The Philosophy Discussion Forum

Yes, the government owns your life. The government is your God with the power of life and death. If it decides you cannot be saved, it doesn't matter if others at their expense want to save your life. Only the government, your God, can make that decision. Opposing God is a virtually unforgivable si...

HexHammer wrote: ↑Fri Apr 20, 2018 7:00 am This isn't a law for anything other than pocket philosophy that leads to nothing.

It is, and it isn't.

This thread is for any suggestions you might have for improving Philosophy Now magazine. If there is anything in the mag that you like and would like more of, or anything that you don't like and would prefer less of, then this is a good place to say so (though of course you could always email me in...

We are not talking about reflex which is an unconscious act. We are talking about conscious free decision. 'Conscious' meaning self-conscious? I am making a decision and at the same time reflect 'that I am now making a decision'. I find it quite difficult to do this. As I write this post, I do not ...

Where the religious mind feels the importance of honoring eternal values, the progressive mind is only concerned with “enlightened expediency” Religious values are only 'eternal' is as far as they are so vaguely formulated as to be meaningless. When it comes to any practical application of these su...

Londoner, I am surprised at your literalist attitude. I had thought that you were aware of the power and function of myth as significant identifiers of cultures. I do not think we should treat every pre-scientific idea of the way the world works as a 'myth'. Some of it is simply their best guess, g...

I don't think the idea of a virgin birth was so outlandish for an age when people had no idea about life at the level of cells. If you look very closely at sperm you will not see a tiny human, so the human cannot grow from the sperm. So the baby must originate in the mother, but need some sort of in...

But there are naturalistic explanations of values. For instance human freedom is explained by reference to the criterion of the uniqueness of the individual. And this value was boosted by Romanticism and individualism which in their turn owe to the naturalistic historical perspective. I do not see ...

mir•a•cle noun 1. a surprising and welcome event that is not explicable by natural or scientific laws and is therefore considered to be the work of a divine agency. I've got to somewhat disagree with 'Dictionary'. An event that was ' not explicable by natural or scientific laws' would suggest that ...

Given that rigorous Logic applies to variable symbols that stand for any proposition what is to be defined in the elements of the statement that they stand for? Those propositions only have the property of being true of false. They also have to be distinct from the connectives, so they cannot thems...

There is no reason to assume getting top grades is a sign of overall merit. To think that it was would be to assume that an ability to pass certain types of exams on certain topics was a marker for overall superiority. The message of 'The Big Bang Theory' is one that everyone is familiar with from r...

You haven't heard that all of mathematics is reducible to logic? I'm not in a position to argue the case, but I understood that this had been achieved by about the beginning of the 20th C, due to the efforts of Russell, Frege, Whitehead et al. On the contrary, they failed to do this. There were alw...

But for Trixie's benefit, we should say that the 'Brain in a Vat' idea is nothing to do with relative morality.

Science works in as far as it restricts itself within a framework, which it does not question. But the friend in the OP has become oblivious to the framework. It is the friend who has a religious-type belief, since for him science has become a metaphysical construct. Science describes very little. I...

You are unlucky in that you have picked a silly illustration and explanation of the subject. The problem is that the same image is used to discuss two different philosophical questions. Most go for that of skepticism. How can we know that our perceptions correspond to an external world? In other wor...