Recent Responses
I've always been kind of puzzled by religious people who claim both that (1) their faith is devout and that (2) they are uninterested in converting people to their beliefs. I feel as though persons of this sort are trying to have their cake and eat it too; they want to affirm their faith, on the one hand, and be tolerant on the other. In an age where multiculturalism is lauded, this sort of pluralistic worldview can seem ideal. And yet, if you really believe that a person who does not acknowledge God will go to Hell, or that contraception is immoral, how can you NOT urge your convictions on other people? When it comes to religious belief -- especially beliefs which pertain to morality -- can "tolerance" be reconciled with true conviction?
Sally Haslanger
March 13, 2007
(changed March 13, 2007)
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It isn't clear to me exactly what the tension is. It will, no doubt, depend on the religion in question. Some religions do not hold that the non-believer will be punished or that there is a special religious basis for morality. In my experience, many who do believe that the non-believer wi... Read more
Is psychoanalysis science?
Mitch Green
March 12, 2007
(changed March 12, 2007)
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Thank you for your provocative question. I don't feel qualified to answer it categorically, but I will try to give some reason why some people have doubted that psychoanalysis is science, and how those doubts might be met. One reason some have doubted that psychoanalysis is science is that cla... Read more
Is it possible to have an empirical theory of ethics?
Peter Lipton
March 30, 2007
(changed March 30, 2007)
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Moral questions typically have an empirical component. For example, the question whether we have an obligation to paint all the roofs in the world white depends in part of the question whether doing this would reduce global warming, and that is an empirical question. And as Miranda Fricker poi... Read more
I’m familiar with syllogistic arguments, but hardly an expert. In a recent debate about logical fallacies, I made the following points. So-called logical fallacies do not apply to inherently sound arguments (much as, for example, libel isn’t libel if the statement is true). Therefore, it is logically sound to "appeal" to numbers or to authorities IF the majority or the authority being cited: (1) has legitimate expertise on the topic (e.g., a doctor, not a mechanic on a medical matter); (2) is cited only in the area of its expertise (e.g., don't cite computer programmers on a biological question); and (3) the subject-matter experts generally agree on the statement (as, for instance, most oncologists agree that smoking is a cause of lung cancer). In other words, it is perfectly logical to accept as valid the consensus of lung-cancer researchers that smoking is a leading cause of lung cancer. I may have phrased my case ineptly, but I wonder if my argument is correct, or at least on the right track. Thank you.
Mitch Green
March 8, 2007
(changed March 8, 2007)
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Thanks for your question. According to the standard technical definition of a sound argument (defined as a valid argument with all true premises, and where a valid argument is defined as an argument such that there is no way for the conclusion to be false while all the premises are true), it is po... Read more
Did teleological arguments give us reasonable grounds to believe in a Creator before Darwin?
Amy Kind
March 8, 2007
(changed March 8, 2007)
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I agree with the posts above on the decisiveness of Hume's criticisms of the teleological argument in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, but thought I'd add one point on the other side. In The Blind Watchmaker, Richard Dawkins suggests that he "could not imagine being an atheist" before Darw... Read more
From reading these pages it strikes me that almost all philosophers in the Amherst group are not religious (Professor Heck is a notable exception). Is this true of philosophy departments in the English-speaking world, generally? I suspect it is, and, if so, what are the ramifications? Do the religious types know they are right - surely a presupposition of their faiths - and do they consider it their role in philosophy to convert doubters? The 'it-works-for-me' anecdotal/testimonial religious argument is surely as worthless in philosophy as it is in, say, pseudosciences like homeopathy, however. Shrugging one's shoulders because one has absolute certainty in one's religion surely doesn't pass muster if one is a professional philosopher whose job it is to explain one's philosophical worldview to one's students? Is the only recourse to be a proponent of Intelligent Design theory, which doesn't work? I can't see any way round this. Your thoughts are very welcome and thanks in advance.
Oliver Leaman
March 8, 2007
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I don't know that philosophers as a group have any particular attitude to religion, just different attitudes. Believers may feel that they can justify their religious beliefs philosophically, and set out to do so. I doubt whether they try to convert students, though, and if they do it does not lo... Read more
Are humans capable of imagining things, that are not based on other things they've already seen, or a combination of things they have already seen? For instance if I ask a kid to imagine a new animal (there I'm already using things I know 'animal'), he/she will most likely come up with something like a elephant feeted, giraffe necked, winged, crocodile or somewhere in that fashion. Now of course some people are more creative, but when you look at e.g. art, again what you get are the elephants with long feet, crazily constructed houses, people in all kinds of strange and surreal forms. But in the end it always seems completely based on things we've perceived in the past. What is your view on this, are humans capable of coming up with something 'new'? This raises the question, what do you consider 'new' (not based on things we've seen/heard/perceived in any way before)? This also draws me to the question if there is knowledge which is not acquired by learning? I hope some of you are interested in answering (well, expressing your view on things, that is, of course); thanks in advance, Dirk.
Jasper Reid
March 6, 2007
(changed March 6, 2007)
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Descartes ponders this sort of thing in the course of the first of his Meditations on First Philosophy. He speculates about whether everything he has taken himself to be really experiencing might actually just be a figment within a dream; and he initially decides that, yes, it could be. But then, o... Read more
Does one good turn deserve another? Intuitively, when someone does something for me which I perceive as kind and selfless, I feel disposed to perform a similarly "kind" action for that person - more so than for some other person. But, if faced with the choice of selflessly helping person A, who once helped me, or person B, with whom I have no history, is there any ethical reason (other than the possible value of my intuition) why I should help person A? Why should the "good turn" which person A did me yesterday have a legitimate bearing on my ethical decision today?
Miranda Fricker
March 5, 2007
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My own view is that, other things being equal, you do have a special reason to return a good turn; a reason that is lacking in the case where you're considering to do a similarly good turn to a stranger. This is because ethical life is a mixture of reasons generated by a 'partial' perspective (... Read more
Does the fact that other religions exist give us reason to disbelieve any one religion, or is this not a relevant piece of evidence?
Richard Heck
March 4, 2007
(changed March 4, 2007)
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Here's a more general question, and one of substantial recent interest: Does the fact that there are other people who disagree with me, by itself, give me reason to doubt my own beliefs? The interest of the question, to me, derives from the fact that there are arguments, founded upon very general... Read more
Presently I am a first year philosophy major and I am interested in taking an Introduction to Symbolic logic course next year. However, I am worried that since my background in math is very weak, taking that class would just be torture for me. I was wondering how math-dependent is symbolic logic? I recently studied the informal and formal fallacies in an ethics class which I found to be easy...does that mean anything? Thanks in advance for the reply.
Alexander George
March 3, 2007
(changed March 3, 2007)
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I would say that a well-taught first course in formal logic would presuppose no mathematical knowledge and no mathematical sophistication. The material is technical in nature and freely employs symbols and terms drawn from the vernacular of mathematics -- but all these should be explained by... Read more