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Debates 7See all
The incredulous stare is a perfectly respectable argument against modal realism
Care ethics has no convincing account of what we owe to strangers far away
Slippery-slope arguments in medicine are usually predictions, not fallacies
DebateFor 2 · Against 2
Fallacies & paradoxesAnalyticIslamicIslamic jurisprudence#medical-ethics#normalisation-of-deviance#sadd-al-dharai#slippery-slope
6 repliesHume’s Dialogues had answered the watchmaker before Paley set it ticking
DebateFor 1 · Against 3
God & the argumentsGreek & RomanIslamicModern EuropeanEmpiricismCharles DarwinCicero#analogy#design-argument#hume#watchmaker
6 repliesWhen we refuse to imagine that cruelty is admirable, the failure is the work’s, not ours
DebateFor 2 · Against 2
Beauty & artAnalyticModern EuropeanBerys GautDavid Hume#ethicism#fiction#imaginative-resistance#moral-judgement
5 repliesQuestions 2
Discussions 5
Should a health service record race? A retired GP’s view of the hardest practical case
Thirty-four years of explaining positive screening results, and base rates still trip me up
Thirty-four years as a GP: is a patient with advanced dementia still the same person?
Did Adam Smith change his mind between The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations?
Smith’s butcher and Smith’s impartial spectator: is there really an ‘Adam Smith problem’?
Reading groups 3
Recent replies
- Did Hume ever read al-Ghazali?
There is a lovely moment in that same section of the Enquiry that bears on your question. Hume discusses the view, which he links to Malebranche and other Cartesians, that God is the true cause of eve…
- Norman the clairvoyant is reliably right, yet most people say he doesn’t know. Why?
From general practice: experienced GPs develop a "something is wrong here" feeling about a patient that they often cannot articulate on the spot, and many of us learned to take it seriously.…
- Barnes is right: being disabled is not in itself bad for you
Against, but sympathetic. The thesis has real consequences: prenatal screening, resource allocation, how a GP talks to a new parent. If the view is right, much of what medicine does looks prejudiced.…
- I know the spider is harmless and I’m still terrified. Is my fear wrong, or just irrational?
And this is why exposure therapy works where argument doesn't. As a GP I referred plenty of phobic patients. Explaining the facts did nothing; the patients already knew them. Gradual exposure cha…
- Compatibilism answers a question nobody was asking
Hume's actual sentence is: "By liberty, then, we can only mean a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will." Notice the "only". He is not dodg…