Philosophy Now Forum

you must see things as I see them or I'll kill you... history never repeats... -Imp "Seeing things as I see them" only means a bad thing if the thing you see is different from the thing I see; if they're the same, then there's no problem, agreement can be reached, and whoever was wrong si...

The common sense understanding of truth is the correspondence theory of truth. From now on referred to as CTT. If the CTT is true,what does it refer to? Another CTT? Depending on your perspective that is a tautology or an infinite regress. So what is truth? PS;The CTT is the theory that a propositi...

Hey, Prof, what if a jackass like myself refuses to abide by your or Hartman's notions of what constitutes 'value'? What if such a person digs in his heels and asserts 'I'll damn well decide for myself what or who is or isn't valuable and I'll do so by my own standards, thank you very much.' What h...

Apology, like many other social rituals, is promissory . By apologizing, we make it clear that we're not going to do the bad thing we apologized for again, so that we become predictable as a good-behaving person again, not only with the person we're apologizing to, but to observing others who might ...

For a long time I thought of language in a later-Wittgensteinian sense, as chess-like use of symbols/sounds/bits etc., according to rules, to do things. Now, I'm more in the old-fashioned frame of thinking of language as an expression of thought. Seems to me that those are not mutually exclusive op...

I was thinking about dualism recently and I find it problematic. Lets start with definition of dualism. Dualism is a system of belief which claims that both mind/soul and matter are real. Mind however is not material hence it does not have any location. The problem I am facing is how one can relate...

Comments welcome.... My feeling is that an advance of ethics towards a more scientific understanding, is in the direction of understanding that ethics is and must be fundamentally egoistic, eudaimonistic . There are two huge mistakes that have run through and corrupted nearly all ethical discussion...

I was thinking about dualism recently and I find it problematic. Lets start with definition of dualism. Dualism is a system of belief which claims that both mind/soul and matter are real. Mind however is not material hence it does not have any location. The problem I am facing is how one can relate...

The problematic around solipsism can arise from two sorts of reflections, the idea that what we perceive in the first instance is mental, and the idea that the totality of my experience could be "like a dream". But the latter is just a poetic way of saying the former. If you don't think th...

There are several different kinds of certainty. One kind relates more to perceptions of basic facts, another important kind relates to the degree of justification you have for a belief (which must be carefully distinguished from the evidence you have for a belief - evidence relating to probability, ...

Recently I have been wracked by global scepticism, are we brains in vats, were the world and all our memories created last Thursday etc. I found that with the use of certain logical tools like Ockham's razor and abductive reasoning that I could dispel some of these sceptical doubts. But how do I kn...

I think my biggest philosophical epiphany of recent times has been my escape from the fly bottle of the problems (such as global scepticism) set up by representationalism (roughly, the idea that ruled modern philosophy for a long time, that we immediately perceive our perceptions, and the external w...

For a long time I thought of language in a later-Wittgensteinian sense, as chess-like use of symbols/sounds/bits etc., according to rules, to do things. Now, I'm more in the old-fashioned frame of thinking of language as an expression of thought. Formerly, that idea seemed to be countered by Wittgen...

See how they are the same one except one is rejected in favor of the other. They're not the same though, one is nourishing (which is why you're inclined to want it), the other isn't. They're made of "the same" matter, in a sense (whatever that basic constitution of matter is), but the mat...

I'm a refugee from Philosophy Forums, which, sadly, seems to be having a bit of an ongoing digital seizure. As an occasional addict of philosophical discussion, who's currently in an addicted phase, I NEED MY FIX NAAAOWWW!!!! So I'm dropping by to check you guys out :D I'm a 57 year old amateur who'...