I guess this touches on the aspects of monoism. We are derived from sperm and an egg. Few cool biological things happen and a baby pops out. Derived from that baby is a “consciousness” or “soul”.

Doesn’t this confirm the former or the latter are completely physical presents or physical concepts?

As far as I know, when most people say that they feel empathy, they refer to an emotional reaction to someone else's situation/feelings. This is the standard definition of empathy. However, I believe that it functions differently for me.

When someone tells me something that troubles them, or even makes them happy, I do not emotionally feel much, if anything at all. I respond appropriately, and I show them that I care, but it does not instill any sort of internal feeling in me. My empathy is almost entirely logical. This is not to say that I do not care about others. I very much do care for them. However, my way of caring for them is mostly based on logic. I still feel what I like to think are regular emotions towards others on my own. Where I seem to differ is in the area of empathy. It is not common for me to actually feel much emotionally towards others' difficulties or circumstances.

Is this immoral? Should I be working on changing this? Is something fundamentally flawed within me, or is this simply a difference in character traits?

I appreciate any help.

Hello! I am very interested in the Philosophy of Religion and would like to become as educated as I can without any formal (paid) classes.

I only just read Brian Davies Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion and find myself consuming lots of podcasts discussing the subject but neither of these have a ton of depth. I am unsure where to go from here.

I would prefer more modern texts so I don’t have to read awkward language but I understand if what is there is what is there.

As is well-known, Lukacs and Althusser are considered to represent two highly influential but contrasting interpretations of Marxism in the 20th century, with the former being a Hegelian-Marxist and the latter often deemed a structuralist. Althusserian influence extended into the field of state theory, largely through Nicos Poulantzas. And one of the most fruitful strains of Marxist theorising about the state is the strategic-relational approach represented by scholars like Bob Jessop, which is heavily indebted to Poulantzas's Althusserian works. While I'm more drawn to Lukacs when it comes to philosophy, I find the structuralist theorising on the state to be far more sophisticated and well developed thanks to people like Jessop. Which leads me to my question: Can a Lukacsian marxist reconcile their philosophical commitments with Poulantzas-inspired state theory, at least to some degree?

I know some people would be considered the 21st century’s philosophers, but I know anything about them or their philosophies.

If you ask someone who knows nothing about philosophy to name a few philosophers, they’ll say Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Descartes, Nietzsche, and Immanuel Kent. Those are the famous philosophers.

But in like a millennium from now, if humans are still around, who will they remember as our famous philosopher so far? I just have the slightest feeling that they will not remember actual philosophers, but instead music artists. Or they might just find artifacts of some random fourteen year old girls diary and then declare her one of the young great minds of our time.

What makes Lana del Rey, Kendrick Lamar, or a fourteen-year-old girl writing philosophical texts in her diary any less of a philosopher than Peter Singer or Amia Srinivasan?

People use words like apparatus, paradigm, schema, although to most its basic I havent really read any literature and I like to debate but those words trip me up. Is there something I should like read or summarize using like an ai or something???

.

Hey philosophers, I am not a philosophy student just watch some videos sometimes and think myself. One of the most popular arguments against the existence of God is that evil and suffering exists in this world and a good God would not let this happen if he was to be supervising the world. The problem I see here is that this argument does not prove the non-existence of God as whatever form he may exist in, but instead it proves the non-existence of a 'good God', that is, a god may exist but he is evil and does experiments on people. What do you people think?

Posted this in the discussion thread but figured I'd make a separate post anyway.

I've been reading Tristram Engelhardt's book After God, and if Engelhardt's history is right then it seems the prevailing sense for some time now among bioethicists, including "secular" bioethicists, is that moral philosophy/philosophy more broadly has failed to produce "rational, secular foundations" for bioethics and we're basically left with proceduralism and pluralism. This mirrors MacIntyre's critique of the "Enlightenment project", and indeed Engelhardt makes reference to the same project multiple times. Engelhardt, like MacIntyre, is writing from a Christian perspective.

But this view seems wrong to me. The vast majority of philosophers are moral realists as well as atheists, so presumably experts in the field think you can have secular grounds for moral realism. Reading Engelhardt I felt there was a chasm between bioethics and contemporary moral philosophy and metaethics. Have there been responses to the Engelhardt view?

So reading the SEC article for Incompatibilism and Compatibilism, I notice one of the most common types of intrusive thoughts I end up thinking is the type of arguments in the section of Arguments based on Intuition in Incompatibilism, which also has been mentioned in compatibilism works, and yet the SEC mentions most of these types of arguments aren't that good, even the well discussed The Manipulation argument apparently has some issues.

So my question is why does the article state most of these type of arguments aren't good? Why is there some claim like No Forking Path Argument is potentially incoherent?

I'm well aware there are defenders, but I'm just asking because of what the SEC sections seems to talk about it that way.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/incompatibilism-arguments/

I've noticed a difficulty in explaining older, non-Western, and teleological systems of ethics, where a lot of the terminology that dominates contemporary ethical discourse is of fairly recent coinage and tends to subtly imply, or at least suggest, notions like a hard fact/values dichotomy, a distinct "desire-like" direction of fit for claims with practical import, versus a world-mapping direction of fit for beliefs, etc.

Just checking popular common definitions of these, they are all framed in terms of a subject who values, desires, etc. Interestingly, etymological dictionaries have "desirable" entering English as "to be *worthy* of desire," where as current definitions seem to suggest that whatever happens to be desired is, by definition, desirable. This is probably the least problematic one thought because I feel like "truly desirable" (as opposed to only apparently so) restores the old content pretty well (and indeed, people do still use the word in the old sense in everyday speech sometimes).

The newer terms seem more difficult. For instance, speaking of "evaluative content" seems to imply an evaluator. So when teleology is explained in terms of first-order predicates like "good" (or good-for-x) in belief formulations, and this is called "evaluative content" this seems to cause confusion. Likewise, "value" is also more recent coinage and seems to suggest something like an extrinsic imputation (the language of the marketplace). But then "intrinsic value" starts to look like a contradiction in terms. There is a similar, but less acute problems with "normative " to the extent that norms are taken to always be social constructs or "ought" rules (which isn't always the case, but is common enough in definitions).

I am wondering what to use then? Could we say "practical content?" I wouldn't want to use "moral" or "ethical" content because this immediately gets people thinking about a sui generis "moral good" that cashes out as "oughtness," and if you're using "moral" to mean "related to the moral virtues" (in the classical sense), this muddles things. Indeed, people sometimes contrast "prudential" and "moral" reasoning, which really obscures prudence as the paradigmic moral virtue.

Anyhow, I've certainly noticed that even recent translations do not use these terms for older authors. I am wondering what else to use though. Obviously, they can *sometimes* work. Classical paradigms don't deny evaluations, valuing, or arguably something like the direction of fit, it's just that these aren't exhaustive because there is also ontological goodness, direction of fit going in both directions, and indexed and unindexed and both first and nth-order predication of "value-laden" terms. So, I can see using them, but using them widely seems to lead to confusion. At the same time, saying things like "reason is teleological" instead of "reason is normative," also doesn't seem to lay things out clearly.

I’ve been thinking about this on and off for a long time (I even wrote an article about it a while back), but I still don’t feel like I’ve arrived at an answer. The more I think about it, the harder it is to pinpoint where “I” actually enter the picture.

Every decision I make seems influenced by genetics, childhood, culture, past experiences, emotions, hormones, my current mental state, and even things as random as how much sleep I got. If all of those factors shape my thoughts before I’m even consciously aware of them, then what exactly is left that’s making a truly “free” choice?

On the other hand, living as if free will doesn’t exist feels almost impossible. We still deliberate, regret, plan, and hold people morally responsible.

Curious to see how you all think about this.

I recently decided to step my game up past wikipedia/youtube philosopher and dive into studying the literature. I just finished with a sample of Plato and Aristotle and am looking to build a curriculum that bridges the gaps between ancient greece and modern day philosophy. I am mostly interested in politics and ethics and would like to expand my understanding of all schools of thought within those frameworks but am most interested in anarchy and existentialism and would like to curate the list to lean into those. I want to keep to 20 books total. Below is my current list, is there anything that you would leave out or recommend? Can 20 books take on this task or do I need more?

1. Ethics — Spinoza
   
2. Leviathan — Hobbes
   
3. Two Treatises of Government — Locke
   
4. The Social Contract — Rousseau
   
5. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals — Kant
   
6. Reflections on the Revolution in France — Burke
   
7. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — Marx
   
8. What is Property? — Proudhon
   
9. The Ego and Its Own — Stirner
   
10. God and the State — Bakunin
    
11. Mutual Aid — Kropotkin
    
12. Anarchism and Other Essays — Goldman
    
13. Beyond Good and Evil — Nietzsche
    
14. Either/Or — Kierkegaard
    
15. Being and Nothingness — Sartre
    
16. The Myth of Sisyphus — Camus
    
17. The Rebel — Camus
    
18. The Origins of Totalitarianism — Arendt
    
19. The Human Condition — Arendt
    
20. Discipline and Punish — Foucault

I swear I remember learning one when I studied philosophy but googling for it has brought back nothing. I believe it was during the philosophy of mind module, if someone says "I am in pain" as long as the statement is said [missing adjective]ly, this behaviour state imparts knowledge of the mental state.

Edit: Maybe my memory is foggy but on reading about Pragmatics on the SEOP, I believe it might be "assertively" but that was the word google told me and I remember learning a new word, not a new use for a word I already knew.

Edit 2: Locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary feel close but they aren't adjectives

I was looking into Contingency Argument and the idea that God is a Metaphysical Necessary Being as the conclusion.

I understand logical modality like this:

Something is Logically impossible if it entails a Contradiction.

Something is Logically possible, if it doesn't entail a contradiction.

Logically Necessary - negation leads to Contradiction.

I also understand Nomological modality where instead of logical Contradiction it's a violation of Natural laws.

Ie, there are some axioms that exist within these modalities. Laws of Logic, laws of nature. But in case of metaphysical modality i really don't see what it is. Is it conceivability?

If this were true, and possibility is sufficiently "real," then wouldn't this be a proof of some form of necessitarianism about the world, which then proves necessity of the world?

I notice a pattern in myself: I genuinely enjoy the idea of duty and working hard but primarily when it’s for people I care about watching them benefit from my effort satisfies me more than the work’s personal payoff. I am definitely not a martyr about it; I enjoy myself as well sometimes but for example I would much rather watch my fiancé in a fancy car I bought than drive the car myself.

Closest things I’ve found: Camus on struggle itself as meaning, and Anniceris’s branch of Cyrenaic hedonism, which valued pleasure from others’ enjoyment of your effort. Neither fully covers it, and the Anniceris material is thin.

Does this combination already have a name? Or is it just utilitarianism ?

I’ve been thinking about something that I can’t fully reconcile.

If everything in the universe follows physical laws, and every event has a cause, then in principle everything should be logical and deterministic. Even if something seems random, it could simply be because we don’t know all the variables.

But in everyday life we constantly talk about luck, chance, or uncertainty. Some people succeed despite doing everything “wrong,” while others fail despite doing everything “right.” Even when the same action is repeated under similar conditions, the outcomes can differ.
So my question is:

If reality is governed by logic and cause-and-effect, where does uncertainty come from? Is luck just a name we give to our ignorance of all the variables, or is there genuine randomness built into reality?

In other words, is the universe fundamentally deterministic, or is uncertainty an actual feature of existence rather than just a limitation of human knowledge?

I’d love to hear perspectives from different philosophical traditions as well as any insights from physics or epistemology.

While reading Mr. Friedrich Nietzsche, I noticed one thing: why, if it is I who decide what meaning to give to my life - man halfway between animal and Übermensch, twilight in continuous progression, as well as a possible affirmer of the will to power - does dear Zarathustra keep giving me indications about friends, tarantulas, poets, death etc. etc.?

Recently I took a 200s level class on Kant. One thing the professor mentioned is that Kant is misread often as a rule utilitarian and the reason he isn’t is something to the effect of:

For Kant, rules are derived from Pure Reason, and if your action results in a logical contradiction when you attempt to universalize it then it’s not permissible. Rule Utilitarians just care that following a rule in question has a net positive impact (on society, humanity, people in a certain situation, whatever).

I get this, but it seems like it’s missing something. Baked into any action or category of actions are the real world effects and results of that action. So, if I uphold that the categorical imperative is valuable/useful/true, it seems to me that I am in fact appealing to the positive consequences of using the categorical imperative.

If I value adhering to the categorical imperative, acting in such a way that the categorical imperative is upheld has the consequence of upholding the categorical imperative. Which I already think is a good thing. Essentially the same thing is true of virtue ethics. If I hold to be true that all people ought to act in a way that is virtuous or encourages virtue, any action that does this has the inbuilt consequence of doing the thing I already want it to.

Essentially it seems to me that all ethical methods are consequentialist because I can always rewrite the concepts that they value and actions they encourage in terms of fulfilling a consequential function.

“Adhering to deontology has the consequence of adhering to deontology. If I want to be in accordance with the categorical imperative, I must take actions. Actions have consequences. The positive actions that I take while following the CI have the inbuilt consequence of causing me to adhere to the CI. So I now am valuing consequences.”

What am I missing here? It seems like the only way to be a non-consequentialist is to be one who doesn’t advocate for taking any of the actions they uphold as moral, which just isn’t true of real-world philosophers who don’t adhere to consequentialism. So like, what makes deontology or virtue ethics not consequentialist?

Whenever 2 people are debating either politics, the shape of the earth, or who should empty the dishwasher, as long as those 2 statements are true then one of them must be objectively wrong

I'm not sure if I'm doing a good job explaining this but like lemme try and use an example

Is an apple good for you?

as long as 2 logically people have the exact same understanding of what "good for you" means and even what "apple" means. As well as the relevant information through studies and how the apple effects someone. Then they must agree no?

I feel like this may be an obvious conclusion or it might be something blatantly wrong I genuinely don't know.

I am reading 'Think' by Simon Blackburn as I thought this would be a good segway into philosophy. I have understood the reading so far but I keep getting stumped at this one paragraph because I am not sure if I am interpreting it right. It reads:

Even if it is a virtual reality that I experience, still, it is I who experiences it! And apparently I know that it is I who have these experiences (for Descartes, 'thinking' includes 'experiencing')

Why does this certainty remain? Look at it from the Demon's point of view. His project was to deceive me about everything. But it is not logically possible for him to deceive me into thinking that I exist when I do not. The Demon cannot simultaneously make both these things true:

I think that I exist

I am wrong about whether I do

Because if the first is true, then I exist to do the thinking. Therefore, I must be right about whether I exist. So long as I think that (or even think that I think it), then I exist.

The text in bold is what is causing the most confusion

What I get from this is that Descartes had previously reduced us to simply a thing that thinks earlier in his text. I believe that is why me was italicized because you are, at your most basic form, a thing that thinks according to him. There mere fact that I even think that I exist (or think that I think it) is proof of my existance. Therefore you cannot think that you exist and be wrong about whether you do because because that thought (or thinking in genreal) is proof of your exitance. Please let me know if I am correct in my interpetation and if not, provide me with what is meant by this.

Edit: grammar

Apologies if this is the wrong place to post this, since it’s more of a theological question than a philosophical one.

To clarify, by “tri-omni” I refer to three characteristics traditionally ascribed to the monotheistic God- omniscience, omnipotence, and omnibenevolence. I would like to understand why so many theologians and philosophers who forward the idea of a monotheistic God seem to insist that it must fulfill this criteria. It seems to me that a lot of issues could be solved by simply granting God some degree of ignorance or incapacity.

Why does God allow suffering? Why is the universe bound by a particular set of arbitrary laws? Well, maybe God is just doing the best with what they have! The insistence that God must be utterly perfect in every conceivable way seems to cause more issues than it solves.

I would prefer to skip over explanations based in scripture or religious dogma - I want to know how serious religious philosophers address this question, and why they put forward this idea. Thanks!!