Philosophy Now Forum

I apologize for inserting here an utter irrelevancy to the thread in its most recent entries. It is more relevant to some earlier thread segments. I intrude here, at the risk of thread-boorishness, because I contend that there is a sound, or nearly sound, variation of Pascal’s argument and because I...

You have 10 cookies (or biscuits for speakers of English English) you wish to give away to children, of which cohort 10 show up, all strangers to you. You might question them and ferret out biographical details that would cause you to favor some more than others. But that, of course, would cost you ...

For Weil’s early-ish political theory, you should be able to find Oppression and Liberty in any university library. It is available used for about $10 in the US, including shipping. Her theory of liberty grew out of a hatred of bureaucratic oppression. She believed that any form of bureaucracy, incl...

1) This would entail an entire reduplication of the Universe for each instance of time travel. This would be more than prohibitive as the energy and mass requirements would be one entire universe, and there is only one. 2) The light that has emanated from the objects of your interest, has long ago ...

The old shooting your grandfather paradox is no problem for forward time travel, either the pedestrian variety we regularly engage in or discontinuous leaps into the future. For the past, the three solutions I know of are (1) branching worlds, whether under quantum many worlds or some other mechanis...

If there is no independent value to equality, then we would feel no preference for 5-5 over 9-1 in the case that no one has any sort of prior claim to the goods in question. Such cases do not arise very often, but they do arise, and cases far more difficult to imagine get routine philosophical exerc...

Combining evolution with the Catholic doctrine of souls and the actual existence of Adam and Eve, as I understand it, leads to some interesting consequences. Adam and Eve, as the first creatures with immortal souls, had parents without immortal souls. It would seem to follow that they would not have...

I would lean more towards the pragmatic approach - more equality is called for if it benefits a whole society; but equality is not good 'in itself Equality is a value in itself if it is at least a tie breaker. Suppose we are going to have a distribution in which A has 9 units of wealth and B has 1,...

Two influential, but very different, theories of entitlement of the rich are set out by Robert Nozick and John Rawls. Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia is the most philosophically sophisticated exposition of “free market” libertarianism. If the history works out correctly (justice in acquisition, ...

The question whether numbers exist may be like the questions whether starfish are conscious and whether Confucianism is a religion. The problem lies more in “consciousness” and “a religion” than in starfish and Confucianism. In the same way we have a better understanding of the natural numbers than ...

“Absolute truth” can mean several different things. A statement that is eternally true, true at all times is one possibility. The 2 truths that began this are probably not absolute in this sense. There may have been and may again be a time in which there is nothing anywhere. It seems pretty likely t...