Pleasure and pain are as intriguing as they are dangerous. They are with us from the beginning and experienced daily, yet I don’t think many of us understand them very well. Most basically they are tools, very primitive ones. If you feel pain, then that is often a good sign that you should try to stop what you’re doing. We can’t necessarily say the same thing reversed about pleasure. Pleasure is a less discriminating tool than pain. And that is…
In reading Siderits’s excellent Buddhism as Philosophy I have come to realize the following problem. If a religion has its base in philosophy, if its central tenets are supposed to follow from the use of reason and argument, then none of its conclusions can ever be firm enough to ground religious practice. There will always be difficult objections and questions that cannot be answered in a way sufficient to allow one to say, “I know this is true and I…
There are many reasons to read Nietzsche. Whether you agree with his substantive views, taking him seriously will help to keep you intellectually honest. An example comes from Beyond Good and Evil, Part One: On the Prejudices of Philosophers, §5: What provokes one to look at all philosophers half suspiciously, half mockingly, is not that one discovers again and again how innocent they are – how often and how easily they make mistakes and go astray; in short, their childishness…
I was thinking about Aristotle’s claim in the Metaphysics that all humans by nature desire to know. It occurred to me that if this is true it might partially explain why people are so often susceptible to errors of reasoning like the bifurcation fallacy and oversimplifying important but difficult issues, e.g., God’s existence, abortion, gun rights, justice, etc. My thinking was that if people really do by nature desire to know, but the issue they are thinking about is too complex…
In a recent essay, I made a distinction between what I called epistemic reasons and purely causal reasons. The former are potentially truth preserving (capable of providing epistemic justification) the latter are not even potentially truth preserving (and thus are incapable of providing epistemic justification). In this essay, I’m going to appeal to the same basic distinction regarding reasons that do and do not provide epistemic justification, but I’m going to refer to them simply as epistemic reasons (ERs) and…
If we can be certain of anything, then it is of death (of course) and……not taxes (for one might live where there are no taxes)…..but suffering: death and suffering confront us as part of what it is to be human. Just as we must eat and drink to live, so too we must suffer and eventually die. Much may come between birth and death—real love and fulfillment would be “nice”—but two of the most important questions we should ask ourselves…
A song from Modest Mouse begins with these lyrics: “I was in heaven – I was in hell – Believe in neither – But fear them as well.” Subtract the claim of having been to both and just consider the claim, “I believe in neither heaven nor hell, but I fear them.” Further, suppose someone asserts this with the utmost sincerity. Is there anything strange about that assertion? Is it at all like “Moore’s Paradox”: “It’s raining but I don’t believe it.” ?…
Let us define the number i as equal to the square root of -1. So i cannot be positive or negative, but all real numbers are positive or negative—so i is imaginary. I am pretty much the farthest thing from a mathematician, but i strikes me as being something that we think we have some understanding of, but we really don’t, similar to saying “There is either a red square-circle or there is not a red square-circle.” But the funny…