Paul Stearns argues against moral relativism and moral presentism. “Whatever we may say about the merits of torturing children for pleasure, and no doubt there is much to be said on both sides, I am sure we all agree it should be done with sterilized instruments.”– G.K. Chesterton “Man is the measure of all things.”– […]
Right & Wrong About Right & Wrong Read More »
Justin Bartlett explores a basic distinction between understandings of ethics. We are all concerned, to a greater or lesser degree, with ethical issues. Whether it be concerns over crime and punishment, humanitarian aid, ecological destruction, or simply the fact that your friend has broken a promise, ethical considerations seem to creep into almost all areas
Stephen Stewart on a forgotten golden age of philosophy. Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo in the visual arts. Bruno, Machiavelli, Erasmus and Thomas More in the world of philosophy. With names like that, it is little wonder that the Renaissance, spanning some three hundred years from the 14th to the 16th centuries, is seen as a
Mark Daniels introduces the most famous work of Moses Maimonides and asks – was he a philosopher, a heretic or a mystic? Moses Maimonides (Moses the son of Maimon – or the RaMBaM – Rabbi Moses ben Maimon in Hebrew) was the leading Jewish medieval philosopher. In addition to his work in philosophy, he was
The Perplexing Nature of the Guide for the Perplexed Read More »
Mark Daniels introduces a whole millenium of ideas. Let us start by considering three points. First, medieval philosophy came from a period when philosophy was under attack: the proponents of religious faith felt that the claims of the philosophers concerning the superiority of reason were false and this led to medieval philosophers such as Aquinas
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Susan Leigh Anderson and Michael Anderson relate how their attempts to build ethical machines have advanced their understanding of ethics. Our current research is concerned with the newly emerging field of machine ethics. Unlike computer ethics, which has traditionally focused on ethical issues surrounding humans’ use of machines, machine ethics is concerned with ensuring that
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Thomas M. Powers on how a computer might process Kant’s moral imperative. Philosophers have worried about how to compare humans and machines ever since Alan Turing proposed his famous ‘intelligence test’ in his 1950 Mind article ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. If the successful imitation of a human conversation is one sufficient condition for intelligence, as
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The Zhuangzi (also known in Wade-Giles romanization romanization as Chuang-tzu), named after “Master Zhuang” was, along with the Laozi, one of the earliest texts to contribute to the philosophy that has come to be known as Daojia, or school of the Way. According to traditional dating, Master Zhuang, to whom the first seven chapters of
Zhuangzi (Chuang-Tzu, 369—298 B.C.E.) Read More »
Bishop Joseph Butler is a well-known religious philosopher of the eighteenth century. He is still read and discussed among contemporary philosophers, especially for arguments against some major figures in the history of philosophy, such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. In his Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel (1729), Butler argues against Hobbes’s egoism, and in the Analogy of Religion (1736), he
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