Mar 17, 2025 04:44 PM
(This post was last modified: Mar 17, 2025 05:00 PM by C C.)
Ghosts among the philosophers
https://aeon.co/essays/when-psychical-re...-cambridge
EXCERPTS: Why did Turing feel the need to talk about telepathy? Why did he consider extrasensory perception a serious objection to his thought experiment? And what about his peculiar mention of ghosts? [...] Cambridge was one of the birthplaces of analytic philosophy, which prides itself on dispensing with speculative metaphysics, and putting a heavy emphasis on scientific precision and empiricism. But ‘spooky’ topics like telepathy, after-death survival and ghosts permeated the philosophical ecosystem in Cambridge and beyond long into the 1960s. It pushed many of the thinkers interested in it towards new and creative explorations of the nature of time, matter and language... (MORE - details)
Religious language is not scientific language
https://iai.tv/articles/wittgenstein-vs-..._auid=2020
INTRO: Critics of religion like Richard Dawkins often depict religion as a second-rate science. According to Dawkins, God is a “hypothesis” which is outcompeted by rival scientific explanations. But might this conception of religion be radically mistaken? In this article, philosopher John Cottingham draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language to argue that any understanding and evaluation of religious discourse must be sensitive to the form of life in which it is embedded. As such, religious claims are not defective scientific claims, but rather entirely distinct ways of seeing the world... (MORE - details)
https://aeon.co/essays/when-psychical-re...-cambridge
EXCERPTS: Why did Turing feel the need to talk about telepathy? Why did he consider extrasensory perception a serious objection to his thought experiment? And what about his peculiar mention of ghosts? [...] Cambridge was one of the birthplaces of analytic philosophy, which prides itself on dispensing with speculative metaphysics, and putting a heavy emphasis on scientific precision and empiricism. But ‘spooky’ topics like telepathy, after-death survival and ghosts permeated the philosophical ecosystem in Cambridge and beyond long into the 1960s. It pushed many of the thinkers interested in it towards new and creative explorations of the nature of time, matter and language... (MORE - details)
Religious language is not scientific language
https://iai.tv/articles/wittgenstein-vs-..._auid=2020
INTRO: Critics of religion like Richard Dawkins often depict religion as a second-rate science. According to Dawkins, God is a “hypothesis” which is outcompeted by rival scientific explanations. But might this conception of religion be radically mistaken? In this article, philosopher John Cottingham draws on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language to argue that any understanding and evaluation of religious discourse must be sensitive to the form of life in which it is embedded. As such, religious claims are not defective scientific claims, but rather entirely distinct ways of seeing the world... (MORE - details)
