Philosophy Now Forum

I agree that it is annoyingly compelling!! At worst, though I think this sort of error encourages intelligent design thinking, as it is rather more common in evolutionary studies than it ought to be. I wouldn't worry. Where is the intelligence behind putting a baseball cap on backwards, for instanc...

Satyr wrote:Yes, men can be the most vehement feminists. It is their only way to get sexually noticed.

Yours will be a one track mind as long as you let your genitals do all the thinking.

And if she is incapable, as she seems, of expressing herself with language that accurately represents the case as it is, then is what she is saying meaningful in any sense at all? Perhaps it's not all that meaningful, and quite possibly even less useful, but I still find it fascinating. If nothing ...

It's much worse. Susan Blackmore is convinced that what she calls memes and temes (things like wearing baseball hats on backwards, and folding the ends of toilet paper in a certain way) , Are "using you to replicate themselves because they want to survive" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQ_9-Qx5Hz4...

I like it too, but it doesn't "drive the point home" as well as all that. The parallel between women's equality and animal rights is not so close that what's true of one is true (mutatis mutandis) of the other, and it's possible to support gender equality without being a feminist. Just saying. The ...

Rortabend wrote:If you have to be a woman to be a feminist then I don't hold out much hope for the future of animal rights. Woof woof.

I love this comment; how it drives the point home perfectly, whilst being funny too. Wish I had written it myself.

I reject any claim, i think, that morality can be anything beyond which people believe is the right thing to do. To go further would be an appeal to a divine legislative authority; or a set of Platonic values that exist out there in the ether somewhere. In practice there is no 'absolute' from which...

Can men be feminists? Sure. I am one. As for the hypocrisy angle, I suppose that for some men, particularly young men, getting laid is the main drive behind almost everything they do or say in the presence of a desirable female. I don't know if pretending to be a feminist would actually work. It doe...

It is almost as if humans are incapable of avoiding this sort of language... I did come across a paper once called something like the 'evolution of purpose' which suggested that this tendency to see the world in teleological terms is actually an adaptation. Primitive humans that had this trait, it ...

There are many ways to appreciate a work of art, and in my experience they complement each other, rather than cancel each other out. I find the notion that knowledge and analysis would somehow hinder "pure" appreciation of beauty quite ridiculous.

Capitalism as I use it is not a catch phrase for everything. For instance, it is not the same as democracy. Not only is capitalism not the same as democracy, but if you think about it, it's actually opposed to democracy. Modern representative democracy is about giving power to certain people (polit...

Spike, the way you use the word "capitalism" it becomes a catch phrase for almost anything. I don't think you have much grasp of the concept, and since there is no consensus on a precise definition of the word "capitalism" anyway, I suggest that you try to state your case without using that word at ...

How about when we observe light from great distances? Isn't this a universal clock showing time through the aeons? Just a thought. I am just a layman so I say this with no authority other than intuition and basic logic. I'm no physicist either, though I have read a lot on the subject. :) I'm not su...

If one Planck time is defined as the time it takes a photon to move 1 Planck length then surely this is the same as regularly perceived time slowing as well. The speed of light is incorporated into the definition of the Planck length. If you change one, you change the other. If time were "slowing d...

I like this idea of time slowing down and have actually wondered it myself, but instead my thoughts drifted towards a variable speed of light. I wonder, would this aparrent slowing of time explain cosmic expansion? I imagine the speed of time would be proportional to the density of the universe and...