Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Knight of faith ...

... The Fear and Trembling of a Philosopher. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The author explains that Kierkegaard shows that the only objective truth the person may know “as actual” is his own reality, that “the actuality of those other realities that is believed” is described by Kierkegaard as an “‘approximative’ type of knowledge.” ... “But note,” Evans writes, “that the recognition of the ‘subjective’ grounds of the belief in no way entails that the content of the belief must be subjective.”


This is where all these brain studies go awry: Knowing what goes on in the brain in response to stimuli doesn't tell you much about the nature of the stimuli themselves. It certainly doesn't give you any reason to dismiss either the stimuli or the manner in which the brain presents them to us. If you're going to take the brain's representation of "nature" on faith, it seems to me you have to take those of its notions as "supernatural" on faith as well.

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