So then why bother? What is the point of questioning everything if you eventually have to settle on axioms? I mean even solipsism has to take it's base points on faith. — Darkneos
I still restate my question. IF everything is ultimately based on a set of axioms that we cannot prove and have to take it on faith then what exactly is the point of performing philosophy? How can we call anything a pursuit of truth? — Darkneos
It just seems.....weird to me that some folks would do that? I mean doesn't that amount to shooting yourself in the foot more or less? Who are you talking to then? Why charge for your courses? Why tell this to anyone? — Darkneos
It's just skepticism doing what it does best — TheMadFool
Anyone thinking that...
It's just skepticism doing what it does best
— TheMadFool
...is incorrect. — jamalrob
I have no idea how you got that from what I said. — jamalrob
Just work on your reading comprehension please. — jamalrob
Cartesian skepticism? The world could be an illusion i.e. it may not exist??? — TheMadFool
Skepticism, the position or worry that we cannot really ever know anything, is completely unjustified... — MG
I'm not sure. Some kind of coherentism, I suppose. — jamalrob
I mentioned in last month’s post here that our familiar term “world” is a rounded-off version of the Old English weorold, “man-old,” the time or age of human beings. That bit of etymology conceals more than one important insight. As I noted last month, it reminds us that this thing we call “the world” isn’t something wholly outside ourselves, something we experience in a detached and objective way. It’s something we create moment by moment in our minds, by piecing together the jumble of unconnected glimpses our senses give us—and we do the piecing according to a plan that’s partly given us by our biology, partly given us by our culture, and partly a function of our individual life experience.
That point is astonishingly easy to forget. I’ve long since lost track of the number of times I’ve watched distinguished scientists admit with one breath that the things we experience around us aren’t real—they’re just representations constructed by our sense organs and brains, reacting to an unimaginable reality of probability waves in four-dimensional space-time—and then go on with the very next breath to forget all that, and act as though matter, energy, space, time, and physical objects exactly as we perceive them are real in the most pigheadedly literal sort of objective sense, as though the human mind has nothing to do with any of them except as a detached observer. What’s more, many of those same scientists proceed to make sweeping claims about what human beings can and can’t know and do, in blithe disregard of the fact that these very claims depend on the same notion of the objective reality of the world of experience that they’ve just disproved. — John Michael Greer
New Realism consists in the claim that there are objects and fields of sense, which have a full-blown realist shape and others, for which this does not hold without either of those enjoying any kind of metaphysical or overall explanatory primacy.
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