The Philosophy Discussion Forum

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If you can't say anything nice then don't say anything at all...

Darwin's claim that all life arose from a primordial single organism into which "life was breathed", is poppycock. There is still no known mechanical or naturalistic explanation as to how life started. The latter is demonstrably false: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miller%E2%80%93Urey_expe...

Olaf Stapledon wrote two of the greatest sci-fi books ever written and his day job was in a philosophy department.

I don't see the dilemma. Nothing about vegetarianism forces you to eat the baby. The fact that vegetarians value other animal life higher than meat-eaters does not mean that they value animal life simpliciter . Questions of respect for human life, societal norms, revulsion, self-loathing would clear...

Welcome to the asylum!

In Aristotle's taxonomy of explanations in terms of 4 basic kinds of cause, evolution ticks three out of four boxes. It provides a material, formal and efficient cause of why we are here. However, as others have pointed out, it fails to consititute a final cause because it does not explain our aim o...

He was totally evil. That would include being a vegetarian and an animal rights activist to me.

You think vegetarians are evil!?

Lovely stuff.

Toot-and-come-in!

(I'm trying to cheer up Chaz. He seems to be a bit grumpy at the moment and I know he likes jokes about Ancient Egypt.)

How do you use an Ancient Egyptian doorbell?

"Parts of this famous book are sketchy ... in other respects it is a marvelously readable, magnificently sweeping survey of Western thought, distinctive for placing it informatively into its historical context. Russell enjoyed writing it, and the enjoyment shows; his later remarks about it equa...

"A precious book ... a work that is in the highest degree pedagogical which stands above the conflicts of parties and opinions." – Albert Einstein

You need to improve your reading skills Chaz... Not only do you castigate Russell for expressing an opinion, calling it bias, as if that were a crime, you exaggerate and say that he gets "everything wrong." I didn't castigate Russell for expressing an opinion, I castigated him for being a ...

"A History of Western Philosophy errs consistently in this respect. Its author never seems to be able to make up his mind whether he is writing history or polemic.... [Its method] confers on philosophers who are dead and gone a kind of false contemporaneity which may make them seem important to...