When a women dresses "slutty" and is raped people are usually divided between two camps. The blame can either be placed solely on the perpetrators or some would argue that the women is also to blame for getting into the situation. While admittedly I fall into the second camp, I don't quite understand why a victim can't be at least partially to blame for his/her situation. Can't people be blamed for creating a situation in which a crime is more likely or will happen? If I supply terrorists with nuclear weapons, and millions die. Yet I didn't kill anyone and the terrorists who did had a choice to disarm the weapon. Yet most people would agree that I would be sharing the blame. If I encourage racism by wearing a "hate blacks" T shirt and speaking in white supremacist rallies do I share any of the blame for the mistreatment of minorities? (Equally am I to blame if I am attacked by black gangs?) Ultimately if a women dresses "slutty" and is raped, can't she be blamed for encouraging the situation? I'm...

The Golden Rule, at least in its usual formulation, would seem to be problematic in cases of justice. If a judge were to "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", then they would probably never sentence anybody. A teacher couldn't fail a student who tried very hard because, presumably, that teacher (at least as a student) would have preferred a barely passing grade if they had tried very hard. The only way around this seems to be for people to enthusiastically and voluntarily be willing to punish themselves, which seems a bit of a stretch, to say the least; at most, people recognize that some system of rules requires they be punished and, perhaps, that system has a point, but nobody really *wants* to be punished. So how do proponents of the Golden Rule deal with such cases? Must they search elsewhere for their justification, or do they change the scope or meaning of the Golden Rule?

Would the idea of 3 dimensional space be possible without vision?

Is it racist to believe that African Americans are less intelligent than Caucasians on the whole since scientific studies show that African Americans have lower IQs? Does not being racist presuppose the hypothesis that cultural biases predispose African Americans to have lower IQs? I mean do you have to believe that IQ differences are due to cultural differences to not be racist? Supposing that differences in IQ were due to biological differences would it be racist to suppose that African American tend to be less intelligent or would that assessment be unwarranted without an understanding of the relationship between intelligence and IQ? I mean you can be intelligent in ways that aren't measurable by IQ can't you? But if IQ differences are in fact biological what is the difference between being racist and scientific? Isn't the idea that some groups are statistically more likely to produce people who are less intelligent than another group one way which racism is defined? Or is that an incorrect definition...

How do novels, plays, or works of music exist? Consider the Iliad. The original copy of the Iliad was lost long, long ago, yet the Iliad continues to exist through its copies. If all original-language versions of the Iliad were to disappear, leaving only translations, one would assume the Iliad would continue to exist. What if all copies of the Iliad in any language and in any material form were destroyed, and we were left with nothing but the memory of the Iliad? Would it then cease to exist, until someone (presumably with photographic memory) decided to write it down again? What if all memory and knowledge of the Iliad were erased, but copies still existed, lying around in old boxes where nobody remembered them? Would it still exist if this were the case? How can we conceptualize the existence of things, like an ancient epic poem, which exist in physical form yet are not dependent on these forms?

Hi; Rene Descartes concluded "cogito, ergo sum", but this only raises a deeper question in my mind as to why do I exist? Is this a legitimate Philosophical question, and if so how does one go about answering it? cheers Pasquale

Is every statement true? Consider the following argument: If a statement is true, then it is a member of the set of true statements. If a statement is false, then it implies a contradiction. Since anything follows from a contradiction, it follows that the statement is true. Thus the statement is a member of the set of true statements. Since a statement is true or false, all statements therefore belong in the set of true statements. All statements are true, with the set of false statements being a subset of the set of true statements. A statement thus is either true and true only, or both true and false. Does this mean that all statements are true?

When we prove a statement, we show it is true. Since contradictions (statements such as "P and not-P.") are never true, we can't ever prove a contradiction. But that's precisely what we do in a proof by contradiction - we show a contradiction to be true, before declaring it absurd. This must mean we are doing something wrong. It must mean that we can't even assume a false statement to begin with. This makes sense because when we assume a statement, we pretend that it's true, but we can't pretend that a false statement is true. It's a logical impossibility. That would be like saying "1 + 1 = 4" is true. Does this mean the "proof by contradiction" method is flawed? In other words, to prove proposition P, we assume not-P and show this leads to a contradiction. But if P is true to begin with (as we want to prove it), and therefore not-P false, how can we even assume not-P is true? It's false. We can't assume it as true. It's logically impossible. For example, it's logically impossible for the square root of...

The book "Philosophy through Video Games" contains an interesting discussion about the nature of personal identity, in relation to the claims video game players make about "themselves" and what "they" did while "in" a game. I wanted to ask the philosophers here what you make of a player's claim that, for example, "I shot two robbers yesterday in a video game." The player, as a human being, clearly did not shoot any other human beings or animals yesterday (one should hope), yet at the same time, saying the sentence is false seems like a gross oversimplification. Is a person's video game avatar an extension of their identity, and thus what happens to the avatar also (in a sense) happens to them? Or does the sentence use niche meanings of words rather than their normal meanings?

What is the meaning of loyalty? If I work in an organization and am committed to its purpose but feel that the organization is not meeting its purpose or is perhaps subverting it, to what do I owe my loyalty? To those currently in the organization or to what I understand to be the purpose of the organization?