On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 3:15 AM, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com > wrote:
*>> I'd like to see Bruno actually quote some well known philosophers or >> scientist using the term.* > > > Materialism vs. Idealism is one of the oldest philosophical debates, Yes, and like all old philosophical debates philosophers have not moved one inch closer to a resolution of the problem in the last 2000 years, they just keep going around and around in circles. That's not to say gigantic progress in philosophy hasn't been made, its just that philosophy is no longer done by philosophers, its done by scientists and mathematicians. Newton, Gauss, Darwin, Maxwell, Cantor, Einstein, Hubble, Godel,Turing, Everett, and Watson and Crick advanced the field of philosophy enormously; Karl Popper did not. > *> The uber-mainstream wikipedia defines materialism as a belief in > that matter is primary.* >From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism#Overview : > <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism#Overview :> "To idealists, spirit or mind or the objects of mind (ideas) are primary, > and matter secondary. " It would seem to me that statement is about as un-controversial and non-profound as a statement can be. In this context "secondary" doesn't mean second rate, it just means there is a difference between nouns and verbs. “Stuff" is not the same as "doing stuff" and doing stuff is secondary because stuff obviously can't do anything if stuff doesn't exist. I'm not saying this is deep I'm just saying its true. And by the way, the number of times the phrase "primary matter" is mentioned in that article is exactly the same number you will find it mentioned in any modern physics journal. Zero. The reason the “primary matter" debate is never going to get anywhere is that philosophers write impassioned posts and even scholarly tomes about the existence or non-existence of "primary matter" but never once ask themselves what the hell the term is supposed to mean, and many don't even wonder what "matter" means. Leibniz invented the silly catch phrase but, as is customary whenever scientists put on their philosopher's hat, he was rather vague (and Bruno even more vague) about what "primary matter” means; and that's why specialists in the study of matter, physicists, have never found the idea useful. And “free will” is a idea that’s even worse, but of course that hasn’t stopped philosophers from generating a vast quantity of verbiage about that too. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
