A quick and friendly introduction to symbolic logic by Stephen Szanto. Most non-professional philosophers are deterred from attending lectures and reading books by academics who use symbolic logic. Some even claim it is an elitist attempt to make presentations deliberately inaccessible to the uninitiated. In any case, I believe it is worth studying and needn’t …
Julia Nefsky on the curiously strong connections between logic and humour. What would you say if I asked you to describe humour? What type of ‘thing’ is it? Perhaps you’d say that humour is a form of entertainment and creativity. Humour is colourful and free, unbounded by rules and norms. Humour is lively. It has …
Richard Oxenberg tells us why democracy needs philosopher-citizens. I would like to begin with a bit of a riddle: How do you turn a democracy into a tyranny? The answer, as those familiar with Plato’s Republic (380 BCE) will know, is: Do nothing. It will become a tyranny all by itself. Plato spends a good …
Ryan Andrews reminds us what free speech is for. Tom: (tuts over his newspaper) Of course, religious extremists and state censors are not the only enemies of free speech. There are also moral-majority conservatives, left-wing egalitarians, and many more overly-sensitive souls of every stripe. The variables are different, but they all follow the same formula: …
Francisco Mejia Uribe explains why the rise of fundamentalism poses a problem for liberals, and suggests what they can do about it. Fundamentalism is creating a paradoxical situation for us Westerners. Pluralism and moral autonomy, the very concepts that once helped us overcome the bitter fundamentalism of the wars of religion, now seem to prevent …
Seán Moran is watching the watchers. We are being watched. As we go about our daily business, closed-circuit televison cameras observe and record our every move. There are over six million CCTV cameras keeping an eye on the public in the UK alone, and public surveillance is at a similar level in all developed countries. …
Simon Clarke argues that deciding when to die is a matter of individuality. People in liberal democracies have various restrictions on their freedom – there are laws against defamation and breaking contracts, for example. But we also have a large degree of freedom compared with people in other societies. Some restrictions of freedom – such …
Philip Badger tries to convince us to be optimistic about human equality. One shared ambition of philosophy and social science has been to understand the origins of conflict in human society. The evidence from social psychology is mixed, with some studies suggesting that conflict can be reduced by the establishment of shared goals (Muzafer Sherif, …
James P. Sterba thinks libertarianism implies a right to welfare. What is a just society? In seeking a defensible conception of justice, it behooves us to start with the assumptions of the libertarian perspective, the view that appears to endorse the least enforcement of morality. I propose to show that this libertarian view, contrary to …
Shawn Harte on a fleeting dream. “Everything subject to origination is subject also to dissolution,” warns the Buddha, insightfully foreshadowing the Second Law of Thermodynamics (the ineluctable tendency of a system towards disorder) in a way whose simplicity would impress even a modern physicist. This law of anitya, or ‘impermanence’, proclaims that all contingent existence …
A Buddhistic Contemplation of Impermanence from Death Row Read More »