Philosophy Now Forum

Throughout my undergraduate degree, I read everything I could get my hands on. I was disciplined in my studies (read the texts, made notes, brought questions to class etc.) and was proud of what I accomplished. Now, after 2 Masters degrees, I'm studying for a DPhil and am struggling with disciplinin...

bobevenson wrote: You were born under free-market capitalism, have benefitted from it every day of your worthless life, but choose to bite the hand that feeds you, you ungrateful loser! In fact, most of us were not born under (into?) free-market capitalism. There is no record of any developed nation...

Read Nietzsche before he comes to you with a prof attached. This 'mad philosopher' is the only really sane one among the lot. Actually, I'd advise against this. To read Nietzsche properly you'll need to be familiar with Greek thought and literature, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer and Mill. This is becau...

I am not so sure this is the way to look at love. I am hesitant to look at love as a thing someone does to you or for you Perhaps you are hesitant, but it doesn't follow that looking at 'love' in this way is mistaken. I'm not talking about reciprocity of action here (the view that we do something f...

Greatest I Am wrote: If the husband whose only deed is mouthing the I love you words is being truthful, then there can be true love there even as he does considerably less to show it than your other example. All he does is say he loves her. He does nothing else. Is this enough? My analogy was to il...

It sounds to me as though you're claiming that the status of philosophy is one of 'meta-functionality' in that it determines the content and procedure of science, which is functional but also answers directly to 'the empirical world'. Perhaps this is the case. However, I think that if you are going ...

Does love need deeds and works to be expressed? I think that this is the crucial question here, so I'll try to address it. Imagine two different married couples, living side by side (and I'm going to imagine that they are heterosexual couples but this doesn't mean that they must be). In the first c...

You make some interesting (and good) points. There's a lot to be said for the idea that a divine entity (in this case the Christian 'god') is a means of anchoring our own ethical activity and transforming it into something moral; or, to put it another way, taking the idea of 'the good life' and maki...

I wouldn't say that there is one 'best' translation (and it can often be of great help to read more than one translation in order to get a more 'rounded' view of the text). However, of the ones I've read I've always preferred the Oxford World's Classics edition (trans. Robin Waterfield). The first t...

I like the idea that philosophical discussion can keep us from coming to blows. However, philosophy of language does more than just talk about what particular words mean. It's more about how language works and what it is. The girl who you called a slut probably wanted to know why you were calling he...

While it's interesting to talk about Terri Schiavo in regards to the question of quality of life, I think we should stick to the topic of abortion/ending the life of a child rather than someone who has already been born and lived a life (despite the quality of said life being severely impeded). TVoT...

Proponents of anti-abortion legislation often appeal to the idea of the sanctity of life. The mere fact of life, the activity of 'living' (where living is the biological condition for 'existing', which for the purposes of this post I understand to be an augmentation of 'living' that incorporates mem...

Well, first of all I hope your ribs heal soon. Also, please give Hegel another try. If he really were 'rambling and meaningless' then his influence on (e.g.) Marx would be illusory. I found Hegel to be near-impossible when I first read the Phenomenology ... now I can engage with the text on a critic...

I think you're confusing the intention to write obscurely with the intention for there to be fidelity between style and content. There is a wonderful passage in Nietzsche's 'Gay Science' which reads along the lines of "the man who wishes to be profound must strive for clarity, while the man who...

Notvacka wrote: To me, agnosticism doesn't explain anything. It's just humbly stating the obvious, that knowledge of God is impossible. I think that it is precisely this established impossibility of knowledge that undoes agnosticism. If knowledge of something is not available to us we can either be...