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Utilitarianism is a moral theory. That we ought to maximize happiness (and minimize suffering) is a normative prescription.
February 18, 2017 at 05:53
Nominalism needs to die. We should take it out back and shoot it, put it out of its misery. Also Leopardi's aesthetic of the spontaneous explorer is q...
February 18, 2017 at 05:27
I don't know why you seem to be so resistant towards metaphysics. This also isn't even metaphysics, it's an attempt at phenomenology, the science of c...
February 18, 2017 at 02:23
I don't get this, astrology isn't metaphysics, and metaphysics isn't astrology. Hence why epistemically productive metaphysics is far more conservativ...
February 17, 2017 at 21:56
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4yutN6FB2M
February 16, 2017 at 17:08
Interesting theory. In regards to how Christianity engenders atheism, I would qualify this and say that it engenders reactionary atheism. To get as fa...
February 15, 2017 at 00:39
Second-order morality takes its ground to be unquestionably justified, and as such suffers from inconsistencies, hypocrisy, aggressive-ness, and tende...
February 14, 2017 at 22:23
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=upbs4kK32kg
February 14, 2017 at 18:06
This is understandable as it's not really a "thing" in moral philosophy. A first-order moral agent can act in first-order moral ways. A second-order m...
February 14, 2017 at 16:52
Perhaps a similar conclusion, but for different reasons I believe.
February 13, 2017 at 23:18
I'm not saying we should just dismiss them as hacks, but that we should be skeptical that the metaphysical systems they employed are indeed accurate p...
February 13, 2017 at 19:23
This is entirely correct. I suspect Scholasticism is indeed flawed even if has internal consistency, but this is just because it comes across as advoc...
February 13, 2017 at 18:43
Indeed, I agree with Agustino, thank you for the references!
February 13, 2017 at 18:19
If it helps, I struggle with this all the time. Our personalities are not of our own creation - they are socially influenced and thus the optimistic a...
February 13, 2017 at 18:13
I've mentioned him several times in the past, but I personally found Julio Cabrera's A Critique of Affirmative Morality to be extremely provocative an...
February 12, 2017 at 00:24
I made a similar argument for antinatalism elsewhere - basically, we did nothing to deserve the goods and bads of life, since we didn't exist before w...
February 11, 2017 at 18:23
Probably I'll give a more thorough response later, but you might be interested in a book on this very subject: Is Nature Ever Evil?: Religion, Science...
February 11, 2017 at 05:47
As they are to me. I'm not nearly as optimistic as Pearce is, but a cautious, pragmatic optimism is the best thing one can have in this situation. We ...
February 10, 2017 at 16:15
False. You are required to be a human to be you. You aren't able to be anything else. That you exist as a human was 100% guaranteed, although your exi...
February 10, 2017 at 15:50
K
February 09, 2017 at 20:01
https://www.hedweb.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v07VZIQyoMc
February 09, 2017 at 16:14
I think this is an example of a philosophical thought experiment that seems to be legitimately problematic, but in reality is actually not an issue at...
February 09, 2017 at 15:47
Hotline Miami
February 08, 2017 at 23:25
We should consider jettisoning the emojis on this forum.
February 08, 2017 at 19:49
Ehh, I would disagree. Descartes is indispensable to any student of the history of philosophy. Studying philosophy isn't just getting what's important...
February 08, 2017 at 19:36
Well I mean I suppose you could say that Kant systematized everything.
February 08, 2017 at 02:27
But...but...my noumenon...
February 08, 2017 at 02:03
Wait but why, though? His aphorisms are great.
February 08, 2017 at 00:28
I think we generally agree. Habits and tendencies arise from dispositions and powers - they are the "macro" scale "laws" while dispositions and powers...
February 07, 2017 at 20:34
Behaviorism was dominant back in the day, in large part because the mind was seen as unable to be studied scientifically. But clearly people don't jus...
February 07, 2017 at 20:15
But who gets to decide when something is fundamental? If we just said that it's a fundamental law that a computer turns on when the power button is pr...
February 07, 2017 at 20:06
The game of Life, I'm not doing so well as of late ... :s
February 07, 2017 at 16:08
Natural laws are the natural extension of a Cartesian epistemologically-oriented metaphysics, one that rejects teleology in favor of mysterious, immut...
February 07, 2017 at 04:20
Damn, that political compass test is ridiculously biased.
February 06, 2017 at 17:39
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyjVixkpKUw
February 06, 2017 at 17:30
In: Existence  — view comment
What book?
February 04, 2017 at 22:24
In: Existence  — view comment
Welcome to philosophy! ;)
February 04, 2017 at 22:15
In: Existence  — view comment
Analogy: there are different sorts of noodles. But are all noodles made of the same thing? Similarly, there are cars and people and numbers and mounta...
February 04, 2017 at 22:05
In: Existence  — view comment
There certainly are different ways of existing, in the sense of different sorts of arrangements and configurations and what have you. But the question...
February 04, 2017 at 21:23
In: Existence  — view comment
Existence as a false predicate comes from Kant. Aristotelian hylomorphism is the theory that substance (another esoteric term unfortunately) is made u...
February 04, 2017 at 21:17
The job of government is to monopolize violence so nobody else gets to.
February 04, 2017 at 21:13
In: Existence  — view comment
To ask such a question seems to presuppose that there is only one "way" or "mode" of existence. Does an Boeing 747 exist in the same way the number th...
February 04, 2017 at 20:57
The extreme nominalist would probably have a difficult, maybe impossible, task of explaining qualitative similarity. The extreme realist (or universal...
February 03, 2017 at 20:22
Y'all need Leibnizian monads and vicarious causation, bitches.
February 01, 2017 at 22:21
This works well with my own phenomenological analysis of how I reason. Except I would add that higher-order thinking processes seem to be based largel...
February 01, 2017 at 00:16
Curious, why not? This premise seems to rest upon the assumption that something can only be causally relevant to something else in its ontological "sp...
January 31, 2017 at 22:27
In my honest opinion, nothing really important or deep, at least in the holistic sense (and not the more specific sense, like social or political issu...
January 30, 2017 at 20:40
Isn't this an inductive premise, though? In the sense that it cannot be deductively proven that all ravens are black? What if there was an albino rave...
January 30, 2017 at 17:23
"The future is the only transcendental value for men without God." - Albert Camus The "idolatry of tomorrow." in Cioran's words.
January 30, 2017 at 06:31
I would say that I agree with the overall sentiment that reason is a burden as much as it is a gift. And I would also agree that philosophy has a hist...
January 29, 2017 at 06:16