A question on luck which an acceptable definition would be ....... success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one's own actions. If I strike a golf ball from a tee and it hits a rock and goes straight in for a hole in one is that “luck”?   How is it deemed so if my intention is to strike the ball in an attempt to get it in the hole? If It happened to hit a rock and go in it would be deemed “lucky” , what if I aimed for the rock hoping for that result is it luck? Using this example would all golf shots be luck bad /good dependent  on the bounce of the ball?  What exactly is luck philosophically speaking? Surely luck exists only if a certain interpretation of quantum mechanics is true?

An interesting question. Let's start with the word "chance," which you seem to see as an essential part of luck. If I follow you correctly, we have chance, hence luck, only if determinism isn't true. I think we'll see that what people mean by "luck" doesn't presuppose indeterminism, but let's start with your golfing example, Joe tees off and his shot goes wild. That's not what he wanted to happen and not what he was trying to do. However, there happens to be a rock in the right place, his ball hits it and ends up in the hole. That he did want to happen. Was he lucky? Since this seems to be a paradigm case of luck, we'd need a good reason for saying otherwise. Although it's doubtful that a real-life Joe intended to sink a hole in one (golfers seldom do), let's suppose he did. Given how things turned out, Joe himself would surely consider himself lucky: he got what he wanted but the way it happened was nothing like what he had in mind. He didn't intend to swing wild, he didn't mean to hit the rock,...

I recently watched a tv show that produced a line of questioning in my head on the virtue of reality. How do we define reality? What's the difference between reality and a world that is the perfect replication of reality? What would be the difference between the two worlds? Is it truly possible to know when we are living in reality? I guess I'm mostly asking if there is work form past philosophers that I could read on the subject?

A perfect replica of reality would be like reality in all respects. It would contain trees—real trees. It would contain people—real people. It would contain fake butter—real fake butter. And if it were a perfect replica, everything in reality would be in the replica. So in every sense that matters, it would be real. But I have the feeling you're worried about how you can know that you're not systematically deluded or deceived about more or less everything. This was Descartes' question in Meditations . He thought that there was one thing he couldn't be deceived about: that he was having doubts and therefore that he, the doubter existed. From there to anything substantial, like trees and people and electrons and burritos is a long way. Descartes thought that just by reasoning about it, he could prove that there's a God who is not a deceiver, and therefore that even though he was no doubt wrong about some things, he wasn't systematically wrong. Most philosophers don't think his argument was very good....

If we assume that relativism isn't true, how can we explain the fact that people behave differently?

First, let's ask what relativism means. The usual understanding is that it says what's right and wrong is not universal, but relative to some non-universal reference point—the predominant opinions in one's culture, typically. Your question appears to assume that relativism is the only good explanation for differences in behavior, but it's not clear why we should believe that. After all, many differences in behavior are matters of preference. I prefer to eat chocolate ice cream; you like rum and raisin. Neither of us is wrong, and relativism is neither relevant nor useful in explaining the difference between us. I like swing dancing; you don't. I don't like playing basketball; you do. We'll behave differently on that account. But neither of us is "right" or "wrong," and once again, relativism doesn't provide any additional insight. Wh do our taste in ice cream differ? Why do we prefer different leisure activities? Who knows? The answer is probably a complicated mixture of a lot of things,...

How do we justify our knowledge of the external world? Knowledge of the external world seems to be fallible in any case if we put the threshold of success at the highest level, namely 100% certainty. But this still raises a question: if we want to avoid complete skepticism, how can we be certain that our knowledge is at least likely to be true? In order to create a probability about the validity of our knowledge of the external world we need to start from perception. The problem is that we can be certain of the existence of perception but not the source of it (the matrix/the real world), and that is essential for the knowledge of the external world. In order to calculate our probability we then need the number of possible events E and the one favourable event F we're looking for: E = 2 possible events are external source or non-external source (matrix, hallucination, dream etc.) F = 1 favourable event i.e. external source P(F) = F/E = 1/2 = 50% It seems to me that both possibilities are equally likely....

Setting external world skepticism aside for a moment, suppose I'm about to roll a die. Now there are two possibilities: it will come up 1 or it won't. If I reason as you did, I will conclude that the probability is 1/2 that the die will come up 1. Something has gone wrong here. For one thing, we can't get the answers to probability questions just by counting. There are many ways to slice up the space of possibilities, and if we use your rule, the answer we get will depend on how we do the slicing. This is a well-known problem, and there is no simple fix. But there's another problem: the probabilities here aren't chances. They are degrees of belief. Even if we thought (though we shouldn't) that the right way to slice things up is that our experience has an external source or it doesn't, without adding anything more fine-grained, we don't have to agree that the two possibilities are equally probable. You say "it seems to me that both possibilities are equally likely." It's worth wondering whether you...

First: I think every question has a logical answer. is it correct? Second: If the answer to my first question is yes, then what is the logical answer to the question why a cow has four legs?

I’m guessing that what you think is that every question has a satisfying answer — an answer that explains what we wanted explained or tells us what we wanted to know. And so my question is: why do you think that? For the record, I don’t think it’s true, or at least I don’t see any good reason to suppose that it must be true. Here’s an example. We can send electrons, one at a time, through a certain sort of magnetic field (one oriented “inhomogenously” in a particular direction.) The electron will respond in one of two ways: maximum upward deflection or maximum downward deflection; nothing in between. So suppose a particular electron passes through the field and is deflected upward. You ask why up rather than down. The most widely-held view among physicists is that there is no answer. The most widely-held view is not that we just don’t know, but that which way the electron went is a matter of pure chance; nothing explains it. Now this may be wrong, but there are serious reasons for...

Hello. I read on the internet that Buddhism teaches solipsism. I want to ask: Do the teachings and doctrines of all the official schools of Buddhism in China, Japan, South Korea, and Vietnam allow Buddhists, Buddhas, and Bodhisattvas to believe that other people have individual minds, consciousnesses, feelings, emotions, and thoughts? Thank you

My understanding is that Buddhism teaches the doctrine of anatta — "no self." This doesn't mean that there aren't people in the ordinary sense. It means that there is no underyling metaphysical substance that amounts to the self. But I'm not aware of anything in Buddhism that would fairly be described as solipsism. So "the internet" got this one wrong (except for the thousands of places where it gets it right. as for thoughts, feelings, emotions, etc., people do think, they do feel, they do have emotions. Or better, perhaps, there are thoughts, there are feelings, there are emotions. But they aren't tied together by some underyling soul or mental substance. The Scottish philosopher David Hume held a similar view. On Hume's view, a person is a "bundle of perceptions," though that's a bit too crude to get it right. In recent philosophical history, Derek Parfit developed a view that he would be the first to admit owes a great deal to Hume and to Buddhism. As for minds and consciousnesses, it...

I’m reading Terry Pinkard’s “German Philosophy 1760-1860 The Legacy of Idealism”, and on page 113, he writes: “Signing a check, hitting a home run, making an assertion, shopping at a sale are all other examples of normative activities that cannot be captured in a purely physical or “naturalistic description of them.” I’m not getting why hitting a home rim cannot be described as purely physical phenomena. Can somebody explain it to me?

Here's a way that might help. Suppose there are two pieces of paper in front of you. One of them is a genuine $5 bill. The other is a perfect counterfeit. In fact, suppose that it was illicitly created by the very same equipment that created the real bill. The point is that the difference between the real $5 bill and the fake isn't a matter of the physical properties of the piece of paper. A similar point holds for the home run. There are certain things that have to happen physically for something to amount to a home run. But with a little imagination, we can tell a story on which what's "really" going on has nothing to do with baseball. It just looks for all the world like a real baseball game. But to be a home run, the physical events have to be part of an honest-to-Babe-Ruth baseball game. Without the right intentions, rule-following, etc., no set of physical events amounts to a baseball game. There are physical regularities in a baseball game, but some of the most important things have to do...

Do you think genetically stupid people should not have kids since the kids will also be like that and having a child would just be adding misery to it's life since it would never be able to be successful or achieve anything. S/he would spend all their life being inferior to other and it would just be a lifetime of pain.

When I was a young man, I knew someone who was, in the phrase that might have been used at that time, "mildly retarded." He was married. And he understood his condition. And he struck me as a happy man. He certainly wasn't leading a life of misery. In the neighborhood where I now live, there is a young man who is even more intellectually challenged. I doubt that he understands his condition. But he does not strike me as unhappy at all. To be sure, he lives a simple life. And no: he couldn't live on his own. And he also won't have "accomplishments" in the sense you have in mind. But near as I can tell, he's not miserable at all. He's happy. In his case, I don't think marriage is an issue. But the larger point is the important one: intellectual ability and happiness are quite different things. There are sad, miserable geniuses and thriving, happy people whose IQ scores are well below 100. So what I'm saying is that I don't accept the premise of your question.

What's wrong with eating animals? Animals eat animals, so it's natural.

The first point is that "Is it natural?" and "Is it wrong?" aren't the same question. We could spend a lot of time on what it means to call something "natural," but you seem to have something like this in mind: if there are species that do it routinely, then it's natural. If that made things acceptable, then the fact that in some species, the female kills the male after sex would mean that it would be okay for a woman to kill a man after having sex with him. Don't know about you, but I'd say that seems like a pretty good counterexample to the "It's natural, therefore it's okay" idea. As for why eating animals might be wrong, I dare say you've heard many of the reasons that some people find persuasive. Some have to do with the consequences for the animals. Others are of a quite different sort. For example: our meat-eating habits are a significant contributor to global warming. Raising animals for food accounts for just under 15% of greenhouse gases. See https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/30...

Is necrophilia morally objectionable? I was under the impression that it wouldn't be, insofar that bodies don't have legitimate interests (e.g., physical or psychological well-being) to be damaged, but a friend pointed out to me that people who are alive now still have wishes regarding what should be done once they are dead. For example, they leave money to their children in their wills, and are able to live contently knowing that this will be honored. If we lived in a society where people's wishes were routinely disregarded after death, then we would have no reason to think that our own wishes would be honored, and we would therefore be distressed by this. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Like my colleague, I agree that you've put your finger on a potential moral problem with necrophilia. However, I have a worry about the rest of his analysis. My colleague writes: "I think the more primordial objection to necrophilia is that most of us see the good of sexual intimacy as the loving union of two persons." I certainly don't disagree that this is a good of sexual intimacy, but aside from the question of whether it's the good, I have a different worry: even if the loving union of two people is the good of sexual intimacy, it wouldn't follow that other forms of sexual activity are morally suspect. The most obvious case is masturbation. I've never seen anything that struck me as a plausible argument that masturbation is wrong. A standard Catholic objection is that all sex acts should be "open to the possibility of procreation," as some Vatican documents put it. My own view is that this is bad as theology, and worse if one doesn't accept theological premises. Another objection is that it...

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