Philosophy

Sartre’s The Reprieve covers eight days in the lives of various people in France before the signing of the Munich Agreement, soon followed by the German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Frenchmen are being called up for military service. In this context Sartre invites us to overhear Mathieu’s conversation with his brother Jacques:
Mathieu returned and sat […]

In Philosophy Now (Sept/Oct 2009) Raymond Tallis argues against the idea that mind and brain are the same thing. Here he distinguishes between necessary and sufficient conditions. To use his example: it is a necessary condition of Tallis being knocked down by a 97 bus in London that he must be in London. But this […]

Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961), founder of analytical psychology, wrote voluminously, 18 volumes of Collected Works and secondary commentary. Jung was a highly influential figure. He was a psychiatrist who became a psychotherapist. But he was also a cultural commentator and quasi-mystic. His doctoral research involved investigating a medium, his maternal cousin, Hélène Preiswerk.
Jung was intensely […]

Yesterday on the way to work I was listening to a podcast by atheistic philosopher, Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, based at Duke University in North Carolina. He was ridiculing the idea that you have to have a God in order to have morality. There were many aspects of his reasoning I found suspect, including the way he […]

In the movie The Maltese Cross, Humphrey Bogart plays the role of Dashiell Hammett’s famous hard-nosed detective, Sam Spade. Hammett’s world is a godless world, ruled by chance and violence with individuals being alone in a meaningless world. Macbeth lives in a similar kind of world. Macbeth is a tragic figure. Michael Rockler sees Macbeth […]

I like this quote I picked up from recently deceased Polish philosopher, Lesek Kolakowski:
Every work of man is a compromise between the material and the tool. Tools are never quite equal to their tasks, and none is beyond improvement. Aside from differences in human skill, the tool’s imperfection and the material’s resistance together set the […]

In Being and Nothingness Sartre presents his depressing view of individual freedom grounded in self-limited epistemology and drowning in a merciless sea of subjectivity:
…I can say of Pierre, who is dead: “He loved music.” In this case, the subject like the attribute is past. There is no living Pierre in terms of which this past-being […]

Nigel Warburton, immediately before interviewing Marilyn McCord Adams, comments that there is no greater challenge to religious belief than the problem of evil. If there is an all-powerful, all-good God then why does he allow such terrible suffering in the world?
It is perhaps Warburton’s view that the problem of evil is the greatest challenge to […]

In What Has Jerusalem To Do With Beijing? Yeo Khiok-khng points out that one of main presuppositions of yin-yang philosophy is that cosmology is more important than anthropology. He comments:
A true understanding of the self is not attained merely by studying oneself, but requires studying the self in relation to the larger whole in which […]

In Being and Nothingness. Sartre contends,
Values in actuality are demands which lay claim to a foundation.
He goes on to explain that:
[value] can be revealed only to an active freedom which makes it exist as value by the sole fact of recognizing it as such. It follows that my freedom is the unique foundation of values and […]

There are two aspects of Kant’s philosophy which came under attack. His synthetic a priori  - his contention that some things can be established by reason alone that are not just tautologies (true by definition) - was rejected by G.E. Moore, Wittgenstein, Logical Positivists and the Vienna Circle, all representing the Analytic tradition of philosophy. […]

Eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism have long stood against the idea that truth can be apprehended through reason. At best reason is akin to a boat that one uses to get to a certain desired point in the process after which it can be left behind.
Yet even in Western philosophy cultural factors throw considerable […]

Immanuel Kant once observed, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” One of the most accessed blogs in the world, Crooked Timber, is based on this quote.
I have not been able to track down as yet the source of Kant’s statement and I am not sure exactly what he meant. I […]

I must confess I have a lot of sympathy for Jeremy Bentham’s regard for natural rights:
Right… is the child of law; from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters.
Natural rights is […]

The Oxford Companion to Philosophy defines paternalism as “the power or authority one person or institution exercises over another to confer benefits or prevent harm for the latter regardless of the latter’s informed consent.” However, Seana V. Shiffrin argues that all that is necessary for paternalism to occur is for the the paternalist to take […]

Summarising Plantinga’s approach to this question, we began with four propositions:
1. God is omnipotent
2. God is wholly good
3. God is omniscient
4. Evil exists
It has never been shown that this logical set is implicitly inconsistent. Yet it does not necessarily follow that it is implicitly consistent. Can it be shown that there is in fact no inconsistency here?
Plantinga begins by considering […]

Following Plantinga, we have seen that no explicit or formal contradiction is involved in the following propositions:
1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is wholly good.
and
3. Evil exists.
We considered an attempt to demonstrate an implicit contradiction by adding the following two propositions:
4c. An omnipotent and omniscient good being eliminates every evil that it can properly eliminate.
and
5. There are no limits to […]

Following Plantinga, we have seen that no explicit or formal contradiction is involved in the following propositions:
1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is wholly good.
and
3. Evil exists.
We considered an attempt to demonstrate an implicit contradiction by adding the following two propositions:
4a. Every good thing always eliminates evil that it knows about and can eliminate.
and
5. There are no limits to what […]

Following Plantinga, we have seen that no explicit or formal contradiction is involved in the following propositions:
1. God is omnipotent.
2. God is wholly good.
and
3. Evil exists.
We considered Mackie’s attempt to demonstrate an implicit contradiction by adding the following two propositions:
4. A good thing always eliminates evil as far as it can.
and
5. There are no limits to what an omnipotent being […]

At this point we need to recall the example containing three propositions concerning the ages of George, Paul and Nick. To demonstrate that these were implicitly contradictory another proposition(s) had to be added that was necessarily true. Since the fourth proposition clearly was of this nature there was no doubt that the three propositions did […]

In God, Freedom and Evil Alvin Plantinga distinguishes between various kinds of contradictions and argues that it is not possible to construct a logical set that demonstrates there is a contradiction between the reality of evil, on the one hand, and God’s goodness, omnipotence, omniscience, on the other.
The typical function of natural theology, involving philosophical […]

Midgley rejects Dawkinism, which Dawkins erroneously assumes to be Darwinism, when Dawkins dismisses as preposterous the notion that there is any meaning or purpose to existence. Dawkins believes that there is no such thing as justice, no evil and no good.
Midgley argues that even in a purely naturalistic universe the terms “good” and “evil” have […]

Over 5 years Debra Trione interviewed 60 of America’s most powerful and influential people - in politics, law, business, the military and publishing - regarding their visions of a perfect world. In doing so she used a unique and, indeed, rather peculiar interview technique.
Trione began with broad questions such as: “Name two things you hope will be true […]

In the editorial for the January/February edition of Philosophy Now, Grant Bartley reports on the results of a survey among their well-educated and presumably scientifically-aware readers. When asked, “Is there a God?” 52% said Yes, 31% No and 17% Don’t Know - an overall majority for God.
This particular issue was entitled Darwin & Friends, given […]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan, insists that when a person makes a decision this does not involve acting on ‘raw beliefs’ about the situation in question, nor on what probabilitists call ‘degrees of belief’, but rather on the possible consequences as perceived by that person. He maintains,
Perception of impact, that is, of […]

It was the view of Ernst Cassirer that humans are unique in the animal kingdom since they are the only beings with a “symbolic imagination and intelligence.” Human symbols transcend the things referred to and involve conception. People mentally react to their symbols. Cassirer argued that “instead of defining man as an animal rationale, we […]

Poseidonius spoke of man’s “second nature” in expressing his view that by nature people are indispensably dependent on culture. Johann Herder followed suit but adding his view that the development of language and culture is necessitated by human deficiencies and incompleteness.
Helmuth Plessner explained the development of culture as arising from what he termed “homelessness” and “excentricity”, […]

Existentialism is committed to the principle that existence precedes essence. This means that we, through our own actions and choices (existence) determine our own nature (essence). Simone de Beauvoir qualified this by her distinction between “in-itself” and “for-itself.” She recognised that both of these dimensions are found in people and accounts for what she described […]

Peter Abbs identifies Jean-Jacques Rousseau as “the first significant philosopher of deep personal autobiography” (”The Full Revelation of the Self” in Philosophy Now [July/August 2008] 17). Rousseau contrasted himself with other Enlightenment philosophers:
I have met many men who were more learned in their philosophising, but their philosophy remained, as it were, external to them. Wanting […]

It was Nietzsche’s understanding that Christianity was essentially repressive. He assumed that initially man in his state of natural innocence simply followed his instincts. Judeo-Christian religion has damaged this with its emphasis on guilt and repression. Indeed, as Cathal Horan points out, for Nietzsche it is this repression of instincts which explains the evolution of […]

I was listening to a podcast some time back (I’ve forgotten the source) which described Nietzsche as perhaps the most art-obsessed philosopher of all time. Apparently, he saw himself as a poet and composer, though others found it difficult to share this opinion. Nietzsche believed that the pre-Socratic ancient Greeks used art to deal with […]

Barbara and I are currently reading Ecclesiastes. The book begins:
“Meaningless! Meaningless! ” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless” (1:2).
This theme permeates the book. For example, we read:
I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind (1:14).
Then I applied myself to the […]

In a stimulating article (”Wilde and Morality” in Philosophy Now 65 [Jan-Feb 08] 28-30) Peter Benson explores the relationship of Wilde’s classic The Portrait of Dorian Gray to morality. In the preface to this book Oscar Wilde provocatively claimed,
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or […]

“The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)
These words were communicated by God via Jeremiah following the catastrophic events of 586 BCE.  It is quite evident that Freud did not discover the unconscious. The Bible is very much aware that the sinful behaviour of people is the product […]

According to Arthur Schopenhauer, the only experience we have of the world is not of the world itself. Rather, it is a representation of the world that we have in our minds. Schopenhauer knew full well that most people would reject this view and insist that external objects show the world is more than a […]

Hegel reasoned that if people are to enjoy the full richness of human experience then they must avoid being detached and isolated from the world. We become so detached when we seek knowledge in external objects separate from consciousness. That is, people see themselves as separate from the world and treat self and world as […]

In Hegel’s thought the self-revealing God of the Bible becomes a pathetic “god” subsumed by what Hegel regarded as a higher conception: ultimate reality as Mind or Spirit. The jury is still out on whether Hegel was a pantheist or not, though there is a great deal about his thought which encourages us to see him this way. […]

In Philosophy Now (July/August 2008) Cathal Horan comments:
Some people consider Freud to be one of the three most important figures in human history, sharing the podium with Copernicus and Darwin. The key to this claim is that all these thinkers shook the foundations of human thought by showing that we are not as important or […]

In the last blog on this subject I pointed out the obvious: that the reality of evil does not constitute an explicit contradiction of God’s goodness, omnipotence and omniscience. But does it constitute a formal contradiction? As Plantinga (God, Freedom and Evil) points out this depends on whether it is possible for the atheologian (the […]

In his book God, Freedom and Evil, Alvin Plantinga gives the following example of an explicit contradiction:
Paul is a good tennis player, and it is false that Paul is a good tennis player.
Technically, an explicit contradiction can be defined as “a conjunctive proposition, one conjunct of which is the denial or negation of the other conjunct” (12). The […]

Lately, much of what I’ve been reading bears on what it means to be human. Angus Taylor, philosopher and author of Animals and Ethics, argues that consistency requires excluding some humans from the moral community and including at least some animals in it.
A ghoulish story serves as the launching pad for his argument. A Transylvanian Count was […]

I enjoyed reading “Dear Socrates” in the latest edition of Philosophy Now, where “Socrates” warns against transfering the certainty of logic itself to a particular argument, pointing out that this itself is a logical error. Why? Because “it conflates validity with soundness”. A good or sound argument is not merely logical but has true premises.
This […]

Plato argued that the most profound love occurs when we are connected with ultimate truth. Ultimate truth is this: “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). The most profound love occurred when God, in his love for us, sent his Son as the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10). It is when we grasp […]

Biochemical researcher Phil Burcham, an Associate Professor at the University of Western Australia, reminds us of the evidence that had persuaded philosopher Anthony Flew to abandon atheism (”Famous Atheist Recants”, Australian Presbyterian, May 2008, 27-28). Flew will have nothing to do with the Christian conception of God. But he is an evidentialist and he became personally persuaded […]

In Romans 1:18 Paul locates the unrighteousness characteristic of all people in their activity of suppressing the truth. In context “the truth” is what God has revealed about himself, which places on us certain moral claims, such as honouring God and giving thanks to him. Adopting an ideal Christian self in the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Soren […]

Heidegger is waiting for a train in a provincial station. He feels bored, uneasy and finds himself desperately seeking for any distraction. He thinks of things he would otherwise be doing. He feels he is wasting time, doing nothing.
Can you identify with that? This is the scenario presented by Cathal Horan in an article entitled “Bored […]

Philosopher-theologian Janet Martin Soskice was once asked if she would participate in a radio program considering the issue of whether there are miracles or not. After she agreed she was told that there would be a leading humanist putting the opposite case. She was asked, “What would you say to him?” She replied, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” […]