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I think vBulletin should give extra points for starting a thread that engenders a public conversion. The rest of us can just log off now.

I apologize for the misreading concerning Anscombe/Lewis. Since you used the phrase "intelligent Christian" in the sentence following your criticism of Anscombe, it was easy to read it as referring to her, but the last sentence of your paragraph does make it clear that you're talking about...

I'm aware of that, but it seems to me that you've been equivocating on the connotations of the term "transcendental"--indeed, milking it for all it's worth. For you, "preconditions of intelligibility" seems to involve the superlunary sphere. Not saying there weren't any precursors in any way...

Based on years of reading and thinking, it is obvious to me. I'll concede that it may not seem obvious to everyone. I have noticed that I never regret not getting involved in an internet argument. That would be welcome. That, to me, is a key question, and far more relevant than rhetorical...

I've been following the discussion. Indeed, at one point you were out saying things like this: And then, a number of posts later, you arrived at this: Apparently your overweening confidence in this claim about atheism (a term which you clearly state that you swapped in for materialism and...

The question in the title of this thread--Is science materialistic?--seems to have morphed into Are atheists pwned by transcendental idealism? A less interesting question, to which the answer is obviously No.

I know more about Kant than Hegel, but I think Hegel's metaphysical historicism (which has inspired fascisms of both the right and the left) follows at least in some ways from his dialectics. I won't say that his dialectics is of no interest or value, but applying it as a template to history is...

I don't judge German idealism as harshly as George Santayana did (I think it had a fruitful influence in some ways on later philosophers and littérateurs), but this passage from Santayana perfectly describes some of the posts in this thread: "During more than twenty years, while I taught...

Mr Veech: You seem to want to discuss morality as if consideration of the evolution of human nature is irrelevant, or "adds nothing substantial to the discussion," as you put it. Pardon me but I find this very funny, in a blackly hysterical way. Re the strawman point: I always make the mistake...

I don't know if evolution provides a sufficient explanation of why we are entitled to label a specific act as "good." I really don't. My point was only that your "thought experiment" was directed at a strawman version of evolutionary psychology. Why the ridiculous hyperbole? I don't think...

If you're going to argue against evolutionary psychology, fine, but you should at least argue against what evolutionary psychologists actually theorize rather than a strawman caricature. This is just a pop science article, but it might help...

I had trouble editing my post last night. After editing and clicking "Save," I just got a spinning circle. I got out of that screen and tried again and chose "Go Advanced" to edit, and then I was able to save the edit successfully.

I haven't read Jerry Fodor, but I think he is an example of a philosophical materialist who wrote extensively about consciousness in a non-reductive manner. Daniel Dennett strongly disagreed with Fodor's approach. Fodor is considered a cognitive scientist as well as a philosopher, and there are...

Beginning with his 1993 book Problems of Philosophy: Limits of Inquiry, Colin McGinn developed a position he calls "transcendental naturalism." His position is more widely known as mysterianism. Basically, he thinks that there is a naturalistic explanation for consciousness, but that the human...

I don't think that critiquing the philosophical concepts of materialism and physicalism entails critiquing the methodologies or the findings of the sciences themselves. The methods of the sciences work, obviously. It's well-known that many of the historical originators of those methods weren't...

Qcrisp, I think you might find this paper to be of great interest: "Zero-Person and the Psyche," by Graham Harman. http://dar.aucegypt.edu/bitstream/handle/10526/3384/Zeroperson.pdf?sequence=5 And much, much more. It's a 30-page paper exploding with insights on every page.