Recent Responses
I've often heard that Anglo-American philosophers have somewhat alienated themselves from their colleagues in disciplines like history, literature, the arts, anthropology, and so on. Is this true? (As far as I can tell, I think this is at least truer in the Anglosphere than on the Continent.) If it is, how can this be explained? Is it because Anglo-American philosophers do not feel that they share a common language with their colleagues? For example, whereas their colleagues may have no qualms using words like 'meaning', 'truth', ‘duty’, 'subjectivity' quite freely in their writings, analytic philosophers seem to take great pains even to define them.
Oliver Leaman
October 26, 2006
(changed October 26, 2006)
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There are philosophers who have a rather arrogant attitude to practitioners of other disciplines, but then this is not uncommon among anthropologists, historians etc. either. Professionals usually try to magnify their self-importance by criticizing other approaches to issues. In fact, peopl... Read more
Is the study of "ancient philosophy", (i.e., Socrates, Plato, etc..) just a historical endeavor or is it still an important and fruitful field of philosophical study in itself? Seems to me that much philosophy, even pre-1800 or so, has been made irrelevant through relatively recent scientific studies. (I'm thinking about early philosophy on perception, for example.)
Jyl Gentzler
October 28, 2006
(changed October 28, 2006)
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The history of philosophy is studied in philosophy departments forthe purpose of understanding whether a particular philosophical claimis true. To this end, historians of philosophy examine the particulararguments that have been offered for views held in the past, becausearguments, if they a... Read more
Is there such a concept as "Aristotelian love"? - as we know there is "Platonic love"... If so, what's it like? And if there isn't, what could it be like? Lou from Barcelona
Alan Soble
October 26, 2006
(changed October 26, 2006)
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Plato had much to say about love and sexual desire in his dialogues Symposium and Phaedrus and elsewhere (e.g., Laws, Lysis, Republic). What we call "Platonic Love," however, may bear little resemblance to what Plato had in mind; "Platonic Love" might be a medieval or Neoplatonist corruption o... Read more
Why is it that homosexuality is not accepted in general? In society there is only the role model of man and woman to build a family and that the family is the foundation of the society. But has this necessarily to be so? Is there an ethical or philosophical argument to not accept homosexuality?
Alan Soble
October 26, 2006
(changed October 26, 2006)
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Yes, it's a joke, and in various versions a good one. (We could, in the manner of the Aristocrats, tell it a hundred different ways. Let me know if you want to hear the version that involves President Coolidge -- or go to http://fs.uno.edu/asoble/pages/bermant.htm.) But even though a joke, it... Read more
Is it wise to purchase insurance? For example, if I buy auto insurance, then I'm betting that I will be in an accident, and that the insurance payout will be worthwhile, notwithstanding the amount I will have paid in premiums. The insurance company is betting that the amount I pay in premiums will outweigh what they pay me in the event of a claim. Given that they have a lot of actuaries and other smart folks working on this, shouldn't I assume that they are right? I.e., does the fact that someone very smart is willing to sell me insurance count as a reason not to buy the insurance?
Douglas Burnham
October 23, 2006
(changed October 23, 2006)
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One buys insurance for any number of reasons, but the one to which you refer is to protect against a set of relatively improbable events, but events that should they happen would have a devastating effect upon you (or your next of kin!). We can define 'devastating' as meaning: having an e... Read more
I suspect concepts like fate, destiny, happenstance, kismet, etc. are meaningless and, worse, misleading to non-critical thinkers but I find myself using expressions involving luck or lucky all the time! 'Luckily another bus turned up so I wasn't late.' It seems to be the same thing as fate, etc. but seems unavoidable and even useful in everyday speech. Is there any difference, or is it just a linguistic convention? No one would say 'A causal chain of events extending back to the Big Bang led to another bus showing up.' Thanks to you all for a fascinating site.
Douglas Burnham
October 23, 2006
(changed October 23, 2006)
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You should have a look at answers on this site under the heading of Probability, but briefly: Yes, 'lucky' is a useful and meaningful concept in everyday language. It means: something that I judge relatively unlikely happened that I judge useful to me. It differs from a concept like fate... Read more
Hi: In meta-ethics there is an ongoing, heated debate about whether moral propositions are "objective" or "absolute" vs. "subjective" or "relative." This debate appears to be progressing nowhere fast. Could it be that moral propositions are like theorems in geometry, i.e. that they are deduced from and depend for their validity on the truth of the postulates or axioms that underlie them? So, nobody seems too concerned about the "subjectivity" of geometry in spite of the fact that it is impossible to "prove" that parallel lines never intersect--we either accept this axiom or we don't. Is it possible that propositions like "it is wrong to take innocent human life" should be viewed as a postulate from which we can then deduce (in combination with other postulates) moral conclusions? Does this approach offer a way out of the "objective" vs. "subjective" debate? Thanks. Mark
Matthew Silverstein
October 23, 2006
(changed October 23, 2006)
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I don't see how your approach can provide a way out of the debates concerning the objectivity of ethics. We can use your example of geometry to see why. You may be right that abstract or theoretical geometry is simply a matter of deriving theorems from a set of arbitrarily chosen post... Read more
A friend of a friend of mine posed a really odd problem regarding our beliefs that I’ve not really been able to answer to my own satisfaction. If we believe that X is the case, then it seems to go without saying that we also believe that we believe X is the case. It would be odd to say that we believe X but don’t believe we believe it. But then if that has to be so, it also seems that we must also believe that we believe that we believe that X is the case. And if that’s so then it seems we must believe that we believe… You get the picture. What’s going on here? We’re finite beings so we can’t have an infinite number of beliefs, can we? I’d put forward some of the thoughts I had about it, but I’m not entirely sure that I think I had them.
Richard Heck
October 22, 2006
(changed October 22, 2006)
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The standard way to resolve this problem is to distinguish explicit from implicit beliefs. Suppose, just for illustration, that believing that p, in the explicit sense, is having a sentence that means that p written on a blackboard in your head. So believing that snow is white, for example,... Read more
A friend of a friend of mine posed a really odd problem regarding our beliefs that I’ve not really been able to answer to my own satisfaction. If we believe that X is the case, then it seems to go without saying that we also believe that we believe X is the case. It would be odd to say that we believe X but don’t believe we believe it. But then if that has to be so, it also seems that we must also believe that we believe that we believe that X is the case. And if that’s so then it seems we must believe that we believe… You get the picture. What’s going on here? We’re finite beings so we can’t have an infinite number of beliefs, can we? I’d put forward some of the thoughts I had about it, but I’m not entirely sure that I think I had them.
Richard Heck
October 22, 2006
(changed October 22, 2006)
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The standard way to resolve this problem is to distinguish explicit from implicit beliefs. Suppose, just for illustration, that believing that p, in the explicit sense, is having a sentence that means that p written on a blackboard in your head. So believing that snow is white, for example,... Read more
Can robots have human feelings?
Mark Sprevak
October 20, 2006
(changed October 20, 2006)
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If you mean 'Can a computer have human feelings?', then the answer seems to be probably not.One of the main characteristics of a computer is that you can build it out of any physical stuff you like: clockwork, silicon, carbon, some might say, even Swiss cheese. What a computer is made out of... Read more