Instead of a first cause as a substance, I believe in the world as an entity that had a first motion. A first motion results in the next and so on, an eternal free fall of causality

The atom now has been found through experimentation, thru the senses. Empiricism comes in different forms. Most agree that taste is in the tongue and not in the apple. So some will say tasting gives knowledge, and others not. I don't see how reason can prove something external to the universe since we are equipped to understand while within the universe

We can't smell, taste, hear, or touch an atom so it's hard to say what it is in itself. We would have to be much smaller ourselves to know.

Ideally or the physical? That question is what philosophy is all about

I agree that the physical field is real and that our imagery of quantum fields have no relation to what they look like to "God". A real field or meadow IS a quantum field that is not isolated by science. What an isolated atom looks like I have no idea

Thanks for your thoughts. I've heard some Aristotelians say only form exists, others that only organic things have forms, and others that everything has form and prime matter. Descartes rejected the idea of two principles in things and said extension of substance alone was what objects are. So it gets rather confusing, especially when it gets to Hegel's logic and stuff, which I just finished reading. By what criteria do we say universals, the general, and prime matter, the specific, compose an object and which objects at that? Does a pond of water have one form as it oozes it many crevices? Where does the form come from when a leaf falls from a tree and is now a new unit? And then there is the ship of Theseus. Ideas of metaphysics, ohh they can be thorny..

I don't see cosmology as going from potential to actual as philosophers like Tim Freke expound, nor from actual to potential in an Aristotelian sense. I think there is what is actual and we sense it and yes we understand it's potentials. But I was trying to show that people go to far with the potency-actuality distinction. They might say "matter has potential so it is below what is non-material because that is completely actual". Such a line of argument is ungrounded but it was used by Aristotle. I don't see what philosophy can say about matter that physics can't

I see pantheism as a fatuation with matter. The famous Jesuit Fr. Teilhard cried as a child when he discovered that metal rusted. Some say he was a modern Spinoza. Aside from his talk of Christian themes, his book The Phenomena of Man was a great read although it is very dated now. As for evil in the context of pantheism, I would point out that it's just a privation. Ugliness is in the sight of the beholder and moral crime is the absence of God. Our consciousness itself might be a nothing in a way, although it is attached to the nervous system. Reincarnation is not a soul going to a new body but a new body experiences the same stream of intensity it use to have in another body. All hope of an afterlife is bound to having a new body because the one you have perishes. Didn't Sartre himself say we a nihilations of the one being?

To my mind material we sense with our five external senses is prior to any sense in which it can change. Brains, hands, beds are all real tangible things. QM has brought the idea of potential existence back to the forefront but a thing has to be actual in order to be able to change. The potentiality comes from the actuality, not the other way around.

Well quantum physicists don't really know what subatomic particles are but only what they do. Imo

Isn't "energy" material in principle?

Subjective ideas are hard to communicate. I'm not saying change doesn't happen but that it is not an object. Heidegger speaks in his book on Metaphysics about nothing nihlating itself. I assume by nothing he means potentiality. The idea of potentiality was talked of as prime matter or contingency (although forms were contingent too in another way) by old philosophers. What seems correct to me thougj is that this chair, this bowl, this spoon is a coherent piece of actualization and that it is fully itself. At a specific time it becomes something else and might be something else every second. But I don't see were potentiality comes in. It's like saying change is an object

It seems to me metaphysical states of matter don't exist. The physical properties of actuality of extension in substantial form is what things are. Change is not a thing. It's what we think of as happening between states of pure actuality.

Potentiality and contingency are 1) not different 2) not properties of matter

Maybe because who the holy spirit is is confusing. The son is said to be wisdom and the holy spirit love. Yet the father creates both and the spirit is the love between the father and son if you accept the filoque. But the spirit is not their child because the relationship is father to son and from there father and son to spirit. It doesn't mirror a human family. Whether the holy spirit is a person was debated in early Christianity with some saying there are just the father and son in God. Every position imaginable on the subject has been proposed and debated by someone in history. The Syrian Christians sometimes call the holy spirit a mother and yet she does not create the son with the father

Christianity promotes a unique psychology in people. For women Jesus is the perfect protector they won't find in the real world. He is an ideal of their make believe. For males Jesus is an elder brother whom they united with in a marriage. "Don't you know the Church is the bride of Christ?" The men of Christianity are the substance of the Church, being Jesus to the women. Last supper communion is how the men consummate their union by swallowing Jesus's body into their own "so they may be one" (as in "one flesh"). Just as the Bible says the Jews are the head of the Gentiles, it says man is the head of woman. Christian humility in Christian men is their pride in being submissive to Jesus as head of their body. They have literally created an ideal and separated it from themselves in order to be submissive and assertive in different respects. I find the whole think rather strange...

Typo. It should say "there"

"Human speech was originally poetic. As Vico wrote, 'Poetry is the primary activity of the human mind. Man before he had arrived at the state of forming universals forms imaginary ideas, before he can articulate, he sings, before speaking in prose, he speaks in verse, before using technical terms, he uses metaphor.' It is difficult for modern man with his prosaic mode to realize that poetry is more natural to man than prose, and yet all the evidence of history shows it. The further we go back in time the more we come not on prose but on poetry." Bede Griffith

Heidegger always had a poetic touch but he knew what he wrote

Is anything inherently obscure? Language is always for a mind. If the mind of the writer knows what he means then how is it inherently obscure?

Zoarastrianism might have been the foundation of what became Pauline doctrine on the separation between the Absolute and the world. These notions were codified by Christian baptism of the works of Aristotle

I would also add that Spinoza said God had no will but only intellect. Intellect and will cannot be separated though, so our wills are God's will and the divine "beyond" is the ideas in the mind of God (aka, the laws of nature and reason)

In that thread you say Spinoza is not a pantheist, a panentheist, nor a theist. Why are you cutting such distinctions so this? Spinoza did not want to be *called* a pantheist because he would be executed for that. Yet he says all flows from God instead of God popping the world out of nothing. It makes much more sense to simply put all religious thought into the theist camp (dieties separate) and the immanent group on the other side. Occam's razor is a better way to slice it

If something comes out of God that is God because he has no parts but is instead a full unity. Pantheism doesn't deny that you can talk to God because all is one divine nature with many persons in it. Communication happens in pantheism even though there is a complete non-duality. I don't see a third position besides duality of creator to creature vs immanent union

I feel like panentheism (Leibniz, the Hare Krisha religion, ect.) is not different from pantheism (Spinoza, ect). Sometimes, or perhaps often, fine distinctions are really too fine and we should leave the proverbial hair alone and see it's beauty instead of dividing it further too infinity. People seem to fall into the camp of either pantheism or theism. Other positions seem to be unstable to me (even deism leaves one unsatisfied in the end)

Will for Schopenhauer was perfect pure autonomy and this is important in considering it's relation to phenomenology. I would be interested in knowing whether Hursserl read Schopenhauer directly although I feel like he wanted to start philosophy anew instead of just following the previous thinkers. "Intention" to me means understanding and will working together to ponder what phenomena means to our direct experience of it

Hegel thought the thing in itself was Absolute Knowledge, a kind of Platonic ideal. Schopenhauer loved Plato too but his thing in itself was Will instead of knowledge. They both thought matter was real but was subsumed by a greater mental form (kinda like Plato). Phenomenology to me seems much less Platonic than these thinkers and I think it's because of the influence of Nietschze

There is no first motion in an eternal universe and so no second but every point in it is in bounded by eternity and the whole system is eternal

Time is continuous in that it is infinitely divisible. This is so because time measures motion which is measured by distance. A point of time has no length but separates chunks of time.. All motion travels infinite time in one respect but the argument of the OP is that there is too much time in (past) eternity for it to have reach the Big Bang. However I think it's obvious eternal time has enough time to reach now or any past point by the mere fact that it is eternal. The wheel of time is the supreme ruler of the world

It seems to me you are saying "anatman". And again Buddhism enters the conversation!

For us, subjectively speaking, the self, understood as the experiencer (and the doer) is the basis of "all this". Without experiencers the world would not appear at all. We can take a more detached scientific perspective and say the world is more basic since the self is born into a pre-existing world. These are two imaginable perspectives; how do we decide between them? Do we need to claim that one or the other is the "true" perspective? Or should we not deploy whichever perspective is the more useful for the task at hand? — Janus

I just finished rereading for the 20th time the first three chapters of Hegel's Phenomenology (skipping over the Preface and Introduction). I think they are very important for philosophy. The rest of Hegel is just commentary on this. Its a question of the paradox of perception. The world, on say the left side, is how we perceive it. We manipulate reality because we know it as other, are a part of it, and have intellect. On the other hand, we construct reality and make it what it is. We bring waves to particles, create colors and sounds and smalls in existence, and form the material of the world into the structure of our own personal worlds. So it is really both ways: the world creates us and we create the world. At least, that's my opinion from my Hegel studies.

For Kant, a priori synthetic judgments are about the non-empirical world. So it matters to ask if the self is non-empirical (Descartes) or not. When we examine the world, there is debate among German idealists and latter generations if and when we use posterior analytic judgments or posterior synthetic judgments. Where the self falls in all this is what phenomenology is about. My 2 cents

So you're saying through archetypes?

I heard two sayings recently:

"Everything is so relative that it becomes absolute"

"If the world is God, then the laws of science of science are his mind"

Dennett doesn't like God and he is putting the horse behind the cart when he says (or seems to say) that philosophy is physiology

Husserls observation that to experience someone else's qualia would be to become that person is pure philosophy and not psychology. Dennett is a philosopher but he seems to me to want to control others philosophical musings and iron them out so that little if any philosophy of being remains. Heidelberg too speaks of man as time. Surely that is something psychology and brain science can't get it's hands on, right?

I read the article and it seems to me Dennett gets close to Wittgenstein's philosophy. Like I said, he can't get away from philosophy of all kinds

Does phenomenology necessarily lead to existentialist?

Dennets position is still philosophy. One can only reject philosophy with philosophy as long as one is speculating about the core of life

What is the or a main argument in favor of phenomenology?

Objective truth can interfere with subjective truth when the latter is faith. Does it matter if all is material when faith can lead to states that don't seem physical? Does phenomenology imply faith?

I read your article. So Jews would say the Trinity was pagan and although there is 3 in God there is not three persons? Is this how modern Jews see it?

7 was also a special number they say