Philosophy Now Forum

As you all know, the amendment second ratified to the US Constitution is not about guns. The objects of the right it constituionalizes are “Arms.” Swords, bayonets, and hatchets, as well as muskets, were the arms of the Revolutionary War. Current arms of individual use include body armor, hand grena...

The view of Aristotle's teacher's teacher, insofar as those views can be disentagled from those of the intermediary, may well have been that philosophy progresses by uncovering the failings of ever more sophisticated arguments about such matters of substance as justice and the nature of the human se...

Time travel into the past would violate the laws of physics specifically the law of cause and effect. It is not entirely clear just what the law of cause and effect is. Quantum theory has already shown that some of our traditional ways of understanding causation are probably wrong. The grandfather ...

The contributions of women philosophers have often received less attention than deserved. A couple of examples: Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia formulated the most important, and arguably decisive, objection to the mind-body theory of Descartes -- a theory that has come (regrettably) to dominate commo...

The notion of deterrence is an absurdity in a country which privatises its criminal justice system. One may believe that private prisons, and their lobbyists, are an abomination, and believe that prison terms in the US are generally excessive, and still believe that there is such a thing as deterre...

There is a large divide in punishment theory over whether justice requires and the state is obligated to punish those who perform prohibited acts. Call those who say yes "mandatory retirbutivists." For them, the murderer must be punished even were we to gain no crime control (and future sa...

It might well be that science can get better and better, at least in the sense of understanding and making fewer or less serious errors without ever getting closer to a fundamental truth about reality because there is no such fundamental truth (nothing expressible in any language or at least nothin...

It might well be that science can get better and better, at least in the sense of understanding and making fewer or less serious errors without ever getting closer to a fundamental truth about reality because there is no such fundamental truth (nothing expressible in any language or at least nothing...

Some very strong believers in inviolable individual rights have recognized, or at least speculated upon, a "catastrophe override" for such cases, fortunately more frequent in the philosophical imagination than in the real world, where the innocent toddler is toddling towards the doomsday t...

Utilitarianism does take the individual, every individual, into account. Criticisms are usually phrased that u-ism doesn't take individuals into account in the right way. A common criticism is that the maximization of utility may violate a right of an individual. All of Jill's many friends and relat...

Would be helpful if you quoted the passage from Foot.

Here is a possible way of understanding Hurtshouse, of whose writings I have some, but limited, acquaintance. It is probably a mistake to read her as unreservedly endorsing a strict distinction between the factual and the normative. Factual knowledge as an ingredient in making decisions about how to...

As wtf says, the consistency and independence proofs raise philosophical questions about the continuum hypothesis (CH). CH can be expressed as the proposition that there is no set intermediated in size between the set of the natural numbers and the set of the reals. I have thought about this a bit, ...

What must something have to count as a something? I should admit i don’t understand your question.. Which of the following are something?: 11, the square root of minus 11, the present kind of France, crimson, triangularity, beauty, the first Dow Jones value after opening next Tuesday, the possible ...

Then, does "there is something" would be certainly true, but not necessary true ? On standard possible world theory, "there is something" is not necessarily true because there is an empty possible world. So if you think "there is something" is certain, you would believ...