Philosophy Now Forum

As they say, there are 10 kinds of people, those who understand binary notation, and those who don't.

Are you perhaps thinking of the successor function S(), which plays an important part in the development of the natural number line? For the whole numbers, S() evaluates to a number which is 1 greater than the number given in the argument: S(0) = 0 + 1 = 1 S(1) = 1 + 1 = 2 S(2) = 2 + 1 = 3 .... This...

And Donald Trump's too.

I read the thread. If anybody could mistake that for a philsophical debate, I'll eat Kim Jong Un's shorts.

What makes us "special" is our intense narcissism. We love thinking about ourselves; we are our favourite subject. Objectively, it is difficult to understand what makes human life more valuable than the life of a cockroach, without invoking Nazist philosophy. Funny old world, eh?

Sorry, Dalek Prime, my last was not a response to you - I forgot to include the quote. I was referring to an earlier post: "But I saw your post on infinity over on that other site and virtually everything you say is laughably incorrect. You're just getting bad information and misunderstanding even t...

This is supposed to be a philosophy site. In case you miss the subtlety of that, it means that if you disagree with someone, you are supposed to present contrary arguments. You may be surprised to learn that "Laughably incorrect" is not an argument. I'm listening...?

Have any of you guys actually considered checking primary sources like Cantor and Russell before you post? I strongly recommend it.

"higher math never has any practical applications ... till it does. Non-Euclidean geometry had no practical application till some fellow named Einstein came along."

"This should be written in letters of gold above all our temples" (William Blake).

You haven't heard that all of mathematics is reducible to logic? I'm not in a position to argue the case, but I understood that this had been achieved by about the beginning of the 20th C, due to the efforts of Russell, Frege, Whitehead et al.

I do. However philsophy degrees vary country to country greately if web forums are anything to go by, so perhaps elaboration is needed. For example I've noticed that Americans in posts use formal logic a lot, I'm guessing US degrees put great emphasis on it. Here we didn't touch it even slightly, s...

http://xkcd.com/435/ _________________ Logic is; everything else isn't. Interesting strip. Quite specious, of course; like a politician's sound bite. I have been trying to think in what sense "sociology" could be defined as "applied psychology". It is not immediately obvious what the two fields are ...