Archive for the ‘Philosophy’ Category
Sunday, July 12th, 2026
The massively complicated cosmogony, cosmology, and metaphysics of Gnosticism often strikes students as merely fantastical. I propose, however, that a very large part of it can be explained as an attempt to integrate a small set of not-obviously-coherent principles and presuppositions. Amongst those are the following, listed here in no ...
Posted in Arguments, Philosophy, Religion | 1 Comment »
Thursday, July 9th, 2026
No inner monologue
Here's an interesting (short!) interview with a girl who says she has no internal monologue. The interviewer is trying to comprehend what that could be like and how it could be possible.
I think a good way to start thinking about it is to realise that there is no actual little ...
Posted in Cognitive Science, Philosophy | No Comments »
Thursday, July 2nd, 2026
A standard justification for the approach of Analytic philosophy is that no real progress can be made on philosophical problems until the concepts with which it deals are made properly clear, and until we have determined that the concepts are in fact well formed. That this is not always the ...
Posted in Philosophy | No Comments »
Sunday, June 28th, 2026
What are these ‘indigenous ways of knowing’ (henceforth, IWK)? Let’s ignore the term ‘indigenous’ for the moment: we will see that it has its own problems. An unsystematic review of many of the official and semi-official resources available online is extremely confusing, since there seems to be no consistent distinction ...
Posted in Philosophy, Politics, Sociology | No Comments »
Saturday, June 27th, 2026
Plato is not now generally thought of as being overly sympathetic to the mystical path to knowledge – the later position of the Academy notwithstanding – yet in the Phaedrus 244a-245c, 265b and Symposium 210e-211b, Plato makes claims that seem to amount to an acknowledgement that there are paths to ...
Posted in Philosophy, Religion | No Comments »
Thursday, June 25th, 2026
Powers aren’t Persons
The status of the Holy Spirit has often been a bone of contention amongst sectarians and is central to many of the heresies that the Church had had to fight off. it seems to have been a hypostatization of the Divine Presence or the Divine inspiration that ...
Posted in Philosophy, Religion | No Comments »
Tuesday, June 23rd, 2026
Posted in History, Philosophy | No Comments »
Saturday, June 20th, 2026
It’s remarkable the amount of incoherence there is in this merely speculative cosmology. One that struck me in the first paragraphs is that the Neoplatonists do not succeed in supporting the consistency of their claims that ‘The One’ (το ‘εν) is absolutely united and singular and perfect and also that ...
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Sunday, May 31st, 2026
It is often asked why we should read; more specifically, why we should read the classics or ‘fine literature,’ by which is meant generally poetry, plays, and prose narratives of various kinds – these days especially, ‘serious’ novels. The question is motivated by the fact that reading this literature is ...
Posted in Art, Cognitive Science, Philosophy | No Comments »
Thursday, May 28th, 2026
1. Are there any truths that are just inaccessible to the human mind – that just could not be thought by the human mind?
I’m not wondering about truths that are incomprehensible because of some gross physical limit, like the names of every person on Earth (or choose your own ...
Posted in Cognitive Science, Philosophy | No Comments »