Theology has been taught at Oxford and Cambridge for about eight hundred years, with I think the degree being something like Bachelor of Divinity. I a...
These two sentences need to be separated. Because they are juxtaposed, it is easy for anybody other than a very careful reader to infer that Peter Sin...
I find it interesting that some Christians adduce that bus ad as evidence of Dawkins' radicalism and hostility to religion. While Dawkins' view is muc...
Who cares about 'directly' - this new word that you have tried to smuggle into the discussion? Fortunately, the answer is - almost nobody, including t...
That's clear, but I'd be surprised if that's what you intended to say. It follows from that that the Ewells' libellous accusations of rape against Tom...
Like the 1960s Batman, the argument is so bad that it's good. Here are some bad/good (nonsensical) things about it that I love: Line 4 is note even a ...
In most people's lives friendships are mostly organic (ie happenstance, not deliberately constructed), but they don't have to be. There are many sugge...
I didn't say either of those two things, and I don't believe them, so I'm not interested in what happens when they're put together. Do you really beli...
That's just anecdotal. One might as well say 'sometimes food tastes nice and sometimes it doesn't, so there's no point in eating it'. What matters is ...
It is having faith in the principle of induction - the belief that the future will be like the past. As Hume pointed out, there is no way to logically...
It has nothing to do with Western secular culture. Secularism is about the separation of church and state, a principle that is supported as passionate...
I agree, in the case of a tree, provided we have not witnessed the destruction of the tree*. And I agree in the case of an uninterested God, like the ...
I think you undermine your case by stapling those two issues together. Given that an individual is here, alive and conscious, there is every reason to...
It doesn't seem that way to me. Experiencing absence is part of one of the most powerful human emotions there is, as it is what makes the premature de...
Necessary conditions for my notion of personhood include consciousness, self-consciousness, non-predictable response to stimuli, possession of emotion...
Unlike the controversial Mr Dawkins, I have no problem with the notion of divine simplicity, as long as it is not coupled with the assertion that the ...
Then you were not a master philosopher at all. To be quite crude about it, you were an incompetent one. Remember Socrates: 'all I know is that I know ...
Amen. And I would add the question 'what do you mean by genuine?'. Isn't genuineness a little like naturalness? We say cities are unnatural for humans...
Gosh. What a long thread for an OP that was just a hit and run that was simply a crude expression of opinion contained not a single philosophical argu...
There are two very different meanings of pessimism. One believes that things will happen which most people would class as bad. The other has negative ...
Sorry, I've only dipped in and out of this thread, which is now nine pages long on my computer, so no doubt I've missed many of the posts and the cont...
Agreed, it doesn't necessarily have any implications for non-human animals. It depends on what reason is given for why humans should be treated equall...
It's hard to know how to answer questions like that. 'Why' questions are so hard to pin down and determine exactly what would constitute a satisfactor...
Thanks for your post. It contains a number of substantive points and I'll try to address them as best I can. Do I think it's inconsistent to argue aga...
The reference to Rugby gives away more than your Australianness. It tells us that you are either from NSW, ACT or Qld, or an exile from one of those. ...
I am baffled by your bafflement. The discussion was about the ethics of treating humans better than animals. You came back with a reason for treating ...
Not wanting to crow or anything, because we have our own problems too, but Australia suffers from (almost) none of those first three. 1. Electoral bou...
That is beside the point. The discussion was about ethical justifications for treating humans better than animals. Those reasons have nothing to do wi...
What those that criticise speciesism would say about this is that the question is why does people being human cause us to treat them better than other...
I would love for a Calvinist to turn up and explain why they believe that the last sentence doesn't contradict the first. Whence came the so-corrupt n...
Sometimes, yes, but surely not always? What think you of the legendary football (soccer) game reputedly played between the British and German troops i...
I wouldn't call that a general Christian understanding but rather a Roman Catholic understanding. Calvinism in particular seems to explicitly deny fre...
I absolutely agree with you about Schopenhauer. While I doubt I'm anywhere near as enthusiastic as you are, I very much enjoyed what I have read from ...
At the other place there was a drop-down list of possible reasons for deletion, and one was 'non-philosophical post'. If people are having a discussio...
If I saw comments criticising personal aspects of a philosopher interjected into a serious discussion others were trying to have about her/his philoso...
I would guess that Chalmers meant nothing by that 'in the world' and his inclusion of those words was just a vestigial habit for concluding certain so...
I can see that anger can mask pain, but it seems to me that it replaces it with something worse. To me anger seems to be pain+blame rather than pain p...
This is very timely for me, as my philosophy club is meeting tonight to discuss Martha Nussbaum's views on anger, which she wrote about at length in h...
I don't see any need to argue one or the other. Both are significant and we can do what is possible to mitigate both. But we in the West have more pot...
Yes, I think we are just making up our own narrative. No I don't think we should because I agree with Kant that should (ought) implies both Can and Ca...
I agree with that, except that I'd rule out the 'responding with a violent spirit' at the very start. Violence is sometimes a necessary part of a mult...
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