There seems to be cognitive gap between ability to use/manufacture tools (engineers) and self-awareness (philosophers). — TheMadFool
People delight in using that example to say See! Animals can reason! What makes you think humans are special!?
Try explaining the concept of prime to a crow. — Wayfarer
From a lecture Karl Popper gave on the subject: — Olivier5
The question is, why aren't blue whales with their humongous brains more intelligent than humans? — TheMadFool
Because it’s not about size - it’s about what you do with it... — Possibility
The ideal scientist has no such barriers. — DrOlsnesLea
If nobody on earth thinks of the alphabet for one full minute, did the alphabet disappear for one minute? — Olivier5
Note that in this lecture Popper challenges both the monist and dualist views and proposes, instead, "a pluralist view ... a view of the universe that recognizes at least three different but interacting sub-universes": the physical world; the mental world; and the world of ideas and cultural artifacts. — Olivier5
The 'substantive existence' of the sensable world is in constant flux, arising and perishing from moment to moment. In the vastness of cosmic time, it is a mere shadow, a lightning flash, a bubble on a stream. — Wayfarer
For Empiricism there is no essential difference between the intellect and the senses*. The fact which obliges a correct theory of knowledge to recognize this essential difference is simply disregarded. What fact? The fact that the human intellect grasps, first in a most indeterminate manner, then more and more distinctly, certain sets of intelligible features -- that is, natures, say, the human nature -- which exist in the real as identical with individuals, with Peter or John for instance, but which are universal in the mind and presented to it as universal objects, positively one (within the mind) and common to an infinity of singular things (in the real).
Thanks to the association of particular images and recollections, a dog reacts in a similar manner to the similar particular impressions his eyes or his nose receive from this thing we call a piece of sugar or this thing we call an intruder; he does not know what is sugar or what is intruder. He plays, he lives in his affective and motor functions, or rather he is put into motion by the similarities which exist between things of the same kind; he does not see the similarity, the common features as such. What is lacking is the flash of intelligibility; he has no ear for the intelligible meaning. He has not the idea or the concept of the thing he knows, that is, from which he receives sensory impressions; his knowledge remains immersed in the subjectivity of his own feelings -- only in man, with the universal idea, does knowledge achieve objectivity. And his field of knowledge is strictly limited: only the universal idea sets free -- in man -- the potential infinity of knowledge.
Such are the basic facts which Empiricism ignores, and in the disregard of which it undertakes to philosophize. — Jacques Maritain, The Cultural Impact of Empiricism
, in this kind of sense there is the world of fashion, the world of football, the world of advertising, and so on; there are countless worlds in this sense, and they all have a different kind of existence. The important point though, relating back to the thread from which this thread was created, that these worlds do not have a substantive existence as the physical field of sense does — Janus
By definition.science lights the way — DrOlsnesLea
I don't see how reasoning could be separate from sensation. Reasoning is a sensation, no? How do you know when you're reasoning and when you're not, if not by sensation?The traditional distinction in philosophy is between reason and sensation - both central to knowledge, but separate faculties. Many animals have far superior sensory abilities to humans, but none of them can speak, or reason, as far as we can tell (leaving aside Caledonian crows and Paul the Octopus). — Wayfarer
don't see how reasoning could be separate from sensation. — Harry Hindu
When it comes to philosophy, the subject was always been seeking out the imperishable, changeless, the first principle. See for instance the thread about the Phaedo. — Wayfarer
My reading of the dialogue is that the Forms are hypothetical, the way Socrates arranges the world in order to make sense of it. — Fooloso4
Reasoning is a sensation, no? — Harry Hindu
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