But is it really? How would you know without a detailed study of the role that conscious experiences play in our functioning now and in our evolutiona...
You are still talking about "democracy" as if it was synonymous with "the best form of government." If you remove what makes democracy a democracy, yo...
You don't understand what "democracy" means, do you? As @"StreetlightX" points out, the sine qua non of democracy is that the governed have a say in h...
For a long time there prevailed a sense of a metaphysical or a logical necessity of our mathematical constructs. Pythagoreans, for example, went so fa...
Surely, we don't need the example of another civilization independently "discovering" mathematics to assure ourselves of the "unreasonable effectivene...
The popular wisdom says that there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. Philosophy supplies a forceful counterargument to that sentiment: the...
You should be careful about how you ask this question. What mathematics are we talking about? Viewed from the most general perspective, mathematics is...
It is a mistake all right, but who actually makes that mistake? When I say that I did not exist prior to my birth, I do not necessarily commit myself ...
I think the OP is suggesting an argument against presentism (only that which exists now has genuine existence): It would not make sense to care about ...
You chose an extremely unfortunate framing for your topic. For one thing, it falls victim to Cunningham's Law: as you can see, everyone who responds t...
You say "in other words," but what you write then in no way follows from what came before. First, you make this bizarre attribution of moral agency to...
The original meaning of agnostic - a term coined by Henry "Darwin's Bulldog" Huxley - is precisely as you say: someone whose position is that they don...
There has been an interest in "naturalizing" religion - explaining its emergence and perdurance (@"Bitter Crank") as a natural phenomenon - going back...
"No statements are true" would be a self-contradictory statement. "There is no objective truth" or "No statements are objectively true" is not obvious...
There is no one thing that is meant by "materialism." "Materialism" is a rather dated term, more often used in derogative contexts nowadays, with "phy...
Broadly speaking, as pointed out, what you are trying to do is to deduce the meaning of life from a description of its natural history and dynamics - ...
"Necessarily" is used here informally, as an amplification. This should not be confused with necessity in modal logic (which does not figure in this c...
I was responding directly to your own summary of your position. If you think that summary was inadequate, you could try again, instead of shooting the...
So your complaint is that mental illnesses are not reducible to simple underlying physical causes? That's what makes psychology and psychiatry "unscie...
Your opening post doesn't necessarily describe "really disturbed individuals" - it applies to a much wider range of people who are not skilled at writ...
Some people? What do you think? What are your reasons? Isn't this why you opened a discussion on a philosophy forum? Look up what "hearsay" means. "Do...
Unless this really is a completely random guess, can you give any reason for your numbers, or for the difference between them? What does make the seco...
You may think that you are supporting the OP by claiming that 2+2 equals 4 by definition, but you are actually doing the opposite. If it is nothing mo...
I am at a loss as to what to make of your thread. The topic that you coyly avoid naming is Is 2 + 2 = 4 universally true? - which, of course, poses th...
Is this going to be another endless thread where loose terms like "absolute" are introduced but never explained, and then people proceed to talk past ...
It just means equality here. I wrote ? to emphasize that the equality holds unconditionally. For example, in the standard arithmetic p×1 = p for any p...
The sad thing with Brexit is that, as with Trump in the US, a massively skewed opinion on this forum is not representative of opinions among the gener...
So, dispensing with the unnecessary formalism, what you have stated is that if nothing can possibly exist, then there isn't a possibility of anything ...
Apologies, I mistook carelessness for plagiarism. Yes, I know that the term had a complicated history, but as can be seen from the Wiki precis, throug...
There are no good forms of political correctness. "Political correctness" - as the very history of the phrase indicates, is a term of mockery and deri...
You don't need to appeal to quantum mechanics in order to conclude that we "have influence on reality." If you are an agent, then you are influencing ...
If I understand you correctly, the question that you are asking is "How can we know that any number can be given a decimal representation?" (Because t...
It's hard to tell without a context, but if we don't assume the standard notation and the standard arithmetic, and instead assume some algebra with un...
At first glance this sounds really stupid. Considering that the author's previous article was published in a crackpot open-access "Journal of Consciou...
Yes, this is an important point. We don't even know what was lost without a trace - the Greek civilization was very fortunate in that respect. Babylon...
Generally I find such pop-culturology totally without merit. The usual procedure is to pick two stereotypes about a culture - or an entire civilizatio...
Babylonian mathematics is said to have been more advanced than Greek mathematics ever was in some respects. Not only did they come up with some advanc...
Like @"unenlightened" said, there is no reason to accept this. "It is raining outside or I should have bought some milk." Is this an "is" statement or...
I am not sure that the differences in class consciousness that you perceived have much to do with the French revolution. Here is Proust writing at the...
We have a Resources section just for that sort of thing. A topic with resources on good argumentation and critical thinking would be right at home the...
It's patronizing and overbearing and has a whiff of... Let's just say it has a whiff of Sapientia about it :razz: Having a sound logical structure is ...
Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that it's completely random and chaotic; of course there are reasons - they just aren't the obvious reasons that we like ...
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