Recent Responses
How can abortion be so easily accepted in a civilized society? Sure, it is important that a woman or any person be able to have control over their body, but the fetus is a separate entity, a new person completely, as is logically shown by the fact that a mother can give birth to a male child. Anyone can tell this without having to use the available scientific evidence which proves my point. So, what gives any person the right to kill someone else so that they can live the way that they want?
Peter Smith
April 11, 2008
(changed April 11, 2008)
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Allen Stairs rightly queries the claim that the foetus is already a new person: killing an early foetus is not straightforwardly killing a person -- it is at most killing something that would otherwise become a person.
Still, you might be tempted to say -- indeed, many people do say -- killing a... Read more
Why is George Berkeley classified as an empiricist given his belief that only minds and ideas exist? How does one observe a mind or an idea?
Jasper Reid
April 10, 2008
(changed April 10, 2008)
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One observes an idea simply by having it. For an idea to exist, and for someone to be aware of it, are, for Berkeley, the same thing. To be is to be perceived. You might say: no, the things we are aware of are not ideas but bodies. But Berkeley would say: bodies are ideas, and it is through exper... Read more
Does the law of bivalence demand that a proposition IS either true or false today? What if the truth or falsity of this proposition is a correspondence to a future event that has yet to occur?
Richard Heck
April 7, 2008
(changed April 7, 2008)
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I take it that by "bivalence", you mean the principle that every proposition is either true or false. And if we take that principle in unrestricted form---we really do mean every proposition---then, well, it's hard to see how it could fail to imply that the proposition expressed by "There will be... Read more
I've heard three arguments to justify why homosexuality is not a disorder of 'natural' sexuality: It is perceived as 'natural for them' by some people; homosexual sex is consensual and not harmful or abusive; and animals have been observed engaging in homosexual sex. None of these arguments convinces me since it seems to me that: everyone's sexual desires appear as natural for them (however weird or extreme they might be); consent and lack of abuse don't equate to 'natural'; and what some animals sometimes do could also be a disorder of their natural behaviour. What are the other arguments about the naturalness of homosexuality? What about the argument that male and female are naturally 'complementary' - physically, psychologically and sociologically?
Richard Heck
April 7, 2008
(changed April 7, 2008)
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Perhaps the first question worth answering would be what one means here by "natural". What is "natural" can be opposed to many different things: "artificial" might be one, for example, but that doesn't seem to be quite what one has in mind when one asks whether homosexuality is "natural". Indeed,... Read more
I think apples are great. Why is it that they fit into my hand so easily? I don't even need to climb a tree to get one as they eventually fall to the ground (by the way I work in the building trade and I also think trees are great, timber is just sooo useful). Take a biro - I know some guy somewhere designed it and then made it and it works perfectly. I just can't help thinking that with an open mind I would be foolish not to think that a lot of nature's produce is far too perfectly designed to be a coincidence -- am I being naive?
Mitch Green
April 6, 2008
(changed April 6, 2008)
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Thank you for your question. I'm smitten by things like apples and trees also. However, implicit in your remark may be a thought about which I'm doubtful: It's the thought that if things like apples can't come into being by pure coincidence, there must be some divine cause to these things. I ca... Read more
Is a computer conceivable that would cut down on Philosophers' work by immediately identifying logic mistakes in arguments? For example: you enter "The Ontological argument for God" or "David Hume's argument against Inductive Reasoning" (or, for that matter, scan in the entire text of Plato's Republic) into the machine, and it immediately uses its programming (which tells it to watch out for contradiction, and all those other logic laws, etc.) and spits out the mistakes in reasoning. Is the problem with this that it would be too difficult to program, or that the laws of logic are under respectable attack?
Alexander George
April 6, 2008
(changed April 6, 2008)
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Philosophy would be much easier if we could program such a machine -- and boring too. But it's not going to happen. For one thing, there's your interesting point that philosophical disputes can go very deep, so deep as to include disagreement about what the laws of logic, of correct inferenc... Read more
Am I correct in thinking that vibrations in the air are just one cause of sound, and that really sounds are what are experienced? So for example under this definition of sound, ringing in the ears is included. Equally then, that sights can be caused by light bouncing off objects but also by the imagination? Can I draw the conclusion then that there are an equal number of sounds/sights/tastes/smells/feelings that have ever existed, than have ever been seen/heard/tasted/smelled/felt? The tree that falls in the woods with no one in it makes no sound at all (but plenty of vibrations)?
Allen Stairs
April 6, 2008
(changed April 6, 2008)
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The issue here seems to be verbal. It's not clear that ordinary language has a settled answer to the question whether "sound" refers to the vibration in the air, or to the experience that the vibrations cause. If we fix on the former, then there have been plenty of sounds that never led to any exp... Read more
As I see it, there is not a single person on the planet who can prove or disprove the existence of God. If there is no provable God and/or afterlife then there can be no better hope for anything beyond the grave than what religion espouses. If there is a God however, then the rewards for correct behavior are well defined. Why then would the rational man NOT believe in some sort of supreme divine being if there is no proof either way?
Richard Heck
April 6, 2008
(changed April 6, 2008)
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To ask a question our illustrious leader, Alexander George, has several times asked here: What's meant by "prove"? If what's meant is what's ordinarily meant by "prove", then it's not clear that a single person on this planet can prove human beings evolved from apes. Nor can anyone prove that the... Read more
When I studied philosophy, all the professors I had held the same views about religion -- that "god-talk" was "cognitively meaningless." I recall reading philosophers like Flew, Smart, and Mackie on this. It was my understanding at the time (I attended NYU in the 1960s) that major academic philosophers in the U.S., the U.K., and the other English-speaking countries saw philosophy as logical (or linguistic) analysis and held these views as well. Have such philosophers come to see religion differently over the past forty years?
Richard Heck
April 6, 2008
(changed April 6, 2008)
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At the time the questioner mentions, it wasn't just religious claims that philosophers declared "cognitively meaningless". Any metaphysical claim was supposed to suffer the same fate.
Well, part of what's changed is that that's changed. Metaphysics is now a flourishing, and for the most part resp... Read more
As I see it, there is not a single person on the planet who can prove or disprove the existence of God. If there is no provable God and/or afterlife then there can be no better hope for anything beyond the grave than what religion espouses. If there is a God however, then the rewards for correct behavior are well defined. Why then would the rational man NOT believe in some sort of supreme divine being if there is no proof either way?
Richard Heck
April 6, 2008
(changed April 6, 2008)
Permalink
To ask a question our illustrious leader, Alexander George, has several times asked here: What's meant by "prove"? If what's meant is what's ordinarily meant by "prove", then it's not clear that a single person on this planet can prove human beings evolved from apes. Nor can anyone prove that the... Read more