What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Give me that old time atheism

I explain why here (in another post that may be of more interest to philosophy of mind buffs than to others).

Comments (3)

Nice piece Mr Feser, if you please let's have a few more like it.
To me the mind/materialist debate is one of the trickier questions in philosophy. I suppose if come done I must I will tip toe into a substance dualist stance. The existence of extensive brain regions,parietal lobe, occipital lobe,somatosensory cortex, etc,presume a physical functioning of sense data or sense-contents as Ayer put it. This would in my extremely humble opinion hold true for intentionality as well.

The very question of consciousness at large appears inexplicable, at least in or down to it's fundamental operative functioning. So the mind-body thing may be only a sub-set of of a larger yet incomplete picture of how we think,[short hand for all brain/mind operations].

Your title does say it all, both for better times past and for the current crop of atheism crusaders. The less religion we have the more the dogs bark. Materialism is only a part of the problem, it is only a corrupt tributary flowing into a greater polluted river, a vulgarly aggressive modernity, degeneration, & ignorance being it's flotsam and jetsam.

“Aristotelians and Thomists regard sensation and imagination as entirely material processes, not immaterial ones. Hence even an outright identification of (and not just correlation between) the having of a perceptual experience or mental image and a certain neural event would be no evidence at all against the claim that the mind is immaterial. For the defining aspect of the mind is intellect, and intellect is irreducible to sensation, imagination, or indeed any other material process.”

Hello Dr. Feser,
An old quote from your post on mindreading. In your current post you assign qualia a dual immaterial action, namely taste, sound, color, odor as well as meaning. So from those two statements, because sensation appears to cover all of the first parts of the duality, that leaves the intellect and/or imagination to provide the meaning. In meaningful communication, imagination cannot be the only source, but I haven’t seen anything so far that completely rules out its input. In any event, the debate over immateriality strikes me like analyzing a shadow. Even if you assert its immateriality, it still has a material cause.

The post was good, but some pleasant distractions were also provided by commenters, such as this link to an account of A.J. Ayers' NDE: http://www.near-death.com/experiences/atheists01.html

I love his widow's assessment: "Freddie became so much nicer after he died."

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