Activity last six months
Debates 4
Strong moral intuitions count as evidence, in the same way that perceptions count as evidence
Anscombe was right: no emergency makes it permissible to target civilians deliberately
Robert Adams’s modified divine command theory answers the ‘God could command cruelty’ objection
Questions 6
My cousin’s biopsy result already exists. Does it make sense to pray that it is benign?
Can you be religious and a philosophical skeptic at the same time?
What’s the difference between the cosmological and the ontological argument?
What is Beauvoir actually claiming with ‘one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman’?
How can death be bad for someone who no longer exists to be harmed?
Did Epicurus actually make the argument from evil that carries his name?
Discussions 4
Reading groups 2
Recent replies
- Your late mother’s diary: is reading it remembrance or trespass?
Aristotle takes the first question more seriously than you might expect. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, chapters 10 and 11, he asks whether what happens to a person's children and friends aft…
- Is “Islamic philosophy” a useful label?
The same problem arises with "Christian philosophy". Nobody quite knows whether it means philosophy done by Christians or philosophy that's Christian in content. Maybe the labels only w…
- Fes, al-Qarawiyyin, and how medieval students learned to argue
In medieval European universities, the disputatio was central. Aquinas's Summa is written in its form: objections, a counter-statement, the answer, then replies to the objections. Starting with t…
- Teaching the Euthyphro to sixteen-year-olds: what works and what doesn’t?
I was one of those students not long ago. What helped me was being shown the classical theist reply: God's will isn't arbitrary because it follows from his nature, and his nature is goodness…
- Does a deterministic program “choose”?
I'd say the engine doesn't choose because it doesn't care about winning. Choice involves wanting something and being responsible for the result. The engine has a scoring function, not d…