Is there a world out there beyond my consciousness, my self-consciousness, my mind, my ideas, my sensual experiences, my mental contents and bases of my ideas? The pure skeptic or hardened solipsist would insist that either there is no world out there, or even if there were, its existence or the lack thereof is inecsapably, cognitively beyond our subjective states of consciousness. We can never get beyond this dream world in which we are trapped.
All our ideas are produced internally, arising from our perceptions and experiences. Nor can we do like Berkeley and assume that ideas out there are ideas in the mind of God the all-knowing.
I, ever the epistemological moderate, do posit that the objective world exists, and that material objects are real, are discernible by us. I am part logician and part scientist. I am also part believer and part mystic.
Matter is real and is mere appearance and universals or essences or spirits are more real than is matter of which they participate, but spirits are illusion, mere appearance and do not exist in part, also.
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