While reading Leiter's Philosophy blog, I was just reminded that John Stuart Mill took the position that numbers and mathematics were empirically grounded, and could be known via our sensations of touch, smell, taste, sound and sight. Thus in his Utilitarian political philosophy he denied altogether the transcendent realm of Plato's Eternal ideas and forms, including mathematics and logic.
David Hume asserted that we ought to limit our public discourse only to that which is empirically real.
This is interesting right now, when religion is holding so much sway in our American politics and cultural discourse. For a long time I considered myself to be an empirical philosopher, and it is only since my husband's death, and the reading of the binary mind theory and quantum philosophy of British authors
Anthony Peake and
Karl L Le Marcs that I find myself returning to the love of Plato and Kant , and of Gnostic Christianity so beloved to me in my youth. One never really knows where one should firmly stand; philosophy is a life long study, in the classical sense, at least. Dualism is returning to philosophical discourse with a vengence, and this would appear to mirror the religious awakening which sweeps America ( I am speaking of the serious and high brow brand here, only). All fodder for the continuing dialectic; all grist for the mill, which grinds slowly and finely.
One author who has made binary mind theory - and in consequence, philosophical dualsism - popular once again in the U.S. , is Peter Novak, with his
The Division of Consciousness and
The Lost Secret of Death (both available @ Amazon.com.) Novak stresses the extent to which our binary minds effect us after death; I think a strong case can be made for the importance of their effect on us in this life as well ( a point Novak concedes but never explores to satisfaction).
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