Probably the most persuasive argument for the existence of God — I don’t mean to philosophers and logicians, but to ordinary people — goes something like this: All of this — that is, a world with life, intelligence, beauty, humans, morality, etc., — couldn’t have come about by accident. It must be due to some intelligent, powerful Being — and that’s what God is.
Martin Heidegger is the Continental philosopher most analytic philosophers love to hate. I actually never knew enough about Heidegger to form much of an opinion. I knew that he said that “Nothings noths” (Das Nichts nichtet), giving Carnap a paradigm of meaningless, unverifiable, unfalsifiable, metaphysical gibberish.
How do we get from noise to meaning? Well, however we do it, the…
Maybe you don’t believe in reincarnation. But a lot of people have and still do. Schopenhauer said, “we find the doctrine [of reincarnation] springing from the earliest and noblest ages of the human race, always spread abroad on the earth as the belief of the great majority of mankind.”
Philosophical discussions about torture tend to focus on two things: whether torture is ever morally justified, and, if so, whether this should be reflected in the law. Such discussion tend to focus on extreme cases: torture the terrorist or let the bomb go off and injure hundreds or thousands of innocents.
The concept of wilderness is a human invention, and it’s built on myths. Taken literally, the concept doesn’t apply to anything at all. There’s no place left on Earth that’s entirely untouched by the hand of man—not even Antarctica, or the depths of the Pacific.
This week we’re thinking about Democracy in Crisis. Now if we’re talking about American Democracy,…
We have two positions. One holds that prostitution is inherently degrading and of necessity involves objectionable objectification, and so is wrong, even if conducted in a way that is safe for and non-exploitative of the prostitute. The other position holds that if conducted in this way, prostitution could be a fair commercial transaction that preserves the dignity of both seller and purchases of sexual favors.
This week we’re thinking about Humanity Violated — the tendency of some people to think of other people as less than fully human. Humans do that to each other way too often. Nazis despised their Jewish victims as little better than diseased rats that deserved to be eliminated for the public good. Slave-owners saw their slaves as little better than pack animals.
I thought Philosophy Talk listeners might enjoy Hume’s last thoughts on immortality, as recorded by James Boswell, who visited Hume hoping for a deathbed conversion.
There’s certainly a lot of hypocrisy around, especially in politics. But how bad is it? Is it a simply necessary evil for an effective politician? Or is it really one of the worst kinds of vices? I suppose we ought to start by trying to get clear on what exactly hypocrisy is. The word ‘hypocrisy’ comes from a Greek word meaning “playing a theatrical role”. So, we might start with: A hypocrite is someone who pretends to be something he’s not. That definition probably fits a lot of cases, but I don’t think it’s quite right.
A skeleton walks into a bar. It says, “Give me a beer and a…
A lot of philosophers I know need therapy. I can’t think of too many I know…
There are lots of ways that corporations threaten democracy. But they’re all, I think, rooted in one basic concept — the idea of limited liability. That’s the concept that the individuals behind a corporation can shield themselves from full financial responsibility for risks they take. The thinking is, if people can protect themselves from full liability, they’ll be willing to take greater risks and try new things. Limited liability encourages creativity and innovation. But limited liability is a double-edged sword.
We all got a rude awakening when Edward Snowden exposed the NSA’s spying on our emails, phone calls, and the like. A lot of people felt their right to privacy had been violated, and Snowden was a whistleblower who should be honored. Others felt Snowden was a traitor, revealing secrets about the capacities NSA has developed to keep America safe. If you don’t like it, move to Russia… like he did.
This week we’re looking at the Anatomy of a Terrorist. But how exactly do you…