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All human activities seem to have dramatic, defining, pivotal moments. Take basketball : 1987 Game 5 Celtics v. Pistons. Dennis Rodman rejects Larry Bird with 5 seconds left. Pistons take the ball. All they need to do is inbound the ball and hold it and they take a 3-2 series lead home. Instead, Larry steals Isiah's inbound pass and the Celtics win. Wow. Of course there are many such moments in sports. What are the equivalent moments in Philosophy? What Philosopher, finally, in what paper, knocked down a prevalent theory held for 1,000 years? That kind of thing. Can a few of you contribute your favorite moments in the history of philosophy?
Sean Greenberg
November 15, 2010
(changed November 15, 2010)
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This is a great question!! It would be wonderful if as many panelists as possible could respond, not only because I'm as curious as Jasper as to what people think, but also because I think that the responses would reveal much about the respondent's own philosophical temperament and prio... Read more
I am reading a book that explains Gödel's proofs of incompletenss, and I found something that disturbs me. There is a hidden premise that says something like "all statements of number theory can be expressed as Gödel numbers". How exactly do we know that? Can that be proved? The book did give few examples of translations of such kind (for example, how to turn statement "there is no largest prime number" into statement of formal system that resembles PM, and then how to turn that into Gödel number). So the question is: how do we know that every normal-language number theory statement has its equivalent in formal system such as PM? (it does seem intuitive, but what if there's a hole somewhere?)
Richard Heck
November 6, 2010
(changed November 6, 2010)
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Peter's explanation is as good as it could be, but let me elaborate on something. You will note that he keeps referring to the "standard proof" of the first incompleteness theorem. There are other proofs, and some of them do not rely upon a coding of this kind. Here's one nice way that stays... Read more
I want to start to study logic on my own to the level that I can understand a book like Enderton's and Michael Potter's Set Theory and Its Philosophy, also be able to study mathematical logic like recursive functions and model theory and Understand Logicist Reduction and why It failed because of Godel. Suppose that I've read nothing on logic and I'm not fair in math, but I want to be good at it. I'll be gleeful if you introduce me a series of books on a) Introductory books on logic followed by more professional ones, b) Mathematics of logic, c) books on Logicist Reduction and Godel or what is necessary to understand them. I have a plenty of time to study all these and will face all the troubles. Thank You Very Much Pouria From Turkish part of Iran (I think you guessed why I have to study on my own)
Alexander George
November 7, 2010
(changed November 7, 2010)
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If you have difficulties actually getting or buying books, you might also look at Paul Teller's A Modern Formal Logic Primer. The book is now out of print, but Teller has made it completely available for downloading from the Web. You can find it here.
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dear sir or madam i am a university student of philosophy who is really eager to know about all philosophical aspects of human cloning and actually i am going to write my thesis in ethics of cloning. would you mind if i ask you to kindly tell me which philosophers have worked on this issue and as i am in Iran and i have a very limited access to foreign library, can you please introduce some books to me? your faithfully Hananeh H.
Richard Heck
November 6, 2010
(changed November 6, 2010)
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I don't know the answer to your question, but you could certainly start here: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/cloning/.
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We rarely, if ever, see headlines such as "A team oh philosophers in Berlin finally solves the Is-Ought Dilemma!". Of course, philosophy in general rarely makes headlines, but even within philosophy itself, it seems rare for philosophical ideas to be expounded or developed by *teams* of people, like scientists are doing more and more often. One would think that working in teams would increase the speed of an idea's development magnitudes, considering one would always have others off of whom to bounce ideas, and weaknesses could be worked over far more quickly, in live dialog rather than over months or years of exchanging arguments in academic publications, or books. Yet it seems that most philosophers choose to go it alone; what are the reasons for this?
Richard Heck
November 6, 2010
(changed November 6, 2010)
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I don't know what the reasons are, but I think co-authored papers and books are becoming more common, especially in the more technical parts of philosophy (language, epistemology, etc). I could be wrong about that, as I haven't done an extensive study, but that's my sense.
Part of the reaso... Read more
Some theories of behavior seem to rely on the idea that we are unaware of what we are doing, and that much of our behavior is programmed or conditionned into us by "our culture" without us actually being aware of this happening. To what extents are such accounts credible? A theory that tells me that the *real* reason I eat meat is because I am expressing my belief in human supremacy and dominance over animals I consider inferior doesn't seem at all credible to me, and yet if that theory also says that I just *think* I'm eating meat because it's tasty and (in some circumstances) healthy - presumably because my human supremacist culture indoctrinates me into believing this - how can I know that the theory isn't right? To what extent can a person trust their own introspection?
Gordon Marino
November 6, 2010
(changed November 6, 2010)
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This may not be much help but I would say "to some extent." There can be no doubt that judgments based on introspection are sometimes wrong. I have often had the experience of thinking that I did something with one motivation only to realize later that there was another at work as well. Als... Read more
All human activities seem to have dramatic, defining, pivotal moments. Take basketball : 1987 Game 5 Celtics v. Pistons. Dennis Rodman rejects Larry Bird with 5 seconds left. Pistons take the ball. All they need to do is inbound the ball and hold it and they take a 3-2 series lead home. Instead, Larry steals Isiah's inbound pass and the Celtics win. Wow. Of course there are many such moments in sports. What are the equivalent moments in Philosophy? What Philosopher, finally, in what paper, knocked down a prevalent theory held for 1,000 years? That kind of thing. Can a few of you contribute your favorite moments in the history of philosophy?
Sean Greenberg
November 15, 2010
(changed November 15, 2010)
Permalink
This is a great question!! It would be wonderful if as many panelists as possible could respond, not only because I'm as curious as Jasper as to what people think, but also because I think that the responses would reveal much about the respondent's own philosophical temperament and prio... Read more
Is there a handy rule for determining which questions can be resolved with a correct answer, and which questions cannot? I get caught up in trying to answer questions like, "What is love?" and "Is justice a beneficial value?" No matter how satisfied I am with the answers I come up with, I find other people who offer equally satisfying answers from other perspectives. For instance, I generally argue that artistic merit exists in the relationship between an audience and a man-made production. A statue of Adonis is just a statue of Adonis, but it becomes art when I see it and I am inspired by it in some way. One of my buddies hates this view of art. To him, artistic merit exists in the independent spirit of the artist, striving against conventions. So we both dig The Velvet Underground, The Beatles, and Miles Davis, but we cannot agree on James Taylor. He thinks Taylor's music is banal and devoid of artistic merit because it panders to a mainstream sensibility, whereas I find some of his albums to be artistic because they inspire my emotions. Maybe "What is art?" can't be answered correctly, and the best you can do is make interesting arguments for how to use the word. Could there possibly be an answer?
Charles Taliaferro
November 5, 2010
(changed November 5, 2010)
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What a great question! Post world war two, the movement of positivism tried to shut down all questions that could not be resolved with empirical verification. This movement would have shelved questions about justice (positivists took a non-cognitive approach to ethics and assumed mor... Read more
We seem to take it for granted that some works of art or fiction have "aesthetic value", which is classed as being of higher value than mere "entertainment value". However, the two don't actually seem that different. Both are values mainly of pleasure, not usefulness or truth; both can criticize or reveal; both can be judged by fixed standards, or based on personal taste. So what is the real distinction between aesthetic and entertainment value, other than that we hold aesthetic value in higher regard?
Charles Taliaferro
November 5, 2010
(changed November 5, 2010)
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The way you have framed the question makes it a little hard to answer, as the term "aesthetic" is often used to refer to a wide range of experiences. So, in the broadest sense of the word, the aesthetic properties of an event or thing are its affective or emotive properties, e.g. a me... Read more
What is the current general consensus as to the fine-tuning design argument for the existence of God? Thanks.
Charles Taliaferro
November 5, 2010
(changed November 5, 2010)
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I suspect that there is no general consensus at this point, though some atheists take the argument seriously (for example, Thomas Nagel in his recent book Secular Philosophy and the Religious Temperament) and the argument is now often included in stanard anthologies in philosophy of mi... Read more