Recent Responses

What's the difference between a philosophy and a religion?

Sean Greenberg October 14, 2005 (changed October 14, 2005) Permalink One might mark the difference between philosophy and religion by looking at the different bases given for claims in these two domains. Philosophical claims are justified by arguments, which provide reasons to believe those claims; religious claims need not rest on arguments, but appeal to... Read more

Mind

Is there an "unconscious", or "subconscious", and if so why hold that such an entity exists.

Richard Heck October 13, 2005 (changed October 13, 2005) Permalink I'm not sure what you mean by "unconcious". If something braodly Freudian, then I'm not in a position to answer this. But there is another notion of "unconscious" that figures heavily in comtemporary empirical psychology: It is the idea of processing or information that is inaccessible to co... Read more

Mathematics

As a teacher of high school mathematics and a former student of philosophy, I try to merge the two to engage my students in meaningful conversations about the significance of some mathematical properties. Recently, however, I could not adequately defend the statement "a=a" as being necessary for our study of geometry when one student challenged "When is a never NOT equal to a?" What would you tell them? (One student did offer the defense that "Well, if we said a=2 and a=5 then a=a would be false, causing problems.")

Alexander George October 13, 2005 (changed October 13, 2005) Permalink I'm not sure whether you're asking (1) What role does the reflexivityof identity (i.e., every object is equal to itself) play in geometry?,or (2) What justification can be offered for the reflexivity ofidentity? As regards (1), I assume that in an explicit axiomatizationof geometry, ther... Read more

Philosophers

Would we be correct to say that, in a sense, Wittgenstein(2) eliminated the need for the Kantian distinction between the noumenal and the phenomenal? I'm thinking more about Remarks on the Foundations on Mathematics and On Certainty and less about the Investigations... More precisely, if all that can be said can be said in natural language alone--therefore in the context of a language game--then aren't we unable to think/speak of a reality "behind" or "outside" of the games? If we can't express "empirical facts" otherwise but within language games, then aren't we unavoidably committed to the rules of one particular game or another? (If we attempt to deconstruct the way we "play" with phrases such as "the real world" or "the noumenal", can we go further than Nietzsche's allegorical evolution and mystification of the real world in Twilight of Idols?) Is the noumenal nothing more than something we artificially construct by logical opposition to our mundane experience of knowing, thinking, feeling, experiencing? Does it hold any more fascination for today's professional philosophers? If it was not Wittgenstein that got rid of it for us, who did? Thank you! Gabriel Mihalache

Richard Heck October 13, 2005 (changed October 13, 2005) Permalink The sort of remark made in the second paragraph is one I see and hear a lot. But, frankly, I just don't get it. In particular, why is it supposed to follow that I can't use language to speak of a reality that is independent of language? I can use language to speak of all kinds of things that... Read more

Freedom

If, through free will, we take only those actions that we choose to take (barring physical enforcement or life/death situations), then where does the concept of 'external influence' fit in, and are we not then ultimately accountable for all the decisions we make in life, even self-destructive ones (the battered wife, the addict, the gangbanger teenager, etc.)?

Richard Heck October 13, 2005 (changed October 13, 2005) Permalink I don't see how the conclusion follows. Coercion is an obvious counter-example. If someone holds a gun to your head and so coerces you, say, to make crank phone calls, I don't see that you should be held "ultimately accountable" for upsetting the recipients. And coercion hardly has to be "li... Read more

Ethics

Situation: married man and unmarried woman on the verge of involvement. Does the woman have a responsibility to protect his marriage vows, or is the responsibility solely his? In the absence of any specific religious doctrine, how would you frame a principle to facilitate discrimination about where responsibility begins and ends?

Matthew Silverstein October 15, 2005 (changed October 15, 2005) Permalink When I read your description of the situation, my first thought was that the woman has a responsibility not to protect the married man's vows, but rather to protect the married man's wife. After all, the wife is the one who is most likely to be harmed by her husband's affair, and it s... Read more

Biology Religion

In intelligent design theory, what exactly are the ID scientists comparing life to, to determine its complexity?

Richard Heck October 13, 2005 (changed October 13, 2005) Permalink My understanding is that they're not really comparing it to anything. The idea is that the structure of DNA is, in itself, so complex that it could not have been produced by the kinds of processes postulated in the theory of evolution. There are ways of measuring complexity in such cases, or... Read more

Space

Where does the universe end?

Richard Heck October 13, 2005 (changed October 13, 2005) Permalink The answer to question 50 is also an answer to this question, I think: The universe doesn't have an end. Log in to post comments

Language Mind

I have heard philosophers propose that thought is dependent upon language: that without language one cannot have thoughts, that we can think of thoughts as sentences, etc. There seems to be a strong correlation, in many philosophers' writings, between thoughts and sentences of a language. In some limited sense, this makes sense to me. Creatures that clearly do not have language (platypuses, say) do not seem to have thoughts; whatever goes through their heads, they do not seem to do what we do when we think. And for those of us who do have language skills, thoughts take the form of sentences in whatever language(s) we speak. But philosophers often assume that thoughts just ARE those sentences, that it is nonsensical even to say that "thoughts take the form of sentences in a language". But how can the ability to think depend on the possession of language skills? If a human baby were never taught to speak or to understand a language, and thus arrived at the age of 30 with no language skills, would we really want to say that he had never had a thought in his life? What if he had survived half that time on a deserted island through ingenuity and invention? Unfortunately, children are occasionally neglected to the point where they do not acquire language skills. (And even more unfortunately, scientists call these children "feral".) It strikes me as inaccurate to say that it is impossible for these children, despite their stunted development, to have a single thought. Do any philosophers have similar intuitions? And if so, is the ability to think linked to, perhaps, membership in a species that is capable of developing language? Are any philosophers less homo-centric and inclined to allow that chimpanzees or other animals are capable of extremely rudimentary thoughts? Many thanks.

Richard Heck October 13, 2005 (changed October 13, 2005) Permalink The question what the relation is between thought and language is, to my mind, one of the most fundamental issues in contemporary philosophy. That is to say, what one's view is about this matter will profoundly shape one's views on many other topics. What one's impression is of the current s... Read more

Mathematics

As a teacher of high school mathematics and a former student of philosophy, I try to merge the two to engage my students in meaningful conversations about the significance of some mathematical properties. Recently, however, I could not adequately defend the statement "a=a" as being necessary for our study of geometry when one student challenged "When is a never NOT equal to a?" What would you tell them? (One student did offer the defense that "Well, if we said a=2 and a=5 then a=a would be false, causing problems.")

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