Therefore my claim is that immediately after Plato Platonism became an aesthetic movement very much wedded to the world. It was Aristotle who was "up in the clouds"

I also wanted to add that phenomenology immediately preceded Heidegger, who took it to a new stage

Plotinus's One can be seen as pure movement without entity being inside. My claim on this thread is that Platonists may not have really believed in top down theo-philosophy, but that the world is the master of the One and the One is subservient to matter. Much phenomenology is needed to unpack this. Forms can be relegated to our minds and gods seen to be the ghosts of our ancestors

We should turn to Plotinus because Plato is ambiguous, and maybe we should continue the thought with a Heidegarrian interpretation of Plotinus. Potentiality-to-being is not strictly static. And further, it is untrue that Aristotle proved that the actual is prior to the potential. I've read his arguments via Aquinas, who wrote them more clearly. I find them faulty to be honest

Giovanni Gentiles was a Fascist with similar thoughts ;)

The Republicans call for a proud America.

The Democrats say they want a humble America

I own Physics and Immortality by Frank Tipler. Controversial book. The parts about a God are mixed with philosophy

Maybe Plato was ambiguous, since he writes in dialogues. Plotinus for one wrote in the Anneads that the One is pure potentiality

I remember when I was improving my spelling in elementary school. I used creative imagination. I saw patterns that strict logic would make you doubt. May be I'm not addressing what your saying :(

To clarify what I said above: we have great minds like the ones working of quantum mechanisms and people like Douglas Hofstadter, yet the issue of the world is so complex they conclude the world and is a "strange loop". This is partial to the Marxist tradition, which takes over from Hegel who took over from Heraclitus. Their internal contradictions are obvious, and I get where the Marxist comes from.

(My ideas of late have been getting bigger and bigger such that I struggle to put it all together. I have schizoaffective disorder and a smart friend of mine once said he thinks I got it from a botched attempt to be a genuis. Perhaps...)

I don't think he has clearly distinguished between (1) innate ideas (2) getting all our knowledge from our senses. You have to make that distinction before you can tackle the issue of creative imagination

Thank you very much!

The idea that a thing is a thing does not come from the senses

"...life consists before all in this: that a living creature is at each moment itself, and yet something else. Life is therefore also a contradiction, present in process, continually occurring and solving itself. And as soon as the contradiction ceases, life ceases.." Engels

We have wave-particle duality theory and Douglas Hofstadter, and yet we can't find a way out of contradiction? Maybe atomist were right and there isn't real physical change. Just rearrangments. This is why I recommend Heidegger, just as a philosopher, and his views on pre-Socratics to Marxists. But eh yes Lenin had many philosophical texts to tempt them

The five ways of Aquinas were created for simple peasants to count on their fingers, like a little intellectual rosary. But he had far more to say on the subject:

aquinasonline.com/aquinas-on-knowing-gods-existence/

This is the most valiant effort offered on this issue from that side of the court.

I'm reading about the panentheism of John Erigena in "On the Division of Nature" by him. A Platonist of a special breed

1) I don't think you want to understand being

2) because you, perhaps rightly, feel that action is greater

3) you get no help that way

What kind of music do Marxists like? Do they ever truly meditate? Just wondering

Marxism started by the replacing of Spirit with Matter in Hegel's system. What's the difference? Don't know. Fine lines

If an abortion was happening in front of me, i'd stop it. I think people would be tempted to as much evil if it was made illegal. All kinds of stuff. So I just ignore the issue

I hate her abortion stance but there is a greater good

I think the only hope for the Democrats is for Biden to drop out before the election. Trump was ok for four years but four more years will bring the Hitler out of him. Biden would be as bad in other ways. Please Trump vs Harris

Thanks for the honest reply. I think Leonardo da Vinci would disagree with your thesis. And maybe dolphins lol. A math teacher of mine wrote a paper saying that angels naturally think with calculus, while humans have to learn it. Don't underestimate the gods either. Enough said. I hope I didn't disrail your conversation

I saved a link to my email on Einstein, GR, SR, and Zeno. The link doesn't work anymore. No!! I wanted to learn about science's perspective on how logic applies to reality

Thank you

1) are you an empiricist like Locke?

2) isn't the working energy in the human intellect what this thread is about

3) are you talking about just humans? Could dolphins have pure creative imagination?

The

I think it was John Searle who asked if a software program was doing addition or "quaddition". He was trying to argue against the emergence of reason from pure matter, but I think the argument works against him. You can fill in the blanks. We don't know what AI could do

Maybe he wanted too be

I've read the Phenomenology of Mind (or translated Spirit) twice. He gets tired and falls into holes. The mazes he then makes are amazing but he lost his concentration because he was not a genius.

Your posts are neat but unnecessarily convoluted. For Hegel, the positive stays, the negative moves. That's how the dialectic worked. I think he was brilliant like Aquinas, but not a genius like Einstein or Hawking

Hegel is a way to learn about philosopher. He is not the be all or end all. If you had read, in a poetical mood, a poem that said "time is a fragmation of time" you might think it was true. So that would be a "negative", meaning movement in Hegels mind

Nice. I recently put down Being and Time in order to read the lesser Logic. Three fourths thru and loving it. Someone recommended Peirce to me instead of Hegel. He does seem to be a serious thinker. Too bad he didn't write an actual book

As a teenager i read the section on Reason in the 1960's new Catholic Encyclopedia. It said animals ( who "do not have reason") can understand how to stack boxes in order to reach something. But only reason (a higher speculative faculty) can make a car where the relation between gas and motion is not empirically obvious. I don't find this a refutation of the OP. Just an interesting note

The British empiricist would applaud you. Most scientists would say "your not in the business" . Scientists, to explain further, often don't like philosophy because it tries to categories their processes of thought. I like philosophy though and I do that all the time.

Have you read either of Hegel's Logics? When I first got on this forum there was a thread about whether he was even a true philosopher. I wonder that about analytic philosphers. I guess sometimes they are interesting. There is a video on YouTube on Ayer, language, and truth that is tempting me. But ye, Hegel :)

I think purpose in the world is in the eye of the beholder; purpose in ourselves we must strive for. Hume would agree

Zeno' idea (basically it was one idea, which btw didn't necessarily lead to the One I don't think) was so profound that I feel people usually don't get it. Many say it's just a spoof, and that's it's been solved. I thinks is solved in a sense by dividing numerical infinite by a mathematical formulation of finitude (the finite). Yes, this intuitively makes sense to me. Objects seem to be that, but sometimes I still point at an object (like my desk) and say "how is it possible that I can divide that endlessly!"

Descartes specifically said in his Replies attached to the Meditations that he doubted simply to find unshakable truth

Maybe the universe is really one infinitesimal, a land before time. B Theory, GR, ect.

The OP tried to cram the teleological argument into the cosmological argument to form one argument. They are not necessarily connected. And he said the world has to be the way it is yet he thinks God could have created different. What a waste of a thread imo

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Like the proverbial donkey between two stacks of hay. Ye, i don't know. We aren't donkeys

Shouldn't you guys be talking to the moderators instead of creating threads?