Footnotes2Plato

“The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato.”
–Alfred North Whitehead

Month: October 2010

  • Aristotle and the historical myopia of science

    Another response to PZ Myers’ blog. I’m responding to this fellow in particular:   Aristotle decided observation was irrelevant? Are you joking? If we are going to base physics on how nature is actually experienced, then Galileo is the one ignoring observation. Galilean physics are based on ideal geometrical models, not actual observation, where friction…

  • Divine Imagination

    I’ve been having a very stimulating discussion with a Christian theologian named Jason Michael McCann. He has held up a mirror to my ideas and allowed me to see them in a new light. His criticisms are fair and I hope we will each benefit from continued exposure to what may turn out to be…

  • Gravity Is Love, And Other Astounding Metaphors : 13.7: Cosmos And Culture : NPR

    This NPR article mentions one of my professors, cosmologist Brian Swimme. Here is my comment: Dr. Swimme calls gravity love, and I think it is an apt metaphor. Anthropomorphic? Perhaps, but how else are we to really understand gravity unless we can relate it to our human experience of the universe? And it is not…

  • Belief in a Personal God

    The following is my response to the theologian Jason Michael McCann’s blog post about the personal nature of God in the Christian tradition. Yesterday, he posted a critical response to one of my short essays on materialism and imagination that I will also respond to soon. JMM, The distinction between truth and fact (which I understand…

  • Idealism, Materialism, Non-dualism

    A response to Owlmirror on Pharyngula, You suggest that idealism is incoherent because 1) it doesn’t explain “things acting under purely physical rules, rather than mental states.” -What is a physical rule, exactly? How are these rules or laws determined, and why, as in the case of our particular universe, are they so organized as…

  • Power and Presence in Theology

    Another response to NRG’s questions for me on Pharyngula: I have trouble conceiving of God as all-powerful because of the problem of evil and my experience of human freedom. I associated God’s omnipresence with “will” even though, for God, there is really nothing to “do.” From the “perspective” of eternity, God is already everywhere and everywhen…

  • God did it, or aliens?

    “NRG” posting over on Pharyngula asks me: Why impute an admittedly Unknowable Omni God to explain currently inexplainable phenomena, if it’s much more reasonable, based on what we actually know, to assume that other citizens of the universe, evolved like us but to a much greater degree, are responsible for such phenomena? To make it…

  • Christianity and Ecology: Response to Glenn Beck

    Glenn Beck’s segment on Christianity and the environmentalist movement. My response:

  • Natural Science and Spiritual Science

    My recent comments on Pharyngula Excerpts from my comments: I should have written “all-loving” instead of “all-powerful” twice. Just a typo, nothing esoteric. The “etc.” was a placeholder for all the other typical attributes (infinite, eternal…). I wouldn’t say these attributions are necessarily incorrect, they are just inadequate descriptors. Cataphatic theology must be balanced by…

  • PZ Myers’ will never believe in God

    PZ Myers’ blog post: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/10/eight_reasons_you_wont_persuad.php Some excerpts from my comments (beginning around #403): The sort of god PZ has decreed impossible to believe in has little in common with Augustine’s, or Plotinus’, or Aquinas’, or with any other great theologian’s God. Natural science is epistemically closed to theological issues, not because they are unreal, but…

  • Consciousness: Problem, Paradox, or Practice?

    A quick contextualizing note for those who are just joining the tangled thread of my recent blogalogue concerning the nature of consciousness and its relationship with the nervous system and surrounding cosmos: Last month, Steve Ramirez, a PhD candidate at MIT, posted an entry on his blog (http://okaysteve.wordpress.com/) concerning neuroscience’s supposed successes explaining the “problem” of consciousness purely…

  • On Consciousness and the Brain

    This is my textual response to Steve Ramirez’s post: Steve, First, thanks for taking the time to rebut, in writing, some of my statements concerning consciousness on YouYube. As a thinker, I can hardly think of a more helpful gift than a detailed counter-posturing in response to my ideas. I think consciousness is involved in…

  • Consciousness: The Holy Grail of Neuroscience

    The following is a video response I posted on YouTube to a blog post by Steve Ramirez about consciousness and neuroscience.     He writes the following: Matthew Segall, known popularly as “0ThouArtThat0″ on youtube, is as eloquent as any up and coming philosopher – an eloquence rivaled in magnitude only by his deep misunderstanding of how science…

  • messages about the purpose of philosophizing…

    Here is a message and my response that I’ve exchanged over on YouTube as 0ThouArtThat0.   From YouTube user drchaffee:   Thanks for understanding that I wasn’t trying to demean you with my length-constrained message to your video. I’ve had a question rolling around in my head for a couple of days, and I just…