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Is it possible to translate a syllogism into propositional logic? This is the example: All doctors went to medical school. Hanna is a doctor. Hanna went to medical school. Thanks a lot, Sebastiano
For any syllogism containing
Stephen Maitzen
October 30, 2015
(changed October 30, 2015)
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For any syllogism containing quantifiers such as "all," "some," and "no"/"none," you'll need predicate logic for the translation. Propositional logic alone won't suffice. But you could use propositional logic to translate a non-quantified argument that's at lea... Read more
How often do philosophers admit their own defeat in their own published academic articles?
Philosophy is a highly
Michael Cholbi
October 29, 2015
(changed October 29, 2015)
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Philosophy is a highly discursive discipline founded on argumentative give and take. Often when a philosopher's position is subject to criticism she believes she cannot answer, she modifies her position while trying to retain those elements of those position she belie... Read more
"Infinity" poses a ton of problems for both science and philosophy, I'm sure, but I would like to ask about a very particular aspect of this problem. What ideas are out there right now about infinitely divisible time and human death? If hours, minutes, seconds, half-seconds, can be cut down perpetually, what does this mean for my "time of death"?
One might mean either of two
Stephen Maitzen
October 24, 2015
(changed April 20, 2018)
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One might mean either of two things by "infinitely divisible time." One might mean merely that (1) any nonzero interval of time can in principle be divided into smaller and smaller units indefinitely: what's sometimes called a "potentially infinite" collection of... Read more
I am wondering if there is an alternative between nominalism and realism. Both of these theories agree that particulars exist but they disagree about the relationship between the particulars and their properties. However, what if there are no individual particular entities that are independent with their own self-nature? In our modern times, we often discuss how entities are interconnected and, to some extent, dependent on other entities. In the field of Social Work, for example, the micro, mezzo, and macro environments affect each other and the line between the three are constantly blurred and uncertain. Believing in a "mechanical" world that is made up of separate individual parts is becoming increasingly difficult to believe.
I can't do better than to
Stephen Maitzen
October 24, 2015
(changed October 24, 2015)
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I can't do better than to recommend that you consult the SEP entry on monism written by Jonathan Schaffer. It's not clear to me from your question whether you favor what Schaffer calls "existence monism" or instead what he calls "priority monism," but you'll... Read more
what are the characteristics of a philosophical question
A tough one - I'd be
Michael Cholbi
October 22, 2015
(changed October 22, 2015)
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A tough one - I'd be interested to see other panelists weigh in!
The first thing to say is that it's hard to identify any limits to the subject matter of philosophical questions. Traditionally, philosophy has addressed questions about human nature, the nature of re... Read more
Do philosophers ever create philosophical fictions akin to legal fictions in order to refute an argument? If so, how pervasive is this practice?
Yes-- all the time. Take for
Gordon Marino
October 22, 2015
(changed October 22, 2015)
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Yes-- all the time. Take for example Robert Nozick's idea of the pleasure machine. Nozick asks - if there were a machine that you could just to be hooked up to that would guarantee that you have an entire life of the highest pleasure - but which would take you ou... Read more
Is it always non-racist to criticize a religion? Even if we disregard ethnic religions such as Shinto or Judaism, the reality remains that any religion and its branches will always have one predominant majority ethnic group practicing it, usually of the religion's or the branch's founding race. To say that one can simply change to another religion or no religion anytime at will is to assume that one's culture of which race is a central component whether one realizes it or not, and one's religion are mutually exclusive, as if the matter is a logic game. One might argue that it's the culture, not the race that's being criticized, but then culture arises from race (among other factors), doesn't it?
Your opening question, I
Yuval Avnur
October 18, 2015
(changed October 18, 2015)
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Your opening question, I think, is relatively easy to answer: it's not *always* non-racist to criticize a religion. Sometimes it is racist because the criticism is motivated by racist attitudes. You may, for example, loathe race X, and you know that all of them are, sa... Read more
Hello, My question is: what makes a swear-word/curse/cuss offensive? I submitted to a friend that in order for a word to be offensive three criteria have to be filled. 1) The speaker must utter the word with the intention to offend. 2) The speaker and hearer must both be aware of the background context of the word as an offensive word. 3) The hearer must hear the word and react; taking offence The justification for this is that a word is just a sound and that many languages use sounds that in another language are curses. It is irrational to take offence to a sound if the speaker is ignorant of it's vulgar connotations. Without a shared contextual understanding of a word's history as offensive, a speaker seeking to offend through uttering a word (without using other signs of contempt or emphasis) is just making a sound to the hearer which has no offensive connotations to them. The hearer upon hearing the word reacts, consciously or unconsciously actively taking offence. A person intending to offend another within a shared contextual understanding is not inevitably successful. The hearer may respond with amusement, disdain, pity, or any other emotive reaction instead of offence. Therefore, in order for a word to be offensive, all three of these criteria have to be filled, if they aren't, the word isn't offensive. Your thoughts? Thanks Joe
I'd suggest that we need to
Allen Stairs
October 15, 2015
(changed October 15, 2015)
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I'd suggest that we need to keep three things separate: 1) whether the word is offensive, 2) whether offense was intended, and 3) whether the hearer was offended. All eight possibilities are real. To take the most relevant, a word might be offensive, and yet t... Read more
In answering question 24759, Michael Cholbi writes: "It's important not to confuse the facts by which others know or identify a person and the facts that constitute his or her identity as a person. The way you and I think about Nelson is in terms of social facts about him (his accomplishments, etc.). If I were struggling to remember who was South Africa's first post-apartheid leader, you'd naturally tell me, "Don't you remember? It was Nelson Mandela."" Professor Cholbi intended that as an argument in favour of the theory that "He's not Mandela unless he has that genetic constitution." But suppose we are extremely well informed geneticists and you were struggling to remember who was the person who had the unique sequence of nucleotides CTAG repeated for 999 times between locations 1A237C and 1A324A. I would also tell you: "Don't you remember? It was Nelson Mandela." What is the difference between the genetic and the social fact? Or the difference between genetic constitution and whatever events that occurred in Mandela's mother's womb after that genetic constitution was fixed? Michael Cholbi says: "Mandela's genetic constitution is essential to him. Everything else about him is contingent." But isn't that just assuming what is being asked? A genetic constitution is a causally relevant fact, like any other. Why choose that one for identity? Professor Cholbi didn't give a single argument, did he? I don't ask Askphilosophers to address the possibility of cloning and the cases of identical twins. It is just that I don't have a clue why people have to have "essences" and why such "essences" have to be sequences of nucleotides (or of numbers, for that matter: within a few years, we will only need the sequence of letters (A, C, T, G) to produce a genetically identical organism). Thank you.
Thanks for following up. You
Michael Cholbi
October 15, 2015
(changed October 15, 2015)
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Thanks for following up. You're asking about a number of issues at once, so let's see if we can distill them out.
First, you wonder why people must have "essences" at all. That's a big question -- Hume is a well-known philosopher who can be read at suggesting t... Read more
Is it ethical to have biological children when there are children who could benefit from fostering or adoption? Isn't creating further needs wrong, when existing needs could be fulfilled? I'm unsure about the moral status of having children reproductively when fostering is possible. There are some reasons for this concern, which are as follows: In the developed world, each person tends to cause globally disproportionate amounts of pollution and environmental harm. The world bank's statistics on per-capita GHG output by country support this. Creating a new person means that there is a new set of needs which must be fulfilled, often at the expense of the globally worst-off, who will be hurt by the effects of procuring the necessary resources to meet those needs. Secondly, it seems as if we have moral reason to meet existing needs before it is permissible to create more needs through reproduction. There are plenty of children without homes, and adopting or fostering them both reduces environmental harms and meets needs that would not otherwise be met. It doesn't seem as if we need to commit to any position as radical as antinatalism to say that having children and not adopting is usually wrong in the developed world, but these concerns do not feature in public discourse concerning environmental impact. In fact, even environmental organisations seem squeamish about bringing it up as an area worth investigating. Is this cavalier and seemingly unconcerned attitude towards having biological children in the developed world defensible? If so, how could it be defended?
I think you're onto a
Peter S. Fosl
October 12, 2015
(changed October 12, 2015)
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I think you're onto a profoundly important question, and I share your concern that the issue is not commonly one encounters in public discourses. I think the issue of having children is, as you say, bound up with concerns about prioritizing existing needs and also... Read more