Philosophy Now Forum

I have always thought the main problem with the raven paradox is the presumption that the expression “All ravens are black” is interpreted in terms of the truth functional material conditional in classical logic. It is this interpretation that makes “All non-black things are non-ravens” logically eq...

Consequentialism does not necessarily entail the obligation to do more than can be reasonably expected. When using consequentialism to determine obligations of an agent we are not just calculating the consequences of an action of an agent. To turn an outcome into an obligation, we have to also accom...

She confessed. There was a confession, but the issue is whether this was genuine or not. There are two statements, typed up in Italian, claiming she was at the cottage with Lumumba and that Lumumba was the murderer.These were produced very late at night, after a gruelling and aggressive interrogati...

Here is a website that should be studied before anyone expresses an opinion on ultimate guilt or innocence. http://themurderofmeredithkercher.com/Main_Page Having prosecuted and defended criminal cases for over thirty years , from running stop signs to murder cases, I'm qualified to assert that gen...

mickthinks wrote:Yes, the judges and jury who convicted them.

And what do you think?

Does anyone think there is any credible evidence against Amanda Knox and Rafaelle Sollecito?

...So (given that infinite parallel universes exist) the probability of every single thinkable event happening in our universe is exactly 50% - like a certain leaf falling from a tree .... An interesting suggestion, but you may want to consider: 1) There are an infinity of integers and there may be...

I quite like this view. The ethical choice is what we would desire if we had a perfect grasp (perfect knowledge) of our situation. But there does seem to be a leap from having a perfect grasp of the facts to having an appreciation for the desires of others. I can see that perfect knowledge is a kind...

Two criticisms come to my mind. I hope they are constructive. My first criticism is that your solution is possible unnecessary. I have never really understood the reason for positing possible worlds to explain modal propositions, so it is possible I am not as familiar with the literature as you woul...

Socialists believe in forcibly taking money from one person and giving it to somebody else, something that anybody else would be thrown in jail for doing. That doesn't sound very fiscally responsible to me. The right to property is a freedom that only exists because a state is there to punish those...

You are primarily drawn to philosophy because.... I am afraid your last response did not seem to address my questions and by offering an explanation of why I am asking them only left me more confused about the point you are making. Can I summarise you as follows? 1) If we were to really examine our...

That there is an objective world is certainly a necessary presupposition for epistemology, and if by "atoms" you merely mean everything is reducible to a finite collection of types of fundamental components, then your first axiom does seem reasonable, at least to me. However, I don't reall...

I think your axiom goes something like: "Assume there exist purposive entities." And then their existence is transcendent. I cannot see any reasonable way to disagree with this axiom being true. However, your attempt to act like you have a rational basis for this framework is suspect to m...

knowledge itself will be reduced to constituent parts, and it will be seen as a phenomena in nature instantiated upon a substrate of microscopic interactions. I understand epistemology as simply asking the question: what is the most reliable way of acquiring knowledge? The only pre-conditions requi...

You can't use deduction to prove that "all inductive inferences are unjustified". And if you use induction your argument is self-defeating You could if you could demonstrate that it was a tautology, such that it was logically impossible that an inductive inference is justified. For instan...