No intuition is not really procedural, although it has some things in common with it. Certainly when you are really good at something through long practise, you have intuitive skills that make what you are doing seeem a bit magical to a beginner. But I also think intuition comes from unconscious mental processes and from harnessing all your being, not just your thinking mind, to an act or a problem.

As said above, people look for different things in philosophy. I have never been interested in empiricism. My feeling about empiricism is that its basic orientation is the defence of normality. Whether it started off that way, I don't know, but nowadays, it is the default position for the modern person. 'This existence is the only reality, I only believe what you can show me, philosophy is about sound reasoning', and so on. All well and good, it brings many benefits and is good in many respects, but it is not spiritually sustaining as far as I am concerned. But - each to his/her own, I am certainly not out to persuade or convert, and certainly one of the great benefits of modernity is the freedom to pursue any of these things, or none, and that is a great freedom indeed.

On a less personal note, however, and in keeping with the theme, I think the rejection of all things spiritual in Western philosophy is why Eastern philosophy is so popular all over the Western world As I have said before, I believe western philosophy has abandoned its mission (with honorable exceptions, of which I suspect Ortega is one, but need to do more reading on him).

No intuition is not really procedural, although it has some things in common with it. Certainly when you are really good at something through long practise, you have intuitive skills that make what you are doing seeem a bit magical to a beginner. But I also think intuition comes from unconscious mental processes and from harnessing all your being, not just your thinking mind, to an act or a problem.

As said above, people look for different things in philosophy. I have never been interested in empiricism. My feeling about empiricism is that its basic orientation is the defence of normality. Whether it started off that way, I don't know, but nowadays, it is the default position for the modern person.

On a less personal note, however, and in keeping with the theme, I think the rejection of all things spiritual in Western philosophy is why Eastern philosophy is so popular all over the Western world

As I have said before, I believe western philosophy has abandoned its mission

I think the retreat into 'scientism', into only dealing with things that can be shown in the lab, really does fall short of what philosophy ought to be. I feel it really ought to make you ask questions about who you are and what your life is really about, and so on.

And maybe the source of your gloom IS the very society we are in and the type of outlook - I dare not call it philosophy - it encourages.

Socrates was cheerful to the end, and his end was not that great. Seriously, though, thankyou for you candour, I respect that.

One should feel something Kennethamy no matter what.

Alright I too am being polemical. Of course Western Philosophy is splintered into a million fragments now and besides the postmodernists distrust all grand narratives. But insofar as 'wisdom' really stood for something, and the Greeks had some common notion of what that was, and there was a tradition in which it was passed down, then yes: I think there was a mission. I am not highly schooled in the whole tradition, but I feel that Socrates' attitude, the kind of questions he asked, and the kind of man he was, is still relevant today and is not currently very well represented in the tradition he helped to spawn. I think the retreat into 'scientism', into only dealing with things that can be shown in the lab, really does fall short of what philosophy ought to be. I feel it really ought to make you ask questions about who you are and what your life is really about, and so on. And frankly I don't see much of that in Western philosophy any more.

So - yes.

Since metaphysics is a branch of philosophy, metaphysics of science is a branch of philosophy of science. You also have an ethics of science, an epistemology of science, etc. However, I recall that Ortega himself was disdainful of using the expression "philosophy of . . .". I'll check out his reasons and let you know what they were.

We will now ask ourselves, What is the content of Mr. Toynbee's book; what is it all about? The title, A Study of History, seems a bit equivocal. Does this mean that Toynbee proposes to write history in a different form from the one it has taken up to now? To some extent, for what he does is to start from the history books, from the science of history as such, and as it has been understood, in order to produce other effects and elaborations. What he does, then, is to take for granted historic science in its present form, and subject it to a secondary treatment in order to see to whether, in that enormous chaos which is a historic happening, one cannot glimpse rhythms, structures, laws, regularities which allow one to arrive at a clear picture of the shapes and features of the historic process. Therefore, it [the book] treats of what, thirty years ago [1918], was called the "philosophy of history."

. How many people think of the sun as a solid object that happens to radiate light, instead of what it (currently) is, a sustained nuclear reaction?

I find what you say here curious. What do you mean, "what [the Sun] currently is". Do you think there has been some astronomical change (or will be a change) in what the Sun is?

The Sun was formed about 4.57 billion years ago when a hydrogen molecular cloud collapsed. Solar formation is dated in two ways: the Sun's current main sequence age, determined using computer models of stellar evolution and nucleocosmochronology, is thought to be about 4.57 billion years. This is in close accord with the radiometric date of the oldest Solar System material, at 4.567 billion years ago.
The Sun is about halfway through its main-sequence evolution, during which nuclear fusion reactions in its core fuse hydrogen into helium. Each second, more than 4 million tonnes of matter are converted into energy within the Sun's core, producing neutrinos and solar radiation; at this rate, the Sun will have so far converted around 100 Earth-masses of matter into energy. The Sun will spend a total of approximately 10 billion years as a main sequence star.
The Sun does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova. Instead, in about 5 billion years, it will enter a red giant phase, its outer layers expanding as the hydrogen fuel in the core is consumed and the core contracts and heats up. Helium fusion will begin when the core temperature reaches around 100 million kelvins and will produce carbon, entering the asymptotic giant branch phase.
Earth's fate is precarious. As a red giant, the Sun will have a maximum radius beyond the Earth's current orbit, 1 AUm), 250 times the present radius of the Sun. However, by the time it is an asymptotic giant branch star, the Sun will have lost roughly 30% of its present mass due to a stellar wind, so the orbits of the planets will move outward. If it were only for this, Earth would probably be spared, but new research suggests that Earth will be swallowed by the Sun owing to tidal interactions. Even if Earth would escape incineration in the Sun, still all its water will be boiled away and most of its atmosphere would escape into space. In fact, even during its current life in the main sequence, the Sun is gradually becoming more luminous (about 10% every 1 billion years), and its surface temperature is slowly rising. The Sun used to be fainter in the past, which is possibly the reason why life on Earth has only existed for about 1 billion years on land. The increase in solar temperatures is such that already in about a billion years, the surface of the Earth will become too hot for liquid water to exist, ending all terrestrial life.
Following the red giant phase, intense thermal pulsations will cause the Sun to throw off its outer layers, forming a planetary nebula. The only object that will remain after the outer layers are ejected is the extremely hot stellar core, which will slowly cool and fade as a white dwarf over many billions of years. This stellar evolution scenario is typical of low- to medium-mass stars.

Haven't you heard tje latest?



Sourcr: Wikipedia

But Socrates is very well represented by the analytic tradition. His method of philosophizing was philosophical analysis.

'Scientific truth', writes Ortega, 'is characterised by is exactness and the certainty of its predictions. But these admirable qualities are contrived by science at the cost of the remaining on the plane of secondary problems, leaving intact the ultimate and decisive questions. Of this renunciation it makes its essential virtue, and for it, if for nought else, it deserves praise. Yet science is but a small part of the human mind and organism. Where it stops, man does not stop'. Jose Ortega a Gasset, History as a System, page 1

Indeed it was - but it was analysis in the first person. He was after all acclaimed as the 'wisest man in all of Greece' afer confessed to 'knowing nothing'. The Oracle of Delphi, by which this honour was bestowed, was inscribed with the motto: 'Man, know thyself'. This is not a matter of 'objective analysis'. It requires something much more intimate and immediate, and something which by and large the scientific and empirical thinkers are always at pains to deny by instead directing all the attention to external data, verifiable facts about measurable phenomena, and denying the centrality of the human person to whom all of this occurs.