Philosophy Now Forum

What might Kant have done had he found himself living in a town in which almost the entire population joined some doomsday cult, attempted suicide and - it being a particularly incompetent cult - failed? Would he have regarded them as things, as beasts, proceeding to treat them as such? Finding hims...

Here in Britain, there is a popular radio panel game called The Unbelievable Truth. Each panelist gives a short comical lecture consisting of lies in amongst which are smuggled five(?) truths. The other competitors try to spot the truths. A common tactic is to declare, "In the American state o...

my great aunt and uncle take the Calvinist / Kantian view that we must obey the law - no matter how unreasonable - as long as the law does not require us to do anything morally wrong it is not morally wrong to not drink when you are under 21 - so I must not drink - the fact that the law is unreason...

its not like its difficult to get alcohol if you are under 21 for a while in high school my friends and i though we were being clever sneaking beer into one of our basements while adults where not looking and drinking it and giggling like idiots well it turns out that all the parents knew - and as ...

chasw wrote: My own philosophical position is, religious experience seems to have begun only within the last 50k years, based on archeological evidence.

Why would we necessarily expect there to be archeological evidence for religious experience?

However, physical laws only apply to the phenomenal world, not the noumenal, Kant argued. So he's saying that physical laws don't say anything about the world in and of itself. In other words, the deterministic physical laws we're familiar with, like the law of gravitation, are only representative ...

But this 'faith' we are talking about could be a working assumption that a scientist might be quite happy to have proved wrong. Of course this is rarely the case. Discovering the theoretical basis of your branch of science to be flawed would result in a loss of pride, prestige and funding. There is ...

There are logical arguments for belief in a creative being, but is this God of the logicians the God most believers believe in? People have a tendency to believe what those around them believe. Traditionally they share a religion ascribing moral values to a god or gods. This acts as a social bond an...

Dance, as a social phenomonen is more complex than Joel Marks suggests. You may feel compelled to dance, but if the dance floor is empty and getting on it and getting down to it gets you those 'you should be in a straightjacket' looks, then you are likely to be inhibited. When the floor is full and ...

1. "The student sat at his desk in quiet contemplation; his thoughts closed up on his face." This seems a very strange phrase to me; possibly an Americanism which has yet to cross the Atlantic? Is it like saying, "His face was scrunched up in thought" or more like, "His fac...

Peculiar Incarceration The only window is a small slit Just below the shallow-domed ceiling I crouch on a bed of paper rectangles, bubble-wrapped squares And cardboard images: Southwold Lighthouse, Leaning Tower of Pizza Squashed into this iron-cold institutional cylinder, This dark blue uniform re...

Sad to see already neglegted contextualist 1950s architecture defaced with such artless pseudo-profundity. Interesting treatment of vulnerable lower part of drainpipe with protective brick buttresses; uninteresting graffiti. And doesn't should have an apostrophe.

Sex is in fact a stress reliever, and if bottled up, one can only explode. I've always disliked prudes as the psychopaths that they truly are. To deny nature is a fools game, and self defeating one way or another. But what some people don't seem to realise is that this 'explosion' can happen in you...

Jesus did not knock on people´s doors like Jehova´s witnesses. He waited for people to come to him on their own and to find out on their own if they wanted to follow him. He did not put anyone under pressure. Doesn't that put someone living in an animist tribe in the middle of a rainforest at somet...

Ironic given they all believe in the same 'God'. :roll: But do they? If God is an abstract concept made concrete in people's lives by religion, then perhaps there are as many Gods as religions, or even as many Gods as people with religion. In any case, Christians believe - or used to believe - that...