Not as such, though perhaps not quite for the reason you might think. The discipline of philosophy isn't a cure for "inauthentic living." In my experience, at least, philosophers are no more and no less prone to being "inauthentic" than anyone else. Philosopher often have pretty good BS detectors, but being good at spotting BS and living "authentically" are probably only loosely correlated. Philosophers who set their minds to it could no doubt offer up some subtle and interesting reflections on what counts as leading an authentic life. But being articulate about it and being good at doing it are very different skills. Compare: it's one thing to be a good art critic. It's another thing to be a good artist. That said, some people who follow a particular "philosophy" may see the attempt to live authentically as closely tied to following that philosophy. This might be true, for example, of committed, thoughtful Buddhists (among others.) Such people may, on average, be more authentic than the average...

I don't have Baggily and Fosl's book handy but if your quote is accurate, there's clearly a mistake—almost certainly a typo or proof-reading error. The tautology that goes with a valid argument is the hypothetical whose antecedent is the conjunction of the premises and whose consequent is the conclusion. Thus, if P, Q therefore R is valid, then (P & Q) → R is a tautology, or better, a truth of logic. So if the text reads as you say, good catch! You found an error. However, your question suggests that you're puzzled about how a valid argument could be stated as a tautology at all. So think about our example. Since we've assumed that the argument is valid, we've assumed that there's no row where the premises 'P' and 'Q' are true and the conclusion 'R' false. That means: in every row, either 'P & Q' is false or 'R' is true. (We've ruled out rows where 'P & Q' true and 'R' is false.) So the conditional '(P & Q) → R' is true in every row, and hence is a truth of logic.

I have to wonder: are you trolling? If not, I'm not sure whether any possible reply is likely to satisfy you. That said, since it can be useful to try to articulate things we normally take for granted, a handful of comments. If someone thinks that getting rid of ugly people trumps not killing people, there's an obvious question: perhaps you're beautiful now, or at least, perhaps you're not ugly. But that can change. It might change slowly through the depredations of aging, or it might change in an instant because of some horrific accident. If you think it would be okay to kill someone because they're ugly, you should agree that it would also be okay to kill you if you become ugly. Now the reply might be: this amounts to begging the question; it implicitly puts ethics above aesthetics. The test I've offered is near kin to the Golden Rule or, at least the Silver Rule, or in any case Kant's Categorical Imperative. But that misses the point. If Jack thinks it would be okay to kill someone else just because...

A postscript: the larger question was whether ethics always trumps aesthetics. A closely-related question is whether a life that always puts moral considerations above all other considerations, no matter how apparently trivial the issue, is a good one. Susan Wolf had interesting things to say about this some years ago in her paper "Moral Saints." ( Journal of Philosophy, August 1982.) Here's a link to her essay: http://philosophyfaculty.ucsd.edu/faculty/rarneson/Courses/susanwolfessay1982.pdf

I'm pretty sure that mathematicians and physicists would both reject the way you've described them. Mathematics not only accepts the concept of infinity but has a great deal to say about it. To take just one example: Cantor proved in the 19th century that not all infinite sets are of the same size. In particular, he showed that whereas the counting numbers and the rational numbers can be paired up one-for-one, there's no such pairing between the counting numbers and the full set of real numbers. Thus, he proved that in a well-defined sense, there are more real numbers than integers, even though in that same sense there are not more rational numbers than integers. Now of course, we sometimes talk about certain functions going to infinity in a certain limit. For example: as x goes to 0, 1/x goes to infinity, even though there is no value of x for which the value of 1/x is infinity. Rather, we say that at 0, the function is not defined. There are good reasons why we say that, though this isn't the...

I've never quite forgiven Ronald Reagan for making "liberal" into a slur, but letting that pass... I don't think there's necessarily any inconsistency here. Jesus told us to feed the poor, heal the sick, and turn the other cheek. But he didn't say that the government should be in charge of all this. In fact Jesus had more or less nothing to say about how secular government should be set up (unless you can extract a political theory from his cryptic remark about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's. It's consistent for someone to feel a duty to do what Jesus commanded and also to believe that the government shouldn't coercively extract money from people to carry out this mandate. As it happens, I'm a liberal and am quite happy to see government tax us to feed people, cure them, educate them, and so on. But I don't think politically conservative Christians are automatically guilty of confusion, let alone bad faith.

I think you're getting at the difference between the principle of Bivalence (there are only two truth values—true and false) and the Law of Excluded Middle: 'P or not-P' is always true. Suppose there are some sentences that are neither true nor false. That might be because they are vague, for example. It might not be true to say that Smith is bald, but it might not be false either; it might be indeterminate. So if S stands for "Smith is bald," then "Either S is true or S is false" would not be correct. Our assumption is that S isn't true, but also isn't false. However, if by "not- S " we mean " S isn't true," then " S or not- S " is true. That is, bivalence would fail, but excluded middle wouldn't. But as you might imagine, there's a good deal of argument about the right thing to say here.

I don't know much about weapons of war, so I can't be confident of the details here, but consider this thought. Suppose an army has a choice between two kinds of weapons. The two are equally lethal, but one kills quickly while the other leads to a slow, painful death. That seems to be a good moral reason for using the first rather than the second. The enemy soldiers will be just as dead, to use your phrase, but the world will have been spared some suffering. The chemical weapons that those World War I poets wrote about—mustard gas, for example—were so horrifying precisely because they killed so slowly and so painfully. I take it that's the reason (or at least one reason) for treating chemical weapons differently from bombs and guns. And on the face of it, it seems like a pretty good one.

You likely won't like my answer, but here goes. You write "You probably have beliefs about the afterlife, but how can you be SURE of them when you are aware of the other equally knowledgeable minds that don’t believe as you do--that have solid arguments for their own worldviews and against your own?" Sorry, but I think this is just false. It's not a matter of my "worldview" (Not sure I have one of those.) It's that the supposedly "solid arguments" just aren't there. If you don't believe me, try to find anything like a good reason. The fact that some religious texts seem to say that non-believers face such a fate doesn't count. Saying something doesn't make it so and doesn't count as an argument. Trying to make the case that there's life after death at all is hard enough; adding unpleasant speculations about what such an afterlife might be like makes the overall package less likely, not more. Theologically, the case for Hell is (pardon me) God-awful. We're supposed to believe that a being worthy of...

I guess I'd have to disagree with the idea that "all of philosophy and logic point to a reason or cause for everything." There's certainly no argument from logic as such; it's perfectly consistent to say that some events are genuinely random. Some philosophers have held that there's a reason (not necessarily a cause in the physical sense, BTW) for everything, but the arguments are not very good. On the other hand... quantum mechanics is a remarkably well-confirmed physical theory that, at least as standardly interpreted, gives us excellent reason to think that some things happen one way rather than another with no reason or cause for which way they turned out. An example: suppose we send a photon (a quantum of light) through a polarizing filter pointed in the vertical direction. We let the photon travel to a second polarizing filter, oriented at 45 degrees to the vertical. Quantum theory as usually understood says that there's a 50% chance that the photon will pass this filter and a 50% chance that it...

If the question is about the word "lying," then there's probably no clear answer. But what word we use isn't the interesting question. Suppose X isn't true, but it's to my advantage that the person I'm talking to should think it's true. For example: maybe I'm talking to my boss, who would reasonably expect that I would have carried out a certain task. In fact, I didn't, and the result was not good. By answering questions artfully, I may be able to leave my boss with the impression that I actually carried out whatever the task was, without ever actually saying this. I've left a crucial detail out of what I said. Have I actually lied? Maybe not; depends on how you want to use the word. Have I deliberately tried to deceive my boss? The whole point of the story is that I did. Of course my boss might not just assume that I did my job properly, but I'm hoping that's what she thinks, and I'm trying to make that as likely as I can short of outright saying something false. Is this as bad as an outright...