Category: philosophy

  • How Descartes died

    Quote from John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century p. 511-512 “The most famous adage of modern philosophy, perhaps of all philosophy, comes from Descartes: ‘Cogito ergo sum’, ‘I think therefore I am’. There is a tale told – I…

  • Secular Counterpart of Religious Intolerance

    Quote from John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century p. 192 “Nor should we forget the late-modern inverse secular counterpart of religious intolerance of freedom of the intellect such as we witnessed, for example, in the ill-fated experiment of the…

  • Heritage of the Byzantium

    Quotes from John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century p. 175-176 “A thousand years would pass before the civilization which had Constantinople for its imperial center would be vanquished by Islamic peoples. The theological and religious heritage of Byzantium at…

  • Scotus Erigena: Martyr to philosophy

    Quotes from John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century p. 137 “There is a tale, alleged by William of Malmesbury (C. 1095/6-1143), that Scotus Erigena, ‘a man of clear understanding and amazing eloquence’, went to England in his later years,…

  • The Boundary of Time

    A quote from John Deely, Four Ages of Understanding: The First Postmodern Survey of Philosophy from Ancient Times to the Turn of the Twenty-First Century “The present, then, as I am defining it here, is the exclusive preserve of the living. The boundary of time is then the separation of no longer living from the…

  • Peirce on existence and reality

    In Cornelis de Waal, Peirce: A Guide for the Perplexed, it was written that Peirce has distinguished between real and existing. On biosemiotics list, Gary Richmond has recommended Kelly Parker’s, The Continuity of Peirce’s Thought on this subject. He has also quoted Peirce: “[. . .] I call your attention to the fact that reality…

  • The Game of Life as Metaphysics

    My emails to biosemiotics list (Conformons as the sound of cell). 13.05.2013 09:42 Not sufficient in this respect just means that one does not have enough computing power to employ the Theory-Of-Everything directly. You should read The Grand Design: “Though we feel that we can choose what we do, our understanding of the molecular basis…

  • Tim Maudlin on Metaphysics

    Quotes from Tim Maudlin, The Metaphysics Within Physics p. 78 “Kant, for example, maintained that metaphysics must be a body of necessary truths, and that necessary truths must be a priori, so metaphysical claims could not be justified by experience.” p. 78 “The Kantian strains survives yet in the notion that the proper object of…