There's an old critique of A C Grayling which seems to agree with Un's view of this, its emphasis being that 'militant atheism' in a sense needs relig...
A complicating issue is how 'we' distribute medical help. In practice there is already rationing by society and cost of types of treatment, and the te...
It seems a bit perverse to claim that groups of people which each call themselves a 'party' are nevertheless simply of the same party. The label of th...
Well, 1+1 = 10 in a binary system, to take the simplest example where the signs to the left of the '=' might imply a different sign to the right. I ne...
For me a memory, for example, is something a person experiences. It's an odd thing for instance to come to a place you believe you've never been befor...
Then there is the mother, or indeed any close carer, of a baby: she recognises a something in the baby that is very particularly that new human being,...
Personally I think the 'aesthetic' is too easily relegated to the sidelines of philosophical chat. Kant himself attempts in the least studied of the c...
The Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán set out in a speech of 2014 his vision of the future form of the state as 'a workfare state': He specifies that this...
The science behind many human actions is however, provisional and, as earlier posters like T Clark have suggested, pragmatic. The relation between ser...
The ghost of Witt says: is this question of the right form? Where did these two categories and their apparently all-encompassing nature derive from? I...
A friend said to me today in our walk through the Yorkshire snow, 'Why do birds migrate?' I think what I like about a philosophy forum is that many pe...
I think you will find that philosophers have decided it *is* philosophy in the past couple of decades. Nice Mr Knobe is actually the co-author of the ...
'Science' is often presumed to be monolithic in these debates. But time in biology and, it seems to me, genetics, is ill-explained by ideas that origi...
Regarding the notes to the Waste Land: some of them are deliberately obscure and unhelpful. My long acquaintance with the poem makes me feel your orig...
On the flip side of a shopping list. This is by Billy Collins. Last night we ended up on the couch trying to remember all of the friends who had died ...
Erving Goffman in the 60's to 80's wrote about talk and conversation as ritual. Indeed one of the books of essays is called 'Interactive ritual'. Alth...
I’ve found philosophy to be therapeutic. I had no idea that this would be so when I began to be obsessed with it. Some Austrian fellow felt the same. ...
'There’s glory for you!’ ‘I don’t know what you mean by “glory,”’ Alice said. Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. ‘Of course you don’t—till I tell yo...
In my previous times here at the forum I've learnt a lot from both the two previous posters, apo and his pragmatist approach to knowledge, and 180's c...
The philosophy of humour has its very own Stanford encyclopaedia entry by John Morreall. Plenty of philosophers have wondered about humour; most unexp...
Kant would say time and space are intuitions we are born with, not concepts. I don't see how 'shape' would be 'primal' in your terms as it preliminari...
Well, this is an eloquent account of a rather cosy view of maternity - with a male child - and a psychological claim depending only on its own literar...
I’m not a great one for laws. But it’s true that Aristotle, while extolling philia or friendship, did indeed think the virtuous would love themselves ...
You're welcome to chime in. That's a topic of interest to me, I'm a childless man. For myself, I do care about any old children above fit adults: so, ...
I'm interested in what you're saying and hope you don't mind continuing comments. As I've said I don't understand the primacy you give to 'belief'. Wh...
I am only proposing that you can give a social robot enough of the appearance of a carer for humans to feel comfortable interacting with it. It seems ...
One interesting thing if you watch people talking on the telephone is how they cannot help gesturing and communicating with their face and eyes to the...
No need to withdraw the idea in my view, John. It's a very productive idea, even if fuzzy. And as soon as a fuzzy-in-itself idea becomes a metaphor, i...
I think the main reason we can't talk fluently with computers is that we talk, and interpret talk, with our bodies, not our 'minds'. That's how mind-r...
Great quote! To debate it thoroughly would take us off-topic. My feeling is that social robotics - not Siri and Alexa, but the robots that provide car...
(HI Wayfarer, hope all is well) I don't see why a machine couldn't be developed that would know how to simulate the expression of pain, and would also...
I think we must see the Moore-Wittgenstein debate about 'hands' differently. To me Wittgenstein's point is that these just are my hands: 'knowledge' o...
What justification do you have for saying that? In European languages such a term only originated in the 1920's. Hughes's commentary on Aristotelian p...
Hi Sam, Long time no see, I hope you are well. I have been infirm and studying philosophy. I think Wittgenstein addresses this question in para 208 of...
The most concrete efforts to apply ergodicity to 'history' have happened in Economics. Google 'ergodicity' and 'economics' and you'll find a tangle of...
If you begin with an individualistic premise like this, you come to an individualistic conclusion. This isn't a surprise. I might begin with, say, 'Hu...
If you take ordinary human suffering that has 'natural' causes, like a painful childhood death from cancer, or the deaths from a tsunami or earthquake...
How I feel about this at the moment is that ideas that separate 'consciousness' or 'lived experience' from our other endeavours like this are not goin...
Your post bears more than a passing resemblance to an 11-year-old blog post, https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200...
It's an odd thing that a glass of water is not entirely H2O. Most water, in glasses, lakes, taps/faucets, also 'contains' what we call, if pushed. 'im...
I used to use the Poetics to teach scriptwriting and screenwriting. It's enjoyably succinct, and has that slightly baffling tendency of Aristotle's (I...
The Stanford entry you quote does go on to mention, as it had already stated at the outset, that 'there is a broad consensus among philosophers of sci...
The blog in Scientific American referenced by this article is actually opposed to the view you summarise here. Kastrup is against 'information realism...
The idea that this was invented by Muslim Brotherhood activists had I thought been long discredited. Here a person calling themselves a counter-jihadi...
I'm an art-maker not an elite member of a critical group, I've spent much of my life writing prose, dialogue, music, poetry, songs, all for a living. ...
You're mistaken. Lord of the Rings is on the curriculum in many school districts in many countries. Houghton Mifflin publish a comprehensive pack for ...
Just to add...any given list of proper names of actual people will have duplicates...triplicates...Like Socrates the footballer and Socrates the philo...
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