Tag: Robin George Collingwood

  • 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…

  • On his sole responsibility

    A quote from Robin George Collingwood,  An Essay on Metaphysics (Revised Edition with an Introduction and additional material edited by Rex Martin). p. 294-295 “A man is said to act ‘on his own responsibility’ or ‘on his sole responsibility’ when (1) his knowledge or belief about the situation in not dependent on information or persuasion…

  • Every Event has a Cause as Metaphysics

    In his book An Essay on Metaphysics in Part IIIc Causation, Collingwood has considered what could mean that every event must have a cause. This could be interesting for a discussion on free will, as Collingwood shows that causation presupposes free will. In other words, if free will is to be abandoned, then causation must…

  • God Exists as Metaphysical Proposition

    From Robin George Collingwood,  An Essay on Metaphysics Chapter XVIII “The Proposition ‘God Exists’” p. 185. “In the last chapter but one I had occasion to comment on the way in which a ‘logical positivist’, wishing to recommend the doctrine that ‘metaphysical propositions’ not being verifiable by appeal to observed fact are pseudo-propositions and meaningless,…

  • Neuroscience as Science of Thought?

    A text written while reading a discussion on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/groups/rks.consciousness/10151012295220115/ Nowadays one can often hear that neuroscience can explain everything about a human being. The external physical world interacts with human sensory systems, natural neural nets in the brain get excited and this in turn causes excitation of muscles. Modern science has found nothing else…

  • Free Will and Mathematics

    Alekandr Lokshin has a book Free Will and Mathematics (in Russian) http://publ.lib.ru/ARCHIVES/L/LOKSHIN_Aleksandr_Aleksandrovich/Lokshin_A.A._Svobodnaya_volya_i_matematika.(2012).pdf.zip and he has started a discussion on the everything list with an abstract of the book in English http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list/t/276f7dffa1c88b0a Alekandr Lokshin, 27.05.2012 20:51: Alexander A. Lokshin FREE WILL AND MATHEMATICS Moscow, MAKS-Press, 2012 , 40 pages (abstract) The general idea of the booklet…

  • Collingwood on Monotheism and Science

    Maarten Hoenen in his fifth lecture on Voraussetzung und Vorurteil http://www.podcasts.uni-freiburg.de/podcast_content?id_content=124 has mentioned that Collingwood once compared monotheism with polytheism in respect to influencing  science. According to Collingwood, the modern reductionism (Theory of Everything) is similar to monotheism where everything should be explained through God. I like this thought and below there are some results from my…

  • Absolute Presupposition

    In his lectures Was ist Philosophie? http://www.podcasts.uni-freiburg.de/podcast_content?id_content=80 Prof Hoenen has discussed R. G. Collingwood and his work Essay on Methaphysics. I like here a lot the term Absolute Presupposition. From Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/collingwood/ “From the mid-thirties onwards Collingwood’s work increasingly engaged in a dialogue with the newly emerging school of analytic philosophy. In An…