Recent Responses
Is philosophy useful? I recently abandoned a course of philosophical study because I became overwhelmed by a sense that all I was doing - all I could ever do - was produce more philosophy. It was fun, it was interesting, I improved my research skills and now have a wider circle of strongly opinionated friends. But I couldn't escape the sense that real ideas were being abandoned in favour of increasingly intricate, but ultimately unhelpful semantic constructs and their counterexamples - for some reason, I am reminded of a paradox involving some ravens.
Andrew N. Carpenter
February 6, 2007
(changed February 6, 2007)
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As you suggest, studying and practicing philosophy improve's one's analytical and creative skills: reading, writing, thinking. So, that is one significant way that philosophy is useful -- and especially so if it were true that doing philosophy is a comparatively powerful means of re... Read more
I was reading a philosophy article, which just talked about "the functions of..." (the subject was law, but that isn't what I'm interested in now). I am not being able to find any introductory philosophy text on "function", not even in Wikipedia (apart from entries on mathematical functions). What is a function?
David Papineau
February 5, 2007
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You can think of a function of X as an effect E that X is designed to produce, or that X is supposed to produce, or that it is the purpose of X to produce.
When is X designed to produce/supposed to produce/has the purpose of producing E?
The most obvious case is where one or more conscious... Read more
My English teacher has said that it is important to read an author first, before reading her critics, so that one can form an opinion unpolluted by the arguments of others. Is philosophy like this as well? Should I read Wittgenstein before I read books and articles about Wittgenstein? Should I avoid books which try to summarize the great works of philosophy, in case theirs is a biased interpretation? Philosophy is pretty hard, and I think that few people can be expected to attack _The critique of pure reason_ alone; for the philosophy undergraduate, what should be the role of "secondary" sources?
Andrew N. Carpenter
February 5, 2007
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With respect to beginning to study the history of philosophy, Ithink that it is almost always more interesting and rewarding to engagewith primary philosophical texts without consulting commentaries andother secondary sources: direct intellectual contact with the mostpoweful philosoph... Read more
How can one acquire knowledge through emotions only?
Miranda Fricker
February 19, 2007
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The anglo-american philosophical tradition has not been very kind to the emotions until relatively recently, when there has been an upsurge of support for the idea (latent, however, in Aristotle) that emotions can have cognitive content - they can tell you stuff about how the world is.... Read more
In the larger epistemological sense, what role does the law of witnesses, e.g. Federal Rules of Evidence (http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/fre/index.html#article_vi), play in our search for knowledge (and truth)? So much of our day-to-day life in modern society is based upon the law or rule of witnesses, e.g. the rule of law, scientific investigations, journalism (print and television news reports), to name just a few. And yet if we take the view of the skeptics -- and to a larger degree, much of philosophy -- nothing is really knowable (with respect to certainty). So how can so much of our daily life rest upon (be founded upon) a principle -- the law or rule of witnesses -- which may be without epistemological foundation? If there are any texts that specifically address this subject, I would appreciate references. Thanks in advance for any and all replies!
Peter S. Fosl
January 11, 2007
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The reliability of witnesses is a terribly interesting issue. You may find it surprising to learn that according to the directors of the Innocence Project at Northwestern University (a project that investigates cases of erroneous criminal conviction) the false testimony of eye witnesses is... Read more
What is music? I can recognise music from cultures other than my own as being music, even if I don't enjoy it; but what makes a series of sounds 'music'? Similarly (I assume), when does human vocalising become song?
Peter S. Fosl
January 5, 2007
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What a fascinating question. I hope that some of my co-panelists can give you the answer this question deserves. For myself, I would briefly and cautiously answer this way: What makes a series of sounds (or even a single sound or even a silence) music is our agreement to consider it as mus... Read more
On the morality of the death penalty: I live in a country (Australia) where the death penalty has long been abolished and is unpopular; particularly mandatory death penalties, say, for example, for people trafficking in illegal drugs over certain quantities. I bring up this example because an Australian citizen was executed in Singapore for exactly that activity. Certainly, I find such laws difficult to justify as consistent, on utilitarian grounds at least. If a person caught in an airport with 0.5 kg of heroin strapped to his body ought to die because that is less-bad than the reasonably presumed consequences to many people would be, were he allowed to live, then surely there is a case for the death penalty for tobacconists or sellers of alcohol. I have no statistics at hand, but I am guessing that the tobacco sold by one tobacconist over several decades would lead to comparable illnesses or numbers of deaths as would the total amount of heroin carried by this particular Australian 'drug mule'. Nonetheless, I cannot escape the thought that there is a reasonable argument for the death penalty (even a mandatory one), only if certain conditions are indisputably met: (1) That a given action X be considered so bad by a society that the society agrees that it simply cannot countenance the occurrence of X. (2) That, it is agreed that unless restrained, a particular agent Y is capable of doing X and that there is a real likelihood that Y will do X. (3) That the only effective way to restrain Y is to kill Y. A rough and ready example of this thinking is that X is torture and murder of an incapacitated victim by pouring strong acid on his face (as also happened in Australia a few years ago, by a paid hit-man: the victim owed someone money); and that Y has previously committed X (which demonstrates capacity), has failed to show any remorse or reformation (is highly likely to commit X in the future) and that the state's legal/prison system cannot guarantee permanent restraint of Y, except through execution. It is pretty clear that such a claim entails various problems: vagueness and appeal to inference to the future, for instance. But as long as we discount simple edicts like 'you shall not kill humans', I cannot see an argument against the principle of this claim. Do you agree?
Peter S. Fosl
January 5, 2007
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When I find myself considering individual cases like the BTK killer and Reinhard Heydrich, I find myself sympathetic to just the sort of argument you present and animated by the feeling that there's really no compelling reason against executing them. But when I think things through more sobe... Read more
Rawls defines justice as fairness. But it is not clear to me how justice differs from fairness in the first place. Dictionaries do not help because they all indicate both terms as synonyms of each other. Could anyone point me out how the two are distinct? THANKS!!!
Peter S. Fosl
January 5, 2007
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Dictionaries can be philosophically disappointing, indeed. But of course one has to remember that they provide only very, very, very brief definitions. Moreover, they're aim is often to capture the common and historical usage, rather than the philosophical theory standing behind the concept.... Read more
This is a follow-up to question 1522 [www.askphilosophers/question/1522). In my language, there is a single word for "justice" and "fairness" ("justiça"). If someone in an English-speaking movie says "That ain't fair!", the translation will probably use our word for "just". So, it is really very difficult for me to understand Rawls's claim that justice is fairness. How could justiça not be justiça?
Oliver Leaman
January 5, 2007
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I don't see the difficulty. Rawls tried to show how his conception of justice really does establish the parameters of justice, i.e. fairness. When we wonder whether some distribution is just we consider whether it is fair, and if it is, then it is just. Of course, we tend to disagree on what... Read more
Can there be such a thing as 'progress' in human history? Does time and circumsance have a more than superficial bearing on our beings? Or are we essentially the same regardless of historical epoch or geographical conditioning? I refer to the so-called 'birth of reason' in 17th century Europe, and its so-said 'dawn of modernity'.
Andrew N. Carpenter
January 5, 2007
(changed January 5, 2007)
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I agree with Peter that one need to specify exact criteria for progressbefore making the sort of assessment that you describe. All suchcritiera and assessments will be controversial because our knowledge ofourselves and our histories is limited and controversial, but this byno way means... Read more