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The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician (2001)
- wnmurphy 8y agoWhat's a metaphysician? A doctor who doctors doctors?
- wje 8y agoA person who studies metaphysics. Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy dealing with questions like 'What is there?'.
- jackcarter 8y agoOdd, I'd have expected the term to be "metaphysicist."
- newsbinator 8y agoYou're thinking of a person who studies physicists.
- ebullientocelot 8y agoA term that is unfortunately abused, at least where I live, by fortune telling shops and other such things.
- Koshkin 8y agoIncidentally, 'doctor' is Latin for 'teacher'.
- schoen 8y agoWe could also sort of say that "physician" is Greek for "naturalist". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%86%CF%85%CF%83%CE%B9%CE%BA%CF%8C%CF%82#Ancient_Greek https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%CF%86%CF%85%CF%83%CE%B9%CE%B... https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/naturalis#Etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/naturalis#Etymology
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cure 8y agoA little more information: http://www.marcsandersfoundation.org/about/the-founder/ http://www.marcsandersfoundation.org/about/the-founder/
- Animats 8y agoOh, that A. M. Monius thing again. "Does reality have a purpose? Why are things intelligible at all?" Those questions run into the usual problem when looking for a First Cause: "God created the world." "Then who created God?" "Shut up, kid." Some philosophers get into this mess by starting from the assumption that there must be something more than the physical universe, so that it somehow "makes sense". With that bias, you get things like this paper. Plus a big chunk of theology.
- ythn 8y agoYou have that problem with any theory, not just religious ones. You could argue that God was created the same way we were - by another God. Which eventually leads to "Gods have always existed", which is similar to Big Bang's problem of "matter has always existed". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_why_there_is_anything_at_all https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_why_there_is_anythi...
- GW150914 8y agoIt’s similar only if you misunderstand the questions physics seeks to answer. “If we rewind time according to present observations and theories, what do we see?” The answer is a Big Bang event, but that is just the answer to the question posed, not the deeper one posed by the wiki article. If you ask “why is there something rather than nothing?” physics has no single clear answer. Science takes very limited questions and seeks to answer them in a limited fashion with a high degree of confidence. Metaphysics plays word games with philosophy because hey, who can really gainsay you? Maybe it’s D-Branes, maybe it’s eternal inflation, maybe it’s the Great Green Arkleseizure. The problem is that popular science and people who don’t know better misunderstand the nature of what physics actually does and tries to shoehorn theories into the questions they want answered.
- d0lph 8y agoI think the question in that case is what existed before the Big Bang, has a vacuum always existed before? Or are we on a constant loop of universes forming and disintegrating.
- joshuaheard 8y agoThe link in the article to the institute was broken. Here is an updated link: https://www.comingtounderstanding.com/ https://www.comingtounderstanding.com/ Interesting the institute calls itself "Ammonius", not A.M. Monius. And the author of "Coming to Understanding" is clearly identified as Marc Sanders.
- antonvs 8y ago> And the author of "Coming to Understanding" is clearly identified as Marc Sanders. The Slate article is a republishing of a Lingua Franca article from 2001. Author identification was presumably only added after the author's cover was blown. The 2000 and 2007 versions of the document don't mention his name. The acknowledgements in the 2010 version mention his brother, Dr. Michael Sanders, and the included review by Zimmerman mentions the author's name.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- oh_sigh 8y agoIf you look at archive.org, you can see even in 2012(after Marc Sanders had passed), the website did not out the author: https://web.archive.org/web/20120213033702/https://www.comingtounderstanding.com/about.php https://web.archive.org/web/20120213033702/https://www.comin...
- tlarkworthy 8y agoI wanted to see if anyone ever cited him, seems not [1]. [1] https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22Coming+to+Understanding%22+Monius&btnG= https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22C...