Just for the record, neither Prof. Smith nor I bemoaned the quality of thinking in philosophy chat rooms, having made it clear that neither of us had ever visited any. But we both have serious doubts about the quality of philosophical conversation to be found there, if any exist. My doubts stem from seeing non-philosophers post and comment on philosophical topics, as I said. With your own training in philosophy, you'd find those threads deeply disappointing too, I'm sure. Prof. George suggested you might find the philosophical give-and-take you're seeking on blogs run by philosophers, but naturally those focus on whatever topics the bloggers currently find interesting. If your interests happen to match theirs, and if they allow comments, you'll find something on which to comment. David Chalmers maintains a long list of philosophy blogs here . I myself like the way AskPhilosophers functions. You wrote, "[T]he responders seem to imply that, at their level of philosophical accomplishment,...

Good question. You ask if all self-consistent ethical systems are equal, by which I take it you mean "equally plausible," "equally likely to be true," or "equally defensible." The crude sample principles you gave might suggest an affirmative answer to that question, but only because they seem about equally implausible. The first principle implies that I can't justifiably harm another even to protect myself or an innocent third party from harm. The second principle implies that I can justifiably harm another for any reason, or no reason, at all. Both conflict with widely and deeply held moral intuitions that are more plausible than the principles themselves. Adherents of each principle could simply reject those intuitions, but we don't have to regard that as a successful defense of those principles. More generally we might ask, "Are all self-consistent descriptions of reality true?" Logic gives us a straightforward answer: No. Two self-consistent descriptions of reality can be inconsistent...

The knowledge that human beings are animals didn't, of course, await the discovery of DNA. We've known it for millennia. But your question puts enormous weight on our being merely animals: the word "merely" is being asked to do all the argumentative work. I take it you're suggesting that anything that's merely an animal can't act immorally. It's open to someone to reply that either we're not merely animals or else some mere animals can act immorally. Indeed, if there's anything we know of that can act immorally, it's an animal -- rather than a plant, bacterium, or fungus. The capacity to act immorally arises from ongoing self-awareness, rational agency, the ability to reflect on one's actions, and the like -- features possessed by some animals (including but probably not limited to our species in this vast universe) and lacked by other animals (such as squirrels). On Earth anyway, the ability to philosophize seems to be restricted to human animals. Why not, then, the ability to act...

In my experience, maybe the most common mistake in reasoning committed by non-philosophers (and certainly among the most exasperating) is the one that philosopher Paul Boghossian complains about here: "Pinning a precise philosophical position on someone, especially a non-philosopher, is always tricky, because people tend to give non-equivalent formulations of what they take to be the same view " (my italics). Boghossian's complaint in this case stems from the "defense" of moral relativism offered by the literary critic Stanley Fish: "Fish, for example, after saying that his view is that 'there can be no independent standards for determining which of many rival interpretations of an event is the true one,' which sounds appropriately relativistic, ends up claiming that all he means to defend is 'the practice of putting yourself in your adversary's shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else might want to wear them.' ...

I second Professor Smith's reply. I haven't participated in philosophy chat rooms either, but I've commented on blogs by non-philosophers who post on philosophical topics. I've found the quality of thinking in those totally unregulated forums to be so bad it's scary. There are people in the blogosphere who are allowed to drive and vote who couldn't reason their way out of a wet paper bag. Philosophy is a discipline, one that takes hard work to acquire. Would you want to discuss medieval history, or quantum mechanics, or set theory in a dialogue format with just anyone out there? I wouldn't. Philosophy is like those other disciplines except that its problems are harder and more fundamental to our intellectual lives. Why do so many people think that being competent at it takes no training at all?

I supplied the response you found unsatisfying, so thanks for not pretending you were satisfied by it! You're right that my response did assume that there's only a "yes" or "no" answer to such questions as "Can N grains (for some particular N) make a heap?", "Can N grains definitely make a heap?", and so on. I also claimed that my assumption was an element of common sense. As I understand it, your counter-proposal is that N grains can be enough to make, for instance, "an 85% heap" (or maybe "85% of a heap") but not "a 100% heap" (or maybe "100% of a heap"). But what's an 85% heap? What's 85% of a heap, except a smaller heap? More plausibly, maybe you're proposing that the statement "N grains can make a heap" is only 85% true rather than 100% true. Proposals of this sort are well-known in the literature on the sorites paradox, usually under the heading of "many-valued logics" (see section 3.4 of the SEP article "Sorites Paradox" that I linked to in my previous reply). These many...

The sorites paradox -- the paradox of the heap and similar paradoxes exploiting more important concepts than heap -- is a terrific topic. It's great to see people thinking about it. You wrote, "we cannot say exactly where the transition occurs." Some philosophers would respond, "It can't occur exactly anywhere, because heap (or bald or tall or rich ...) isn't a concept that allows exact status-transitions. To say that there's an exact point of status-transition, even a point we can't know or say, is to misunderstand what vague concepts are." Some philosophers would also object to your suggestion that the fuzziness can be "bounded," if by that you mean "sharply bounded." They'd say that any boundary around the fuzzy cases must itself be a fuzzy boundary: like the boundary between heap and non-heap , the boundary between definitely a heap and not definitely a heap isn't precise to within a single grain. (This phenomenon is usually called "higher-order...

I'm also no scholar of Schopenhauer, but from what I remember he's claiming that our universe is at bottom non-rational -- fundamentally arising from causes rather than from reasons . The universe isn't, on this view, irrational if that means 'capable of reasoning but bad at it' or 'containing logical inconsistencies'. I take it that Schopenhauer is rejecting a theistic or deistic view that sees reason (and not causation) as fundamental to our universe. I agree with Professor Manter that neither Schopenhauer's view nor the view he's rejecting allows for inconsistent things such as square triangles. Can I take this opportunity to grind an axe? Advocates of a supernatural (theistic or deistic) origin of our universe often claim that only their view -- rather than metaphysical naturalism -- gives us hope of achieving a rational understanding of the universe by investigating it. They say that only if the universe was rationally intended can we hope to understand it. I think the...

As hard as it was for your friend to explain his dissatisfaction with philosophy, it's even harder for me to be confident that I really understand just what his complaint is. But I do think that a philosophical work fails to a significant degree if an intelligent reader comes away feeling that the author missed the boat or can't speak to anyone but specialists. Indeed, I support this website because I think philosophy is far too important not to be better understood by the general public. I'd encourage your friend to try harder to articulate the reasons he came away dissatisfied by this or that particular work of philosophy: to translate his feelings as carefully as he can into reasons and examine them. That exercise by itself very much counts as philosophizing. From time to time (although not as often as the public probably supposes), contemporary academic philosophers take up an age-old human concern like the meaning of life. An outstanding example, if by no means always easy reading, is...

As a white male myself, I guess I'm answering your question in the affirmative by even presuming to post an answer to it at all. Surely the question you asked is so broad that no one could reasonably answer it in the negative. Racism exists: some people or practices are racist. Sexism exists: some people or practices are sexist. There: I've said it, and I defy any reasonable person to deny my assertions or call them "illegitimate." Now, it's a harder and more interesting question exactly how much a white male can say about racism or sexism without losing credibility on those issues, but I'm inclined to think that a white male could, in principle, become the world's foremost authority on racism and sexism, and the burden of proof would rest with anyone who said he couldn't speak legitimately on this or that particular aspect of those issues: we'd be owed an explanation why not.