Philosophy Now Forum

"Brexit means Brexit" has truth value, but is not what we might call content-rich.

4) We pick up the best option among prioritized options, so called rational decision making The best for who or what over what sort of time scale? For immediate pleasure? Long-term health? Bank balance? Those we have responsibilities towards? Those we love? A community? The whole human population? ...

An absence of free will would not a be a good reason for failing to hold people responsible for their actions unless their actions were never influenced by fear of punishment or a sense of guilt. If there really were a total absence of free will, those who ran the judiciary system would not be free ...

(I recall Henri Poincare saying that after thinking hard about a problem, he comes up with answers later on when his mind becomes preoccupied with something else or being relaxed) Spookily, mere minutes after reading and commenting on this topic I started to read Meaning in Mathematics edited by Jo...

Von Neumann did some of his best work blazingly fast in noisy, chaotic environments, and once admonished his wife for preparing a quiet study for him to work in. He never used it, preferring the couple's living room with its television playing loudly. So far studies have had mixed results, but it c...

Hobbes' Choice wrote:Here we see Aryton Senna praying before the race in which he died due to his tyre pressures being too low - so much for God.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtyBB4ZKOS8

He obviously forgot to ask God to pump up the tyres.

No, praying for success in anything is two things; 1) a complete waste of time; and 2) delusional. I'm inclined to agree it's delusional. I'm not so sure it's a waste of time. It may be that prayer is one part of the brain communicating with another; that other part of the brain may have some beari...

Yes, it would make sense to thank God for having given you the ability to win even if you hadn't asked him to, assuming you believe he made you who you are with all your abilities. I did however, recently read an account of the 1988 100m Olympic final in which Linford Christie is quoted as saying, '...

Mo Farah (who is a Muslim) kneels in a prayer of thanks after winning a race. Usain Bolt crosses himself before a race. There is nothing secretive about what they are doing; but is it cheating? If it were possible to get a divine being to intervene in order to get you to run faster than your rivals,...

I've just been reading Why Do People Get Ill by Darian Leader and David Corfield, which provides quite a good introduction to this area, if you can stomach the most speculative of Leader's Freudian/Lacanian noodlings. Possibly what the Facebook fruitcake had in mind was how unusual Western thought i...

People are judged on their actual behaviour rather than behaviour they are predisposed to, although character and risk of reoffending may be considered in sentencing. I was thinking more of questions of identity. As a forty-year old, I don't feel myself to be the same person I was when I was sixteen...

It would be nice if the link didn't bring me to a glass manufacturer. :lol: Apologies - I overlooked the importance of the word 'the'. Try this - http://www.theguardian.com/law/2015/may/01/janners-alleged-victims-question-inconsistency-in-dementia-cases What I was wondering was, if he were to compl...

Is memory essential to a sense of self? If so, when someone loses memory, does he/she loose moral responsibility for actions committed before such memory loss? I am thinking here of the case of Lord Janner http://www.guardian.com/law/2015/may/01/janners-alleged-victims-question-inconsistency-in-deme...

This intriguing little article introducing Feuerbach's thought makes for an interesting contrast with the Wittgensteinian and logical positivist explorations in the same issue. For the logical positivists anything mystical was neither logically nor empirically verifiable, therefore nonsense; they th...

Linguistic meaning is normative. That is, there are right and wrong ways to use words. If we use words in the wrong way we may fail to say anything meaningful. For example, if I say, "The window was dog," then I'm misusing either 'window' or 'dog' in such a way that I'm talking nonsense. ...