Recent Responses
Literary theory often urges us to ignore what the author believes or says about his or her own work, and to look at the text itself. Yet many literary theorists (perhaps not necessarily good ones, but many nonetheless) couch their analyses in terms of agency - like commenting of a horror movie that "The fact that the black man dies first tells us that black people do not have a place in this society", or, to quote an example our professor gave us, "The buttons in a tram that signal for the driver to stop are intended to train you into behaving in an impersonal and instrumental way towards servants." If we are supposed to ignore what the author of these artifacts says about them (which is almost certainly at odds with the "analysis"), how can we then coherently speak about intention, suggestion, or other notions of agency? Who is telling or intending, if not the creator of an artefact?
Oliver Leaman
November 24, 2011
(changed November 24, 2011)
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There is a difference though between saying that the intentions the author evinces in writing his or her text are the meaning of the text, and saying that the text reveals a good deal about the intentional values held by the society that the text represents. Language is public and we do n... Read more
“The eyes of the Lord are in every place, watching the evil and the good.” (Proverbs 15:3) This implies to me that God is omnipresent, through time and space. With that premise, what argument can be made for free will? If he can see every action we make, he knew the actions that Adam and Eve would make before their creation. Thanks, James
Oliver Leaman
November 24, 2011
(changed November 24, 2011)
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Just because God knows what is going to happen does not mean it has to happen, in the sense that human beings have to do what they end up doing. For example, I always have sugar in my coffee, if sugar is available, but that does not mean that I am incapable of having coffee without suga... Read more
I've been reading about the attempts of the US and other western nations to dissuade Iran from its nuclear program. On what grounds might a country that maintains nuclear arms insist that other countries not acquire such arms themselves?
Oliver Leaman
November 24, 2011
(changed November 24, 2011)
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I suppose the argument would be that Iran is an aggressive country that frequently threatens to destroy its enemies, while the United States is not. Whether the argument is valid depends of course on one's political point of view, but that is the general approach, it seems to me.... Read more
I've been in education of some kind for over fifteen years now, and over these years I've had many history classes, concerning a variety of topics. Something strange happens in all of them, though - without exception, the classes never seem to spend more than a single session on anything that happened after the 1950s. In high school, we had a single class to talk about the Cold War; two other years of history didn't even go that far, except in the broadest of strokes with mentions of decolonialism. In a college course on American history, our last session was the origins and beginnings of the civil rights movement, with nothing beyond that. The social, technological, political and ideological shifts in the past half-century seem to be deemed unworthy of teaching. Why is this? Aren't the social and technological developments of the last sixty or seventy years at least as critical to the understanding of modern society as the sum of all that came before? What is the importance of teaching the history of the distant past, and why is it that the recent past isn't comparatively as important?
Eddy Nahmias
December 14, 2011
(changed December 14, 2011)
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I've always thought it would be interesting to do a history course in reverse. Start with the later events (beginning in present) and have students consider what history might have looked like to lead to these later events, working backwards as far as possible. I always hated that my hist... Read more
I consider myself a (metaphysical) materialist or, to use the synonymous term that is more fashionable nowadays, physicalist, and I'm familiar with the academic literature on contemporary materialism/physicalism. But in no paper or book did I find really satisfying, fully adequate definitions of the central concepts of a material/physical object and of a material/physical property. (A material/physical property certainly isn't material/physical in the same sense as a material/physical object.) Does this mean that there actually aren't any such definitions, and that materialism/physicalism is therefore a virtually vacuous doctrine? Material/physical objects (substances) could be defined in terms of material/physical properties: x is a material/physical object =def x has some (intrinsic) material/physical properties. But then the big problem is how to properly define the concept of a material/physical property. I've been trying to devise and formulate a fully adequate definition of it for several years—but I always failed. Such a definition is particularly hard to come by because it mustn't render property dualism false by definition and physicalist property monism true by definition. It also mustn't rule out the possibility of panpsychism. So my question to you is: Is there any fully adequate definition of the concept of a material/physical property available, or is the intellectual search for it hopeless?
Marc Lange
November 24, 2011
(changed November 24, 2011)
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This is indeed a difficult question. If we say that a physical object is an object with intrinsic physical properties, then you are right: we have left ourselves with the question of what a physical property is. If we say that a physical object is an object with spatiotemporal properties (su... Read more
Everything can be determined. Therefore, the world is deterministic. What do you think? (1) Everything can be determined. (2) Determinism is the thesis that everything can be determined. __________________________________________________________ Therefore, (3) the world is deterministic. For example, suppose I am raking the leaves outside my house. Then the fact that I am raking the leaves can be determined. It can be determined by anybody driving past my house. It can be determined by a high resolution satellite (on a clear day with no overhanging trees). It can be determined by merely witnessing me raking the leaves. The same goes for anything else that happens. Its occurrence can be determined. For (1) not to be true would be to undermine the assumption used in court trials. All court trials assume that the occurrence of anything, crimes included, can always be determined (even if not by the available evidence). For (2) not to be true would be to say that there are things that cannot be determined in determinism. But obviously then, determinism as we know it would not hold. So what do you think? Isn't this a good argument for determinism?
Richard Heck
November 24, 2011
(changed November 24, 2011)
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As the Stanford Encyclopedia article on the subject defines it, causal determinism "is, roughly speaking, the idea that every event isnecessitated by antecedent events and conditions together with the lawsof nature".
This is a much stronger claim that is made at (2). To say that "everythi... Read more
Is religion the true enemy of freedom in a democratic society since it teaches us that we have to think a certain way or is science since it teaches us that nobody is truly free but a product of deterministic forces?
Andrew Pessin
December 2, 2011
(changed December 2, 2011)
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Or another mode of reply: First suppose that science DOES suggest determinism. How would anything be different in our lives? Wouldn't democratic processes work precisely the same way as they have been? (After all, our behavior has been deterministic all along, so why would discovering/p... Read more
I have been reading some of the work done in the analysis of knowledge for an epistemology course. Stepping outside the debates being had as to what the definition of knowledge is I find myself questioning the idea of the analysis of knowledge in general. Most arguments I have read seem to be focused on giving conditions of knowledge that describe cases in which we intuitively think that a person knows something. But what is the validity of appealing to such an intuitive notion of knowledge for the basis of analysis? Aren't our intuitions about knowledge too idiosyncratic and inconsistent to ever give a precise analysis of what knowledge is? Is the analysis of knowledge really a philosophically interesting industry?
Sean Greenberg
November 24, 2011
(changed November 24, 2011)
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Much depends on what you mean by "the analysis of knowledge." I assume that you mean the attempt to explicate the respect in which knowledge is more than mere true belief, an enterprise that goes back to Plato's Meno. It seems to me that you think that discussion that attempts to fill... Read more
Is it possible to think irrationally? My instincts tell me not but my philosophically-versed friends tell me that it is.
Sean Greenberg
November 24, 2011
(changed November 24, 2011)
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Given that it is possible to think rationally, it must be possible also to think irrationally. An analogy with the concept of biological function may usefully illustrate why this is the case. If some part of the body has a function--so, for example, if the heart has the function of pum... Read more
why is it that an exact replica of art is valued less than the original even though the aesthetic aspects are still the same?
Eric Silverman
November 22, 2011
(changed November 22, 2011)
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One obvious difference is that the original is 'scarcer' and thus the laws of supply and demand lead it to become 'more valued'. Also, the original has at least one potentially valuable attribute the replica does not have, the attribute of being 'made by the original artist.' Finally, it... Read more