How do you feel? –What did I just ask you? “Feel” is like many/most words, i.e., we usually use it without thinking and its meanings are many and varied. I might ask you how you feel in regard to your physical health—the answer, “I feel good; the pain in my ankle has gone away.” I might ask how you feel in regard to life/mental health—the answer, “I feel kind of down these days; I can’t quite place it.” I might…
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…
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…
1. Introduction In this post I want to consider a number of aspects of the question of whether and to what extent our claims about God’s nature are intelligible. I will begin by considering the question of intelligibility on its own before applying those considerations to some of the things typically said about God in the Judeo-Christian tradition. My conclusion will be that in regard to some things we say about God, e.g., that God is outside space and time,…
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…
Before talking about the nature of arguments in my Intro to Logic class, I start off talking about inferential relationships between statements more generally. So I ask them to consider what else must be true , e.g., if “Todd is dead” is true and if “Bob loves Jill” is true. Two of the claims that people said followed from “Todd is dead” were: 1) There is at least one dead person. 2) There is a reason for Todd’s death. I…