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Dear Madam or Sir, this is not a question but a request: Is there an introduction into philosophy that you would recommend? Hoping to get an answer I remain sincerely yours Matthias
There are basically two kinds
William Rapaport
March 9, 2017
(changed March 9, 2017)
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There are basically two kinds of intro philosophy texts: General intros and anthologies of "classic" papers. As Andrew mentioned in his reply to your question, a search on amazon.com will turn up many good anthologies. But the two general intros that I heartily... Read more
Dear Madam or Sir, this is not a question but a request: Is there an introduction into philosophy that you would recommend? Hoping to get an answer I remain sincerely yours Matthias
There are basically two kinds
William Rapaport
March 9, 2017
(changed March 9, 2017)
Permalink
There are basically two kinds of intro philosophy texts: General intros and anthologies of "classic" papers. As Andrew mentioned in his reply to your question, a search on amazon.com will turn up many good anthologies. But the two general intros that I heartily... Read more
There are certain kinds of moral belief that we view in a pluralistic manner, and others that we take to be absolute. For an example of the former, suppose that I'm a vegetarian who believes that eating meat is immoral. Most people would say that it's inappropriate for me to harangue meat eaters, since they are just as entitled to their beliefs about diet as I am to mine. By contrast, we don't reason this way about things like murder. I am not obligated to respect the beliefs of someone who thinks murder is permissible--on the contrary, I may be morally remiss if I don't try to stop or correct him. What explains the difference between these two kinds of moral belief?
It's an interesting question.
Allen Stairs
March 4, 2017
(changed March 4, 2017)
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It's an interesting question. Some thoughts.
Suppose Rufus believes that murder is morally acceptable. If I know of a murder he's trying to commit, then most of us agree that I'm not just allowed but even obliged to do various things to prevent it. (Telling the po... Read more
It is a common moral conviction that it is better to let many guilty people go free than to wrongly imprison a single innocent person. My understanding is that this principle underlies the presumption of innocence in criminal trials. I can see that this strikes us as profoundly right, but I'm not sure why. I mean, off the top of my head it seems fairly easy to refute it along a crudely utilitarian line: all we need is to suppose that the guilty parties are liable to do harm enough to outweigh the suffering of the wrongly imprisoned innocent party.
Setting aside the question of
Michael Cholbi
March 2, 2017
(changed March 2, 2017)
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Setting aside the question of whether the principle 'better to let many guilty go free than to wrongly imprison a single innocent person' is the rationale for the presumption of innocence, that utilitarians would reject the principle is not as clearcut as you appear... Read more
Could there be colours we haven't yet seen?
A lot depends on who "we" are
Jonathan Westphal
March 2, 2017
(changed March 2, 2017)
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A lot depends on who "we" are. Suppose we are complete achromats, so that we only see "achromatic colours", greys, blacks and whites. Now it is clear enough that there is a colour "we" haven't seen. Red is an example, and so are all the other chromatic c... Read more
I would really like to know what logic is. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has TOO MANY articles on logic for someone like me. Let me list most of them: action logic, algebraic propositional logic, classical logic, combinatory logic, combining logic, connexive logic, deontic logic, dependence logic, dialogical logic, dynamic epistemic logic, epistemic logic, free logic, fuzzy logic, hybrid logic, independence friendly logic, inductive logic, infinitary logic, informal logic, intensional logic, intuitionistic logic, justification logic, linear logic, logic of belief revision, logic of conditionals, logical consequence, logical pluralism, logical truth., many-valued logic, modal logic, non-monotonic logic, normative status of logic, paraconsistent logic, propositional dynamic logic, provability logic, relevance logic, second-order and higher-order logic, substructural logic, temporal logic. I have started reading some of these articles, but I still didn't find an answer for my basic question. In some of these articles, a logic (<i>a</i> logic!) seems to be just a bunch of symbols intended to represent reasoning. But some other times I get the idea that logic intends to discover what is good reasoning. In any case, why are there so many different logics? Are they all necessary or useful? Don't computers use just one kind of logic? Truth is that if my children (6 and 8 y.o.) ask me what is logic, I don't know what to tell them....
At the risk of a bit of self
William Rapaport
March 21, 2017
(changed March 21, 2017)
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At the risk of a bit of self-promotion, readers might find my introductory article on logic for the Encyclopedia of Artificial Intelligence to be helpful. You can read it online at http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~rapaport/Papers/logic.pdf.
Log in... Read more
Could there be colours we haven't yet seen?
A lot depends on who "we" are
Jonathan Westphal
March 2, 2017
(changed March 2, 2017)
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A lot depends on who "we" are. Suppose we are complete achromats, so that we only see "achromatic colours", greys, blacks and whites. Now it is clear enough that there is a colour "we" haven't seen. Red is an example, and so are all the other chromatic c... Read more
so What is more real? The number two or my two feet?
Why must either be "more real
Stephen Maitzen
March 2, 2017
(changed March 2, 2017)
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Why must either be "more real" than the other? I can't make sense of "more real," anyway, as a comparison. Are shadows less real than the 3D objects that cast them? Shadows are dependent in a way in which 3D objects are not, but I don't see how that makes shado... Read more
Here is a question. Say I want to live forever and constantly move my brain from one body to another, so I never age. I also replace non functioning parts of my brain with new ones made with stem cells. Eventually after living for a long enough time my brain is no longer anything like the original except for its collective memories. Would that thing still be me? To take it a step further I create clones of myself and each of them has a small part of my originals brain. Would I still exist? Or I created a collective consciousness in which I am able to communicate to each of my clones and we are able to share our experiences in one big cloud. What does that even mean for me? Am I even the same person or something completely different? These problems have been really bugging me and I am just trying to see if anyone has any answer.
Often with questions that are
Jonathan Westphal
February 23, 2017
(changed February 23, 2017)
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Often with questions that are composed of multiple further questions ("Here is a question", you write . . . - it's not - I count four question marks!) it helps to take just one, and deal with it carefully, before moving on to the next. Of course some of th... Read more
Milo Yiannopoulos recently resigned from Breitbart amid controversial comments about that a relationship between an adult male and a teenager could be beneficial. Without wishing to imply a defence of his claims, what I wanted to ask is -- didn't Socrates make essentially the same claim 2500 years ago in the Symposium, and what has changed between now and then to make the idea less intellectually respectable?
A lot that Milo Yiannopoulos
Nickolas Pappas
February 23, 2017
(changed February 23, 2017)
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A lot that Milo Yiannopoulos said about sex calls the Symposium to mind, and for all I know was intended to. He distinguished between relations involving pre-pubescent children and those involving teenagers past the age of puberty, and the latter type certain... Read more