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Everything on philosophy related to Maier files series. Posts and Thoughts examining existence, change, properties, space, time, causality, and possibility.

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Brains in Vats Paradox

Penfield’s classic brain experiments of the 1930s inspired a certain famous riddle, long since dubbed “brains in vats” by philosophy students. It goes like this: You think you’re sitting there reading this post. Actually, you could be a disembodied brain in a laboratory somewhere, soaking in a vat of nutrients. Electrodes are attached to the brain. And a mad scientist feeds it with a stream of electrical impulses that exactly simulates the experience of reading...

A secret message to Goethe

Goethe had quite an important influence on Otto Maier. Goethe, a poet and at the same time a scholar, who seemed to offer the model of an approach to nature that was both scientific and aesthetic. Let’s take a look at a peculiar dedicatory page in a published book of Humboldt and Bonpland. From July 16, 1799, to March 7, 1804, the German scholar Alexander von Humboldt, together with the french botanist Bonpland, had embarked...

The problem of consciousness

The problem of consciousness, alternatively put, is the problem of finding out how mental phenomena, such as thoughts and feelings, are related to physical occurrences in brains. This way of stating the problem assumes that some such relation exists, an assumption not always made in the history of philosophy. Since Descartes the debate has become more sophisticated, and in our own time the use of scanning devices to monitor living brain activity has enormously advanced...

The Twelve Knights

  In almost all myths all over the world the same theme reoccurs. The twelve knights, twelve tribes, twelve heroes etc. In his last and longest dialogue (Laws), Plato teaches: There are twelve feasts to the twelve Gods who give their names to the twelve tribes. Also in early christianity, the image of twelve disciples with the Godman figure at their center echoes the twelve constellations which revolve in the heavens around the pole star. Are...

Good? — by what standard? by Ayn Rand

John Galt, in Atlas Shrugged: “Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code of morality, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned man, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. … You went on crying that your code...
Kiss Klimt

The paradox of the love mystery

The writer Aventinus stated that the Minne and the Minnesingers did not have anything to do with love and constant courting. That’s not entirely true. There are many enigmas and paradoxes concerning the Troubadour movement and their theme “LOVE” in the middle ages. They propagated the quest for selfhood, the birth of the individual. And the individual’s love is discriminative, personal and specific. You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created...
Aletheia

Aletheia is truth or disclosure in philosophy

Aletheia, the Greek word for truth, typically stands for the correctness of a thought, perception, or assertion, and, in fact, as early as Homer, a cognate of correctness, homoiosis, served as a synonym for it. According to Heidegger, this construal of aletheia derives from its more basic meaning as un-hiddenness, where the privative prefix ‘un-’ apes the corresponding privative Greek prefix ‘a-’ in ‘a-letheia’ and ‘letheia’ derives from words for the hidden or forgotten. For...

When fiction becomes reality, Black Lodges

In the occult scene of the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries, a black lodge was a term for occult orders and secret societies dedicated to the study and routine of evil magick. Many of the occult authors of this period treat the presence and activities of the Black Lodges as a matter of common knowledge. They discuss in detail the contrasts between the genuine way of occult initiation and the corrupt way. Black Lodges...
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