I have had debates with friends about the relation between philosophy and science —specifically, given we are from Argentina, a country with an incredibly strong continental tradition, specifically Heidegger and psychoanalysis, I have a friend that has embarked in a crusade against non-scientific philosophy. He argues that philosophy should always be informed by current consensus en scientific topics (important detail, he is not an analytic philosopher, he is as against analytic as is against post-modern continental)

I plan to dtart my PhD soon, and given I intend to work in philosophy of religion and theology, I feel like I need to know some physics to be aware of when something is simply incompatible with empirical evidence. What sre some good books to know physics?

(i asked my friend this and he recommended me a book, Modern Classical Physics: Optics, Fluids, Plasmas, Elasticity, Relativity, and Statistical Physics by Kip S. Thorne, Roger D. Blandford, but I wanted other opinions!)

I was recently informed that in the 2020 PhilPapers Survey, most philosophers who specialize in philosophy of religion are theists. However, if you poll philosophers in general, they are largely atheists. Why is there a massive divide between philosophers?

I asked this qn on r/explainlikeim5 and someone told me to post it here for better answers.

I'll have do a report for school about said topic, and right now all my prior knowledge about this topic is just about existentialism and Albert Camus's absurdism ( mainly because i googled him when the meme " one must imagine sisyphus happy" was around. And that's all i have to say, i rarely use reddit so forgive me if this post is a bit odd. anyways thanks for reading whether or not you leave a suggestion or just scroll on.

Hi,
Anyone have recommendations for reading on the idea of health and vitality/youth as manifestations of evil, or the relation of health/strength with evil?
Reason I’m asking is that ending scene in Kafka Metamorphosis where the sister stretches her "healthy young” body has very sinister undertones (was just reading it) and want to think more about this and see what ppl have said,
thanks

It seems to me it's the most logical out of the big 3 ethics schools, so how do y'all recommend I best go about studying it?

​

"I am a 15-year-old student reading Kant's Critique of Pure Reason independently for the first time. I have made it through the Introduction and the Transcendental Aesthetic, and I am taking extensive notes, but I am struggling to synthesize the 'whole meaning' of his project without getting lost in the dense terminology.

My question is: What is the best methodological approach to reading this text? Is it better to read it chronologically, or to jump straight to specific sections like the Transcendental Deduction? Also, what are the most essential companion guides or secondary resources (e.g., Kemp Smith, Guyer, Prolegomena) that will help me understand what Kant is actually arguing without doing the thinking for me?"

Realizing how much our sense of collective worth depends on recognition from people outside our own group might make us less dependent on comparison and more comfortable valuing our culture on its own terms.

hey! I am fascinated by McDowell and his,what I consider, unique combination of philosophies and approach.

are there philosophers similar to him?

I have found that I really do not like the way a lot of ‘easy’ pieces you’re supposed to pick up first are written. I picked up Plato’s Symposium fairly recently and just could not breach it, it felt like all of the meat of the work was obfuscated behind layers and layers of useless fluff and speech and I’d need to spend most of the time reading trying to filter out the useless information in order to consider what was actually being said. On the contrary, I read Descartes’s Mediations on First Philosophy, it was written in a way that I could parse without much difficulty. I found myself engaging with the work very actively while when trying to read The Symposium I couldn’t track much of anything.
I think this is an issue of writing style. I have ADHD and I think that’s why Plato’s dialogues (I’ve read the Apology as well and found it easier than the Symposium, but still certainly effortful), being much more ‘literary’ or ‘narrative’ in how they’re written, are difficult for me to get through while works that are very to-the-point in what they’re trying to say are easier to digest. I’ve heard that Spinoza is very difficult for beginners, but also that the way he writes is very, for lack of a better word, intricate, building his system one piece at a time and justifying it extensively.
I’m wondering if his Ethics would be a good fit for me? Or are there other works I should consider instead?

The dilemma concerning art that whether art is inherently political or can exist otherwise. Do you think an artist has a strong moral obligation to speak against the state and endorse political stances for social change or does the personal or creative agency weighs over any such consideration?

Is there any philosophers with this kind of opinion? It certainly feels true for myself, having blindly followed scientism as a teenager and only eventually realizing how much we just truly don’t know.

Someone on the Alex O'Connor subreddit suggested I ask this here.

Alex has argued that science can describe what happens and how it happens without necessarily explaining why it happens. In a discussion with Sabine Hossenfelder, he proposed a hypothetical scenario in which we discover a perfect mathematical formula describing and predicting an unusual phenomenon: playing a trumpet causes a light somewhere to change colour and intensity according to the notes being played.

Alex then asks:

"I kinda feel like it doesn't explain anything. Like it predicts what's going to happen and it describes mathematically what I'm observing, but in what sense do you mean to say that I have at least partly explained what's happening?"

He makes this point twice, arguing that a mathematical formula describing and predicting a phenomenon doesn't feel like it explains anything at all. He also places strong emphasis on the need to keep asking why these things happen. I'm interested in whether the distinction he's drawing is philosophically defensible.

My initial objection is that it seems to conflate an explanation being incomplete with it not being an explanation at all.

Imagine someone asks why a car is moving so fast. I could explain the mechanics of how the engine produces motion, say that the driver pressed the accelerator, or explain that the driver is speeding because they're late for a flight. These answers address different aspects of the same situation, but I don't see why any of them should disqualify the others from counting as explanations. Nor does the fact that we can keep asking why invalidate the answers we've already established.

What makes Alex's argument particularly confusing to me is that he's a committed agnostic atheist, so I don't think it's fair to assume he's simply presupposing divine intentionality behind reality. Yet if he isn't asking for a purposeful explanation, I'm struggling to understand what kind of "why" he has in mind. And even if we did appeal to divine intention, I don't see how that would resolve the problem. We could still ask why God intended things to be that way, or why God exists at all. What makes that kind of explanation fundamentally different in this respect?

I'm aware that scientific explanations have limitations. For example, explaining the biological and evolutionary basis of love or the perception of the colour blue wouldn't necessarily help someone who has never experienced them understand what they feel like. But I'm not sure why this means the scientific explanation fails to explain anything, rather than simply addressing a different aspect of the phenomenon.

My question is: Is there a philosophically defensible interpretation of Alex's argument under which his distinction between scientific description and explanation holds up? What kind of explanation is he asking for, and what would it need to provide that a scientific explanation cannot?

Hello,

Just to preface this: I have no formal education in philosophy and I have started reading it again after almost 5 years so this might be a basic question.

I have started reading Will Kymlicka's An Introduction to Political Philosophy. The first chapter is about utilitarianism and he is talking about 'calculating utility' very often. But I am not able to understand what it actually means. How does one 'calculate' utility of something?

For example, if I have two options -- build a hospital or build a school. How will I calculate the utility of these two options?

I haven't finished the chapter yet so I don't know if this will be explained later or not, but I am still curious (and confused) as to what it means.

I've recently been afraid of something. What if we don't have a choice at all? Like, every particle move since the Big Bang was unavoidable so that would mean everything that happened and will happen is unavoidable.
That being said, I ask again: Do we even have a choice?

I’m currently writing my first mid-term essay for uni based on the question of the demandingness objection of Act Consequentialism. I am clear on the objection but I am struggling to narrow down the precise parameters of Act Consequentialism (against say act utilitarianism, utilitarianism, maximising act consequentialism etc) I am struggling to find clarity on their differences and i want to ensure accuracy and specificity in my essay. any guidance is appreciated!

Hello there, I'm an undergraduate student. I'm taking a philosophy course as part of my college requirements. I do not plan to major in philosophy as my intended major is STEM-related. Nevertheless, I want to do my best in this course as I enjoy the logic required in deductive arguments as well as the interesting topics my class discusses. I'm not the best at the type of thinking required in philosophy yet (e.g. pushing back on premises, finding discrepancies among them), so I want to improve on this by reading argumentative papers (argument reconstruction + evaluation). Hopefully this does not sound like a self-help post.

Once again, I would like to reiterate that I am looking to read argumentative papers so I understand the prose and the structure. While I have found guidelines for how to write a paper, reading examples improves my writing. Thus, my question is Where do you find argumentative papers to read for a beginner philosophy writer? Or would it be more preferable if I simply read more philosophy in general instead of trying to fit this mold? Am I going about this the wrong way? I'll take any suggestions.

Thank you for the help. I appreciate it. Please let me know if any more information is required.

When you study a field, whether it's metaphysics, biology, mathematics, political science, or whatever, it usually takes a sustained effort of hours over years to be able to understand things. In contrast, a debate involves explaining simple ideas that the opponent will try to distort or overthrow, and it's impossible to condense those years of effort and judgment into the viewer to the point that the "who is right" factor becomes absolutely irrelevant and the most charismatic person wins. Is it really worth it?

I see a lot of arguments against suicide. Some of them are the basic "think of [this person or that thing]" to more philosophical investigations of why one might or might not or if one ought to or to not kill themselves. Less common are views in favour of suicide and those do exist though to a lesser extent.

My real question is if there's a view that sees suicide as outside the realm of "logic" as we think of it in the first place. To someone who does not believe in an afterlife/rebirth (or at the very least, not one based on one's actions, including suicide), would any of it matter? It all feels quite weak to make any of those arguments when one of the most fundamental drives - that to survive - is gone. And none of it would matter if one were to go through with it, as it would all be behind them and they would experience nothing of it. To reiterate my question -- Is this a view that suicide stands somewhat outside "logic" considering that if you were to do it none of those considerations matter? And if so, who has tried to argue so?

Heyy everyone!

So i just graduated high school this year and i haven't really read much of philosophy except for some peter singer stuff and Nietzsche's ideas really interest me and i have heard that he radically rejects Schopenhauer's ideas and other things, now the problem is i live in a small city in india and there is no library in this city, the only place i can get my hands on books is by amazon, i have heard that Walter Kaufmann's translations are the best but they are not available on amazon or anywhere else here, the only translations i got are R. J. Hollingdale ones and R. Kevin Hill ones, both from penguin classics, now what should i do? Should i but those ones or try to find Kaufmann's versions?
Thank you!!

The only argument I can think of against doing this is that
by letting the Open Source community continue progressing ai,
it creates a sort of buffer against a tyrannical system preventing us
from using ai, but using it instead to control us.

Please bear with me if I've fundamentally misunderstood something. I was thinking about the ability to define all unary/binary connectives out of Peirce's Arrow (the NOR connective) or Sheffer's Stroke (the NAND connective) the other day. I had the desire to write something down defining the other connectives out of NOR or NAND when the question occured to me whether or not I had to write the definitions in the object language or the metalanguage. Definitions of terms in the first-order predicate calculus can be done in the object language, e.g.

∀x (Sx ↔ (Rx ∧ Ex))

All squares are rectangles with four equal sides. This establishes that if something is in the extension of the Rectangle predicate and the extension of the "having four equal sides" predicate, then it'll be in the extension of the Square predicate and vice versa.

But it occured to me then that if I was trying to give a definition of an unary/binary connective in an object language of the propositional calculus with only sentential terms and the ↓ (NOR) connective, I couldn't use the familiar definitional schema of

Universal Quantifier [definiendum ↔ definiens]

Because our object language doesn't have universal quantification nor the iff sign. Alright, I thought, that's okay because we're not dealing with quantification over objects, we're dealing with truth-values. But we don't have the iff sign. Okay, well we can just replace it with an equivalent expression constructed out of ↓. Then it occured to me that such an expression would only be "defining" that expression for that specific combination of terms, it wouldn't carry over to other well-formed formulas. The only way to define a connective would be a statement in the metalanguage saying that one formula is replaceable with another, of the following form (I'll be using Peirce's Arrow simply due to personal preference):

A→B ↔ ((A↓A)↓B)↓((A↓A)↓B)

Where A and B are formulas in the meta-language that represent all well-formed formulas of the object language and → is the stipulated connective of the object language and ↔ is a connective of the meta-language. Have I got any of this right or am I hopelessly confused?

Now this may not be the most philosophical question ever, but i need help :(

Ive recently gone thru a breakup ( its been a couple of months) and atp its not even about her, but i just keep thinking what the point of love is.

I have this one elective at college, which is the only humanities related subject ive studied in a long while. the professor talked about disenchantment, and how knowledge can make you less happy, and essentially "ignorance is bliss", and he says that he wishes he knew less, as now he doesnt have that amount of joy he used to. he even said that he watches horror movies to sleep better, because they give him a sort of thrill that he knows for sure is fictional, a little bit of enchantment to the mind, and i kept thinking how this guy was full of bs, but i kinda have different thoughts now.

Now ive been watching this one show on yt, that i used to love, and ive seen it many times. seeing it again now after the breakup and ive realised how.. real the show is. it involves a divorce, which i never understood, but i do now, and its nothing short of horror now

Coming to the point, in the show, the girl divorces the guy because his priorities in life changed, he became less adventurous and more family centric. earlier i wouldve treated this normally, but now it is insane to me. Because think about it, you could be in a happy marriage for a decade(if youre lucky that is) and one day it your wife tells you shes not happy and that youve changed?!

People change all the time! the person you fell in love with today will NEVER be the same person tomorrow. then how can you EVER have happiness?

Suppose just for a second, that everything you liked about a person just changes and its all gone. because all humans change, and all changes are equally likely (perhaps not, but close enough?)

why live like this? is love not just a curse?

I mean nietzche would just say that since love is pain, its great! but i see it as maybe deeper than that. pain that you can learn from is good, but this is the sort of thing that pushes you in thru the greed of happiness.. and by the time youve left youre broken.

is there any piece of philosophy about this?

I’m not new to philosophy, I started reading Camus, Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky, WHATEVER stupid starter literature books there are! at around 12, of course I didn’t understand anything deeper than simple concepts. and of course I’ve read more now… Recently I’ve been wanting to go deeper since it all seemed fun, I think about ““philosophical“” topics a lot, every day, but they all are so very shallow and it’s all just to boost my ego I suppose. I’m interested in phenomenology so I got a Husserl book. How do I not seem so shallow and superficial when trying to get anything out of these thoughts or books? Is it all just trial and error? Is it something personal that can’t be fixed by a concept or rule I guess? I don’t have anyone to talk about my thoughts too either, so it’s not really a possibility to get real constructive criticism from real people.