ask a question

recent responses

all topics

info

⚲

Mathematics
Science

How do we account for the weird coincidence of math and science (e.g., physics)?

Given that mathematics is a body of universal and necessary truths, how could science (or anything else for that matter) not coincide with it? If the physical world was to violate the principles of mathematics, now that would be weird.
Religion

Did teleological arguments give us reasonable grounds to believe in a Creator before Darwin?

I'd certainly agree that the Dialogues concerning Natural Religion ought to be the starting point. I sha'n't try to summarise Hume's arguments here, for he could surely express them far better than I could myself: the full text is freely available online, with only the most elementary of searches. In my opinion, this book constitutes one of the most powerful philosophical polemics ever written on any issue at all, and it really does need to be read by everyone who has any interest in the issue of intelligent design, both those who support it and those who oppose it. And yet my impression is that pitifully few on either side have ever really looked at it at all. The proponents of intelligent design so often portray Darwin as the great enemy, to be refuted at all costs; but, equally, its opponents portray Darwin as the prime source of salvation against what they regard as creationist mumbo-jumbo. But Darwin's work only ever touched on a tiny aspect of the universe, namely the living organisms...
Mind

Are humans capable of imagining things, that are not based on other things they've already seen, or a combination of things they have already seen? For instance if I ask a kid to imagine a new animal (there I'm already using things I know 'animal'), he/she will most likely come up with something like a elephant feeted, giraffe necked, winged, crocodile or somewhere in that fashion. Now of course some people are more creative, but when you look at e.g. art, again what you get are the elephants with long feet, crazily constructed houses, people in all kinds of strange and surreal forms. But in the end it always seems completely based on things we've perceived in the past. What is your view on this, are humans capable of coming up with something 'new'? This raises the question, what do you consider 'new' (not based on things we've seen/heard/perceived in any way before)? This also draws me to the question if there is knowledge which is not acquired by learning? I hope some of you are interested in answering...

Descartes ponders this sort of thing in the course of the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy . He speculates about whether everything he has taken himself to be really experiencing might actually just be a figment within a dream; and he initially decides that, yes, it could be. But then, on further reflection, he notices that this only seems to be true of composite things. The basic elements out of which these things are constructed within the dream, he feels, will still need to have been derived from prior experiences. He makes the same observation that you made: "For even when painters try to create sirens and satyrs with the most extraordinary bodies, they cannot give them natures which are new in all respects; they simply jumble up the limbs of different animals." But then he goes a step further than this: "Or perhaps if they manage to think up something so new that nothing remotely similar has ever been seen before -- something which is therefore completely fictitious and unreal -- at...

Pages