmingly empiricist in outlook - all knowledge from experience, rejection of innate ideas. That's what is behind a lot of the animus in respect of platonic realism.

Just now watched a CTT interview with Paul Davies on the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics'. Davies is much more open to the 'mysterious convergence' kind of view (as opposed to the 'happenstance' or 'brute fact' kind of view). He acknowledges he's in the minority but I think he's on the mark.

I also idly speculate that the realm of necessary facts is somehow connected to an intuitive understanding of what must always be the case, in order for the world to be as it is.
— Wayfarer

Interesting, can you say some more to clarify this point? Are you saying, for instance, that space/time is part of human's innate cognitive apparatus - it constructs our understanding of reality? — Tom Storm

This is the kind of topic which no respectable professional philosopher would touch with a barge pole. They concentrate more on minutae. . But the intuitive view I am developing is that the rational order of the mind, and the rational order we perceive in the universe, is the same order, basically. That somehow, the relationship of ideas and causal relationships are connected. That's because the order we perceive is imposed by the mind - this is once again Charles Pinter, Mind and the Cosmic Order. But because of our sense of separation of observer from observed, we can't perceive that, and then wonder where the order comes from, or why it exists.(Schopenhauer: 'materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets himself'.)

The other idea that is converging with this one, is that the domain of a priori truths is the domain of logical necessity. Would it be possible for a world to exist where, say, the law of identity did not obtain? Or basic ratios and constants didn't hold? :chin:

Chilling. The thought does cross my mind, however, that in the event of such a global emergency, could humanity not cut off electrical power from all of the servers? You know, pull the plug? Sure, it would probably cause massive outages and blackouts, but it would seem preferable to the alternative.

The question of the nature of the a priori is a major topic in philosophy. I believe it was Quine who called the whole notion into question, saying that there is no clear boundary between what we can know a priori and what we can know based on experience. Rather, all of our knowledge is interconnected, and any belief can potentially be revised in light of new evidence. My problem with that is, well, pure maths, for starters. And all the many discoveries that have been made through reasoning from evidence. Sure, those discoveries need to be tested against empirical fact, but many of them were made well in advance of such validation. Empiricism and naturalism have an innate bias against the idea of innate knowledge (irony alert!) Whereas, I believe that the a priori reflects innate structures within the mind that are operative in the exercise of reason. I also idly speculate that the realm of necessary facts is somehow connected to an intuitive understanding of what must always be the case, in order for the world to be as it is.

I really like the start of that lecture, I'll find the time for it later.

There was no place in the cosmos staked out by Plato or Aristotle. — Fooloso4

There was at least a conception of 'the cosmos'

Trying to explain how reasonable creatures emerged in the first place from simpler conditions is perhaps the most spectacular use of reason so far. Reason is honored in the use of it. — plaque flag

Evolutionary biology is an account of how species evolve, but I don't see it as an account of the nature of reason. Should be a different thread, though.

Naturalism as construed in neodarwinian terms, which seems to dictate that whatever faculties we possess are the product of adaptive necessity. Interesting how it’s a similar argument to both Donald Hoffman’s and Alvin Plantinga’s, albeit each of them draw very different conclusions from the same basic premises (although I suppose Plantinga and Nagel are closer then either are to Hoffman, even if Plantinga is theistic, and Nagel claims not to be). Nagel is defending the sovereignty of reason. That is the thrust of that whole book of his The Last Word, which was published about 1996 as an argument against cultural relativism from which that essay is extracted.

I think self-evident truths are supposed to be the fingerprints of the Divine. — plaque flag

In ancient and medieval philosophy, the order of nature was seen as ‘God’s handiwork’. But that was especially true in respect of Aquinas and that strain of scholastic philosophy that incorporated Aristotelianism - scholastic realism, in short. But the countervailing historical strain was Ockham’s nominalism and Bacon’s early empiricism, and that was the strain that prevailed. (This was the theme of a fantastic book, The Theological Origins of Modernity, M A Gillespie, which I read when I first joined forums. It links nominalism with the rise of theological voluntarism, which says that the soveriegnty of God is not constrained by reason. Very deep and lengthy argument however.)

But look at the current debates around Platonism in mathematics. These revolve around the argument as to whether and in what sense number (and by implication universals generally) can be said to be real. In scholastic realism, universals are understood to be real, and this is what underwrote scholastic metaphysics. The mainstream view today is very much that numbers are discovered not invented, they’re human artifacts. And that is in part because if the reality of such things as number can’t be accommodated in the presumptive materialism of modern philosophy.

Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects that aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences.[1] Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate. Mathematical platonism has considerable philosophical significance. If the view is true, it will put great pressure on the physicalist idea that reality is exhausted by the physical. For platonism entails that reality extends far beyond the physical world and includes objects that aren’t part of the causal and spatiotemporal order studied by the physical sciences.[1] Mathematical platonism, if true, will also put great pressure on many naturalistic theories of knowledge. For there is little doubt that we possess mathematical knowledge. The truth of mathematical platonism would therefore establish that we have knowledge of abstract (and thus causally inefficacious) objects. This would be an important discovery, which many naturalistic theories of knowledge would struggle to accommodate. — SEP, Platonism in Philosophy of Mathematics

(I’m pursuing an idea that they are real in the sense of Terrence Deacon’s ‘absentials’, i.e. acting as logical constraints within the domain of possibility.)

All of which is completely besides the point of this thread so I will end it there.

I think Hegel may have been trying to update Spinoza. The World is God — plaque flag

I think that is a notoriously difficult point in Spinoza's philosophy, whether it amounts to a flat out declaration that Nature is God tout courte. I've found an interesting recent title on Spinoza, Spinoza's Religion by Claire Carlisle, although probably that ought to be subject of another thread.

As for Hegel, I don't know for sure, but I don't think he was at all inclined towards atheism or even Pantheism. I am kind of interested in Robert Wallace's interpretation but, you know, too many books......

The problem for me is that reason by itself tells us nothing, it is really just a good practice of consistent thinking — Janus

Which has among other things resulted in the scientific revolution.

a critical mind will ask the question as to how we know this most attractive thought is actually true.

And I can't see any possible answer other than that it might "feel right". It isn't empirically verifiable, and it isn't logically necessary, so what other ground do we have? — Janus

My tentative answer is that the world is the experience-of-the-world, and so the order we find in reason, is also the order we find in the world, because they're not ultimately separable (a lot rides on 'ultimately' in that sentence.)

Logical necessity is nowadays often deemed to be a separate issue to physical causation (something I explored in this offsite post.) But that doesn't seem to me to address the 'unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences' which time and again has produced predictions for which at the time there wasn't even the empirical means to test (e.g. relativity, Dirac's discovery of anti-matter.) I think these are all examples of Kant's synthetic a priori and a testimony to the power of reason.

Nagel's point is that if we are to be considered rational beings, then this is because we accept the testimony of reason, not because we are compelled to do so by the requirements of adaptation, but because we can see the truth of its statements. I think it is that power to discern apodictic truths which caused the ancients to grant it a kind of quasi-religious status, and conversely the tendency to deprecate reason as simply an evolved capacity is an indicator of a kind of deep irrationality.

I think a big part of the problem is that philosophy is no longer connected with culture. After all, Greek philosophy, which you yourself are very well versed in, prizes virtues and qualities of character that are quite out of keeping with today's materialist and technologically-driven society. The nihilism you speak of was foretold by Neitszche and also by Heidegger. We no longer have a place in the cosmos - science tells us (or at least so it is thought) that life originated by a fluke combination of chemicals clustered around geo-thermal vents and then evolved by chance rather than design (and no, I'm not promoting ID theory, but the sense of life as essentially a product of chance, with no purpose other than survival and procreation, is one of the characteristics of nihilism.)

In Eastern culture, whilst it too is also becoming overwhelmed with modern consumerism, there is still a connection between philosophy and culture preserved in (for example) Buddhism in China and Japan (notwithstanding the official atheism of the Chinese Communist party) and the various forms of indigenous spirituality which continue to animate culture in India.

There are however some really interesting counter-cultural currents bubbling up in the West. I've been watching the odd panel discussion by a UK organisation called the IAI, Institute of Art and Ideas, which regularly hosts debates between leading public intellectuals, scientists, and philosophers. Bernardo Kastrup, Raymond Tallis, and Sabine Hossenfelder regularly appear in them, along with many others. There is a ferment of philosophically-oriented channels on YouTube, of varying quality, but some are very good (John Vervaeke is an interesting example). People are searching, asking deep questions, and the interconnected nature of today's world facilitates that. Notably absent from many of those debates are academic philosophers, for the reasons I noted above. But philosophy, as I think Etienne Gilson observed, has previously been declared dead, only to 'bury its undertakers'.

Further to the above:

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) appears to be finding multiple galaxies that grew too massive too soon after the Big Bang, if the standard model of cosmology is to be believed.

In a study published in Nature Astronomy, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin find that six of the earliest and most massive galaxy candidates observed by JWST stand to contradict the prevailing thinking in cosmology. That’s because other researchers estimate that each galaxy is seen from between 500 million and 700 million years after the Big Bang, yet measures more than 10 billion times as massive as our sun. One of the galaxies even appears to be more massive than the Milky Way, despite the fact that our own galaxy had billions of more years to form and grow.

“If the masses are right, then we are in uncharted territory,” said Mike Boylan-Kolchin, associate professor of astronomy who led the study. “We’ll require something very new about galaxy formation or a modification to cosmology. One of the most extreme possibilities is that the universe was expanding faster shortly after the Big Bang than we predict, which might require new forces and particles.”

For galaxies to form so fast at such a size, they also would need to be converting nearly 100% of their available gas into stars.

“We typically see a maximum of 10% of gas converted into stars,” Boylan-Kolchin said. “So while 100% conversion of gas into stars is technically right at the edge of what is theoretically possible, it’s really the case that this would require something to be very different from what we expect.” — UT News, Austin, Texas, 13 Apr

Media commentary has been murmuring this possibility since September 2022, with many 'alt-science' sites and dubious youtube channels crowing about 'breaking the Big Bang'. The powers that be meanwhile have until now been tut-tutting the whole idea, move right along, nothing to see here. But it seems there might be a fundamental problem in the current cosmological model.

He doesn't leave it at a single sentence. A very detailed discussion of the sovereignty of reason and its treatment by evolutionary theorists occupies the remainder of the essay.

I'll also add that the point I was trying to make in my earlier responses on this OP, was not that there is anything the matter with Advaita Vedanta. It's more like that when I first encountered it, through the teaching of Ramana Maharishi, it lit a match, so to speak. I even went to an ashram and tried to practice yoga seriously (although I never had much aptitude for it, nor a lot of self-discipline). But I came to realise, over the subsequent decades, that the truth the Advaitins teach about 'sat-chit-ananda' is not something one can casually pick up or enter into. It does demand what is called a sadhana, a spiritual discipline, and a relationship with a guru. So in the end, although we'd like to think there is an essence which can be extracted from the religious trapping (or 'religious fairy tales') it is a religious discipline, and actually a pretty exacting one. I did go far enough into it to actually pass a university exam in Sanskrit, although I've forgotten most of it since. But the man who taught that class ended up ordaining as a Vedantin priest, which he is to this day.

It is amazing, in this day and age, that we have access to all of these materials via the Internet, which in past times were barely even visible in the West. And I think the opportunity to learn about them, appreciate them and study them is a great thing. But don't underestimate what is involved. That's all I'm saying.

Any personal experiences? — Tom Storm

Recounting them is rarely particularly meaingful, no matter how meaningful they are or were to those who have had them.

With respect to Hegel, I think he definitely had a mystical side to him, but I haven't really mustered the endurance to slog through his often impenetrable prose. There's a scholar by the name of Robert Wallace who had an article in Philosophy Now about Hegel's God:

If God is to be truly infinite, truly unlimited, then God cannot be ‘a being’, because ‘a being’, that is, one being (however powerful) among others, is already limited by its relations to the others. It’s limited by not being X, not being Y, and so forth. But then it’s clearly not unlimited, not infinite! To think of God as ‘a being’ is to render God finite.

But if God isn’t ‘a being’, what is God? Here Hegel makes two main points. The first is that there’s a sense in which finite things like you and me fail to be as real as we could be, because what we are depends to a large extent on our relations to other finite things [in other words, our being is contingent]. If there were something that depended only on itself to make it what it is, then that something would evidently be more fully itself than we are, and more fully real, as itself [unconditional being]. This is why it’s important for God to be infinite: because this makes God more himself (herself, itself) and more fully real, as himself (herself, itself), than anything else is.

Hegel’s second main point is that this something that’s more fully real than we are isn’t just a hypothetical possibility, because we ourselves have the experience of being more fully real, as ourselves, at some times than we are at other times. We have this experience when we step back from our current desires and projects and ask ourselves, what would make the most sense, what would be best overall, in these circumstances? When we ask a question like this, we make ourselves less dependent on whatever it was that caused us to feel the desire or to have the project. We experience instead the possibility of being self-determining, through our thinking about what would be best. But something that can conceive of being self-determining in this way, seems already to be more ‘itself’, more real as itself, than something that’s simply a product of its circumstances.

Putting these two points together, Hegel arrives at a substitute for the conventional conception of God that he criticized. If there is a higher degree of reality that goes with being self-determining (and thus real as oneself), and if we ourselves do in fact achieve greater self-determination at some times than we achieve at other times, then it seems that we’re familiar in our own experience with some of the higher degree of reality that we associate with God. Perhaps we aren’t often aware of the highest degree of this reality, or the sum of all of this reality, which would be God himself (herself, etc.). But we are aware of some of it – as the way in which we ourselves seem to be more fully present, more fully real, when instead of just letting ourselves be driven by whatever desires we currently feel, we ask ourselves what would be best overall. We’re more fully real, in such a case, because we ourselves are playing a more active role, through thought, than we play when we simply let ourselves be driven by our current desires.

Why is there no point in discussing a "a perennial philosophical reflection" on a philosophy forum? — Art48

I had deleted that comment, but now you've picked it up, I will explain what I was getting at.

This forum is a very tolerant and easy-going place, especially compared to a lot of other internet spaces, with a wide range of views being presented. But the general attitude of modern philosophy and secular culture is what I would describe as 'presumptively naturalistic'. To paraphrase a scholar I know, the issue with our usual understanding of secularity is its taken-for-granted-ness, meaning we not aware that it is a worldview. It is an ideology that pretends to be the everyday world we live in, and assumed that it is simply the way the world really is, once superstitious beliefs about it have been removed. In this context, the burden of proof for any ideas of 'the transcendent', whether Christian or from some other source, is on those who propose them, in terms that are either intelligible scientifically, or with respect to the corpus of Western philosophy.

That passage you quote on the SEP article from Schopenhauer is one I myself have also quoted previously. But I'm of the view that Schopenhauer (and the other German idealists) were in some respects the last gasp of philosophy proper. (Now there's a thread topic.) But the point is, the kind of speculative metaphysics you find in Schopenhauer went completely out of fashion in academic philosophy around the time of WW1. Since then the emphasis has been on plain language and analytic philosophy, that demurely cedes the ground to science when it comes to normative claims about the nature of reality. 'Mysticism' is basically a derogatory term for that audience, conveying only vagueness or woolly headed thinking. Another name for woo.

So there are some here who are open to the perspectives offered by Eastern philosophy and indeed the 'perennial tradition' - I'm one of them! - but overall it's a dissident or minority approach.

Why do I feel the only reason you asked me the question is to debunk whatever response I came up with? I won't waste my time in future.

So you haven't a clue how a natural brain with natrural capacities adapted to nature can have "supernatural experiences" — 180 Proof

From what I understand, neuroscience has no idea of how the natural brain with natural capacities experiences the taste of vanilla.

What I'm saying is, there is abundant documentary evidence and witness testimony for the experience of such states of being, but I'm not going to waste any time trying to convince you of that.

How do you suppose that natural brains consisting of natural cognitive and sensory functionalities adapted to nature are in any way capable of perceiving – experiencing – "supernatural" events / agents? I'd like to be shown what publicly warrants the OP's problematic assumption that human beings can have "supernatural experiences" (which are more than just drug / psychosis-induced hallucinations). — 180 Proof

We have in our culture a very rigid barrier between natural and supernatural. It is mainly constructed due to the cultural dynamics surrounding early modern science. I once read a document about the formation of the Royal Society, as you know the first properly scientific body in the world. It explicitly said words to the effect of 'no metaphysics! Keep out of anything that is the business of the priesthood!' And you can understand why. At the time, Europe was convulsed with religious wars, Britain herself had the many religious conflicts between Church and Throne. Natural philosophers found it prudent to keep a strict separation between their investigations of 'the movements of bodies' and the kinds of questions which occupied the priesthood and the scholastic philosophers. And also, as you're well aware, there were dreadful penalties placed on deviation from orthodoxy, which literally means 'right belief', from the beginning of Christian culture. So that, I think, is where this firewall between natural and supernatural, in a political and cultural sense, can be traced back to.

Christianity itself is grounded on supernatural stories, that being the resurrection of Jesus, and the accounts of the miracles in the Gospel. It was a requirement to believe these as fact - not as symbolic or metaphor, and not as something explain rationalistically or 'work out' The Gospel was 'foolishness to the Greeks', i.e. confounded the Greek philosophers (hence the deep-seated tension in Christianity between Gospel and philosophy.) That is what I think has given rise to the deep division in western culture between religious and secular culture.

But as @Tom Storm says, there there are voluminous testimonies of religious and mystical experience and realisation from every culture and every period of history, of phenomena and experiences outside the bounds set by this division in Western culture. Even the scientific world-picture is moving away from old-school materialism and the idea of the human as a gene machine. Have a look at The Neural Buddhists, an old OP by David Brooks.

I think there is, in a very broad sense, such a thing as religious naturalism. That is not 'religion within the bounds of currently-defined scientific knowledge' but arising from the experiences, practices and traditional lore of cultures other than Western that has developed over millenia, from sources including India, China, and Persia, to mention only a few. There are vast domains of understanding in those cultures which are not characterised by the same implicit divisions between nature and what is purportedly above or beyond it, that we in the West have absorbed.

Also, closer to the OP, Dermot Moran has a book on the mystical theologian and neoplatonist Duns Scotus Eriugena, in which he traces his influence on the development of German idealism via Echkardt and medieval mysticism. Also I've noticed a book mentioned in a few of these debates on Hegel as an Hermetic philosopher (Hegel and the Hermetic Tradition https://www.amazon.com/Hegel-Hermetic-Tradition-Glenn-Alexander/dp/0801474507)

You seem to begin with an assumption there is a supernatural or divine. — Tom Storm

Whereas, the general consensus on this forum is that any claims of religious revelation or accounts of the divine arising from religious or mystical traditions generally should be disregarded as valid sources of knowledge and/or information and should be put to one side. Would you agree with that?

for the most part, traditional dialectics, by their very nature, start with the assumption that one side is right and one side is wrong. — ClayG

I don't know if that is really correct. Dialectic has always comprised a dialogue between opposing points of view, but part of the point of dialectic is that in this exchange an understanding emerges from the tension between them which may not be disclosed without there being this opposition. But, that said, overall I agree with your analysis of the value of Hegel's dialectical approach for the evaluation of religious ideas.

The majority will never accept that there is the kind of state of self-realisation or higher knowledge that the Advaitins are speaking of, as it has no reference points in modern philosophy or Western culture generally. Explore it by all means but don't waste your time trying to convince anyone else that it's real.