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Posts tagged philosophy
On sites like Codidact, the question often arises about what rules should be imposed on user behavior. What is a good question? What is a good answer? What behaviors are desirable and which are not...
Philosophy is an academic discipline and also a more informal conversational pursuit. How should the Philosophy community be structured to support and encourage answerable objective questions and ...
A philosophical zombie is an entity that is externally, behaviorally indistinguishable from some conscious entity, but lacks inner conscious experience, a.k.a. qualia. See articles “Zombies” and “...
When society creates laws to govern themselves, do they simply codify what has already been established practice in society? For example, when a law is written that forbids theft, is this because s...
Philosophically, what role does police serve in society? Today, virtually every society has a police force. So, it seems like there must be some compelling reason to have one, i.e. police must ser...
Do laws only matter if there is a police force enforcing them? Police in the modern sense is a recent development. Before the 19th century, police forces as today were very rare. But people have m...
Is there a specification meta-language for logics? A formal language which can express, “a logic with variable symbols, unary predicates, and connectives”?
Consider the following claim: In any causal relationship X -> Y, it is always possible to find an intermediate effect A such that X -> A -> Y. This is a claim about nature, not our c...
Science tends to discover knowledge by performing experiments in the lab. For example, suppose we have a hypothesis that a volume V of atmospheric air, when compressed quickly to a certain ratio, ...
How does climate change research establish causality? For example, when it is said that human activity causes global warming, what sort of logic is used to justify this claim? Let's not get into t...
Is the historical method a scientific method? When I was a child in grade school, I learned that "The Scientific Method" had the following steps: Observe a phenomenon: find things by curious ex...
When explaining a piece of knowledge, sometimes the explanation is short and simple and other times it is long and complex. Some people put the burden on the explainer, and demand that they make i...
I think there may be a common fallacy which I do not know if it has been given a name and a fully developed, possibly mathematical, argument. The idea is something like a basic fallacy of assuming...
Socrates was fond of engaging in philosophical discourse where he would simply ask questions and not make any statements or assertions. This created a situation where all the conclusions come from ...
a formal system is a system of axioms equipped with rules of inference, which allow one to generate new theorems. The set of axioms is required to be finite or at least decidable, i.e., there mus...
In order to understand Gödel’s theorems, one must first explain the key concepts essential to it, such as “formal system”, “consistency”, and “completeness”. Roughly, a formal system is a system ...
From what conceptual framework could one derive self-consistent ethical principles about how to distinguish between situations in which people’s right to privacy enables them to choose what data ot...
The following is cross-posted from Stack Exchange for catching my eye: Schopenhauer already defined "intentionality". There is a part in his philosophy where he separates representation into subj...
It is common nowadays for the term “colonialism” to have a default morally negative connotation. But, what really is colonialism, and is it always bad? Why/why not?
What are some developed ethical theories and frameworks regarding killing? For example, is it ever ethically justified to kill? When, under what circumstances, and why?
Site Name Philosophy Description Philosophy is a highly general and fundamental subject which often inquires into the nature of intellectual inquiry itself. It addresses life’s “big questions”, ...
