My answer is that this reasonableness is mostly a trick of language. We say the plane will stay up in the air and the train will arrive regardless of the shifting grounds of the sciences that makes these devices possible. — Joshs

Faith, on the other hand, is an excuse for believing something when there is no good reason. — Tom Storm

"Personally I would never use the word faith to describe reasonable actions taken in the world." — universeness

Metaphors are commonly used in science — RussellA

. He had no use for organized religion, but was something of a disciple of Tielhard de Chardin, an intellectual and Catholic priest who advanced the idea of an Omega Point, toward which the world moves and reaches in its final days. — jgill

The language he uses is deeply religious throughout — Moliere

Tegmark is not a "physicalist" — 180 Proof

I know very little about Sheldrake but I did see common ground between his 'morphic resonance' label and Dawkins's' memes' label, both in functionality and proposed final result. Do you see any connection between the two? — universeness

Are you saying it's hard to find robust Plato scholars who can write from a perspective located somewhere between recherché and accessible pap? — Tom Storm

This may also be too breezy, but there's a Neo-Platonist Catholic philosopher on Youtube who who often recommends books on Plato. Check out Pat Flynn and Jim Madden (Benedictine College) - they love Gerson and various others.

Gerson contends that Platonism identifies philosophy with a distinct subject matter, namely, the intelligible world, and seeks to show that the Naturalist rejection of Platonism entails the elimination of a distinct subject matter for philosophy. Thus, the possibility of philosophy depends on the truth of Platonism. From Aristotle to Plotinus to Proclus, Gerson clearly links the construction of the Platonic system well beyond simply Plato's dialogues, providing strong evidence of the vast impact of Platonism on philosophy throughout history. Platonism and Naturalism concludes that attempts to seek a rapprochement between Platonism and Naturalism are unstable and likely indefensible.

Murdoch does initially speak of the void in British politics. I do see her as describing what is happening rather than advocating for the elimination of metaphysics. — Jack Cummins

Murdoch describes a "progressive education in the virtues" which involves engaging in practices that turn our attention away from ourselves toward valuable objects in the real world. Citing Plato's Phaedrus, she identifies the experience of beauty as the most accessible and the easiest to understand. She attributes the "unselfing" power of beauty both to nature and to art. Also following Plato, she locates the next and more difficult practice in intellectual disciplines. She uses the example of learning a foreign language as the occasion to practice virtues such as honesty and humility while increasing one's knowledge of "an authoritative structure which commands my respect". She says that the same quality of outward objective attention to the particular is needed for developing and practicing virtues in ordinary human relations.

Murdoch argues that Plato's concept of the Good applies to and unifies all these ways of learning and practicing the virtues. In her discussion of the concept, she refers to three sections from Plato's Republic: the Analogy of the Sun, the Analogy of the Divided Line, and the Allegory of the Cave. The concept of Good, Murdoch says, involves perfection, hierarchy, and transcendence, and is both unifying and indefinable. She suggests that "a sort of contemplation of the Good" in the sense of "a turning away from the particular" is possible and "may be the thing that helps most when difficulties seem insoluble". However, this practice is difficult and carries with it the danger that the object of attention might revert to the self. — Wiki

I was comparing Rupert Sheldrake's 'morphic resonance' with Richard Dawkings coining and use of the term meme from his book 'The Selfish Gene.' — universeness

The mind is of a different kind to the mind-independent world

Realism is the belief that the world comprises the mind and a mind-independent world. — RussellA

If universals don't exist in a mind-independent world, yet we can perceive them in our minds, then they must have been created in the mind. — RussellA

Conceptually distinguishable (rationalism) but perceptually not (empiricism). — Agent Smith

I wonder how we would we describe the position of mysterianism in relation to the venerable mind body question? It maintians the issue can't be resolved (perhaps even in principle) which may be an overreach, but does it imply that the question or any proposed answers are nonsense too? — Tom Storm

The purpose of metaphysics is to bring those unacknowledged, unrecognized assumptions out in the open — Clarky

You are as much a philosopher as 95% of us here. You certainly are more well-read than I am, in spite of your aw shucks, I'm just a jumbuck playing my didgeridoo next to the billabong in the outback way of talking about yourself. — Clarky

A group of people may agree to share a common language. It may be agreed within the group that white objects are linked with the word "white". In the world being observed by the group, not only do white objects physically exist, but also and the word "white" physically exists as an object. — RussellA

If concepts existed in a mind-independent world then they would be "out there somewhere" and discoverable. However, if that were the case, two people independently observing an object, for example a rock, should be able to write down all concepts discoverable within the object, in which case, when compared, their lists should be the same. Concepts in objects cannot be discovered by observation alone, but require the inventive power of reasoning using the intellect. — RussellA

If universals don't exist in a mind-independent world, yet we can perceive them in our minds, then they must have been created in the mind. As universals have been created by thoughts in the mind, they must be dependent for their existence on thoughts in the mind. — RussellA

In An Essay on Metaphysics (1940) (Collingwood) attacked the neo-empiricist assumptions prevalent in early analytic philosophy and advocated a logical transformation of metaphysics from a study of being or ontology to a study of the absolute presuppositions or heuristic principles which govern different forms of enquiry. Collingwood thus occupies a distinctive position in the history of British philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century. He rejects equally the neo-empiricist assumptions that prevailed in early analytic philosophy and the kind of metaphysics that the analytical school sought to overthrow. His logical reform of metaphysics also ensures a distinctive role and subject matter for philosophical enquiry and is thus far from advocating a merely therapeutic conception of philosophy or the dissolution of philosophical into linguistic analysis in the manner of ordinary language philosophy.

Collingwood is critical of those philosophers who, like Bradley (1874), bring the presuppositions of natural science to bear upon the study of the historical past. It is not the role of historians to dismiss as false the testimony of historical agents who attest to the occurrence of miracles on the grounds that since nature is uniform and its laws do not change, the miracles past agents attested to could not have happened because their occurrence contravenes the laws of nature. This “positivistic spirit” encourages a judgmental attitude towards the historical sources rather than an attempt to understand their meaning. This is not to say that historians need to believe that miracles happened in order to understand the sources, but rather that understanding the role that belief in the supernatural had for the agents who witnessed to them is more important for the historian than assessing whether belief in the supernatural is true or false.

the main point which Murdoch is making is making is the emphasis on empiricism — Jack Cummins

Example: "Belgiums are baby killers and should be punished". Once, long ago, those words were believed my millions. Evil words, sinful words. Death words. — Ken Edwards

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday announced the introduction of a bill that would place a national freeze on handgun ownership across Canada.

"What this means is that it will no longer be possible to buy, sell, transfer or import handguns anywhere in Canada," Trudeau said in a news conference.
"In other words we're capping the market," he added.

If passed, the new anti-gun legislation will fine gun smuggling and trafficking "by increasing maximum criminal penalties and providing more tools for law enforcement to investigate firearm crimes," Trudeau said.

The new legislation would also require that long gun magazines "can never" hold more than five rounds.

"Gun violence is a complex problem, but at the end of the day the math is really quite simple: The fewer the guns in our communities, the safer everyone will be," the Prime Minister said. — CNN

It does seem that Kant has become rather unpopular, — Jack Cummins

That's how you interpret it. — Landoma1

As with all inventions they were invented in the mind, and then made into a physical thing of perhaps wood and steel, a circular rim supported by spokes revolving around an axle. — RussellA

I am persuaded by FH Bradley's Regress Argument that relations don't ontologically exist in the external world, meaning that wheels don't ontologically exist in the external world. — RussellA

It could mean that if we turn over the whole universe item by item we will find at least one thing that is to the west of another thing.
There is a case - at least one case - of something being to the west of something else.
From which if finally follows that relations exist...........we can see that relations have ontological existence. — RussellA

Consider such a proposition as 'Edinburgh is north of London'. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. When we come to know that Edinburgh is north of London, we come to know something which has to do only with Edinburgh and London: we do not cause the truth of the proposition by coming to know it, on the contrary we merely apprehend a fact which was there before we knew it. The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know about north and south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe. ...We may therefore now assume it to be true that nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation 'north of', which is a universal; and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental if the relation 'north of', which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental. Hence we must admit that the relation, like the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create.

This conclusion, however, is met by the difficulty that the relation 'north of' does not seem to exist in the same sense in which Edinburgh and London exist. If we ask 'Where and when does this relation exist?' the answer must be 'Nowhere and nowhen'. There is no place or time where we can find the relation 'north of'. It does not exist in Edinburgh any more than in London, for it relates the two and is neutral as between them. Nor can we say that it exists at any particular time. Now everything that can be apprehended by the senses or by introspection exists at some particular time. Hence the relation 'north of' is radically different from such things. It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental; yet it is something. ...

It is largely the very peculiar kind of being that belongs to universals which has led many people to suppose that they are really mental. We can think of a universal, and our thinking then exists in a perfectly ordinary sense, like any other mental act. Suppose, for example, that we are thinking of whiteness. Then in one sense it may be said that whiteness is 'in our mind'. ... In the strict sense, it is not "whiteness" that is in our mind, but "the act of thinking of whiteness". The connected ambiguity in the word 'idea', which we noted at the same time, also causes confusion here. In one sense of this word, namely the sense in which it denotes the object of an act of thought, whiteness is an 'idea'. Hence, if the ambiguity is not guarded against, we may come to think that whiteness is an 'idea' in the other sense, i.e. an act of thought; and thus we come to think that whiteness is mental. But in so thinking, we rob it of its essential quality of universality. One man's act of thought is necessarily a different thing from another man's; one man's act of thought at one time is necessarily a different thing from the same man's act of thought at another time. Hence, if whiteness were the thought as opposed to its object, no two different men could think of it, and no one man could think of it twice. That which many different thoughts of whiteness have in common is their object, and this object is different from all of them. Thus universals are not thoughts, though when known they are the objects of thoughts.

We shall find it convenient only to speak of things existing when they are in time, that is to say, when we can point to some time at which they exist (not excluding the possibility of their existing at all times). Thus thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects exist. But universals do not exist in this sense; we shall say that they subsist or have being, where 'being' is opposed to 'existence' as being timeless. — Bertrand Russell, The World of Universals

That Alice measures her entangled particle doesn't imply that a measurement has been made or ever will be made on Bob's entangled particle. — Andrew M

"Quantum Computation and Quantum Information - Nielsen and Chuang"]For physicists, the most important lesson is that their deeply held commonsense intuitions about how the world works are wrong.

Here at human scale, we can live our lives as we always have. — Clarky

The world is not locally realistic. — Andrew M

Schrödinger thought that the Greeks had a kind of hold over us — they saw that the only way to make progress in thinking about the world was to talk about it without the “knowing subject” in it. QBism goes against that strain by saying that quantum mechanics is not about how the world is without us; instead it’s precisely about us in the world. The subject matter of the theory is not the world or us but us-within-the-world, the interface between the two. — Chris Fuchs

I have the impression from previous reading that Nietzsche aligns himself with Aristotle's notion of eudamonia, "good spirit" or "flourishing", — Janus