There is a difference between being materialistic and being a materialist. If you are materialistic, you value material things above non-material things. By materialism I don’t mean the valuing of material things. What I mean is the view that there is nothing that exists that is immaterial. A material thing is some entity which is possible to experience. Some material things are so small you can’t see them, but it would be possible to experience them if one’s senses were adequate or if the thing in question was bigger. Of course, if you are a materialist, then you will very likely be materialistic. That’s all there is, after all. What…
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After Naturalism…
Naturalism has peeked. And when it has collapsed something else will take its place. The question is: What? Naturalism is a combination of a method and an assumption. Methodologically, naturalism is the attempt to understand the world through the natural sciences. The assumption, which, theoretically at least, can be overturned at any moment, is that all that exists is material (whether these two are happy bedfellows is a discussion better left for another day). I say that this assumption can be overturned at any moment because natural sciences don’t claim to have all data at their finger tips. Fairies could be found at the bottom of an English garden and…
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A Worldview on the Brink
Thomas Nagel argues that if you are committed to a reductive materialism/physicalism and a darwinistic historical narrative you have a problem – consciousness. A darwinist is one who holds to the evolutionary story. It is a description of history that attempts to explain how we have emerged to be rational, moral, conscious human beings through natural selection and laws of nature. A materialist holds to a set of presuppositions that imply that reality is fundamentally reducible to what is physical. Nagel says that darwinistic materialists are committed to a set of presuppositions (a constitutive account) that is reductionary (all is physical) and a story (a historical account) that is emergent (all that…
- 9/11, Conversion, Gnosticism, Jeffrey Satinover, Knowledge, Marxism, Materialism, Slavoj Žižek, Speaking of Terror Part 4, Terror
Speaking of Terror – Part IV
How can we know what is real? In the wake of 9/11 many philosophers offered interpretations of the event from their own perspective of reality. Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, claimed that 9/11 was an event which woke America up. America, he wrote, has been awakened, like Neo in The Matrix to, using the phrase Morpheus used, “the desert of the real.” Americans, Žižek argued, were, before 9/11, like Truman in the movie, The Truman Show1 – living in “the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise…in its very hyper-reality, in a way ireal, substances, deprived of the material inertia.”2 According to Žižek, the attacks on America burst the bubble of unreality and…