I have been reading your site, and there is somewhere you said a conclusion can logical valid but unsound. Is the following argument valid but unsound? I am not sure about what unsound arguments mean? Can you please clarify this for me. – Johnson Mafoko Yes, that is a valid, unsound argument. The structure is [...]
Wednesday, January 9, 2013
…Thank you for making the attempt. I like it. My question concerns Paul Tillich’s critic of pure existentialism, stating that our use of language is universal and points to essentialism. He argues that Christianity is comprises a dynamic between essentialism and existentialism. You need both. You can’t separate the two. Is it really possible to [...]
Hello, I would like to find out how you could answer the following question: Is conscious experience an epiphenomenon of the brain? I’ve dealt with this question several times before, but I’ll gladly address it again. Epiphenomenalism is the idea that mental phenomena –thoughts, feelings, acts of will –do not cause physical actions, but are [...]
Also filed in
|
|
Q: Thank you for replying. I must say, your goodwill and faith in people is quite admirable. I agree that a shift towards creative / artistic production is something of great value and represents a positive destiny for human beings. The great problem that we face however, is that there is a significant percentage of [...]
Everyone in the Western World and beyond knows that we hold the key to personal/societal/cultural/financial transformation. We know that everything we do is wrong. Instead of going out and doing exactly what we should, ie stop spending, stop our vacuous pursuits (Plastic surgery springs to mind), stop supporting imperialistic expansionist ideals, we proceed to have [...]
Thursday, November 24, 2011
In the old days, prior to Individuality, your Identity was entirely a function of what slot your community plugged you into. You might be the Village Idiot, the Village Chief, the Village Medicine Man, the Village Wise Woman or the Village Whore, but there was no question of you taking on a role outside of [...]
Thursday, October 20, 2011
From the time I was very young, I worried about the question of whether the true nature of Reality was as we perceive it or not. And if we could be deluded about the nature of Reality itself, what did that mean in terms of our relationships with others, others who might be mere figments [...]
Thursday, November 18, 2010
It depends on how strictly you want to define the word “tautology”. A) FORMAL: If you wanted to evaluate it this statement as a formal tautology you would have to rewrite it as a formal statement first. In the form “IF NOT a THEN NOT b” (a=opportunities, b=crimes) it is not a tautology, but in [...]
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
You are probably thinking of Socrates. To be exact, he said that the wiser man is the one who knows he knows nothing rather than the person who thinks he knows something (but does not). However, the underlying idea is the same. Socrates is also famous for developing a method of practicing philosophy that consists [...]
Essence in this case refers to the ancient philosophical idea (most closely associated with Plato) that all things have a predefined, ideal set of characteristics. For instance, the Essence of a chair is that it has four legs, a back, and people sit on it. However, not everything matches its Essence. You might have a [...]
Monday, September 20, 2010
I can’t give any definitive answer to this question, but I can offer you a portrait of a situation that might be analogous. Picture yourself as a character in a book. Time only has meaning for you, the character, during the narrative of the story, which represents your life on earth. However, outside of the [...]
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Both wrestle with the concept that everything we ordinarily view as “reality” could be in fact a highly convincing illusion.
It’s both. It has the form and function of a question, so it is a question, but it is about the questioning process, so it is also a metaquestion. Formal languages such as first or second order logic have paradox-avoiding restrictions that force an either/or choice between using regular langauge or meta langauge, but not [...]
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
We have to define science first –let’s say it is the body of knowledge formed through the scientific method of testing hypotheses against verifiable empirical data. It becomes clear that there are a range of questions science cannot answer. Science cannot answer the question of “what is science?” because the body of knowledge that composes [...]
Thursday, October 2, 2008
This ranks among the most important questions human beings must strive to answer. It’s also one of the most difficult. There are three contrasting approaches typically used in answering this question. The first is pragmatic: Human nature is what humans do. The second is aspirational: Human nature is an ideal towards which we should strive. [...]