The Philosopher Justice

    A thing like a global pandemic brings out both the best and the worst in us.  The best, as we increase cooperative ventures, pitching in, volunteering, solving problems on the run, in order to  save lives and keep essential services going.  The worst, as individuals retreat within themselves, and create an echo chamber for their own fears and prejudices, both falling prey to, and actively participating in the spread of disinformation on the internet. The issue I want to focus on is the anti-vaccine movement.  One of the largest components of this movement is made up of young men, age 20 -40, which suggests a group of people who are in good health, feel somewhat invulnerable, and don’t yet feel the full responsibility of raising a family.  They claim that they are motivated by freedom - they wish to be free to act however they want, without being told what they can and cannot do.  This is also a perennial adolescent theme, a theme that ori...

 Coming soon: a discussion on the idea of freedom.  In the meantime here is an excellent source for ideas in this debate: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/~uctytho/dfwIntroIndex.htm  

  Logical Atomism  was an early twentieth century philosophical movement championed by Bertrand Russell. It was based on an analogy between atoms and mathematical axioms. It  was inspired, both by the resounding success of the science of physics, and at the prospect of the  merging of logic and mathematics, also championed by Russell, that seemed imminent at the turn of the last century. Just as physical matter is ultimately  made up of combinations of atoms, concepts were envisioned to be made up of combinations of primitive atoms of meaning, like axioms in a deductive system.  The idea was that meaning has some kind of logical structure analogous to physical structure;  and the belief was that some future science could determine the laws governing this “conceptual” structure, just as physics shows us the physical laws that govern the universe.   One hundred years after the heyday of Logical Atomism, how has that atomic analogy fared? Indeed...

 https://theelectricagora.com/2021/04/28/will-a-i-be-the-death-of-us/

Why do popular philosophical theories of truth deliberately deflate truth’s value? They argue that there is no difference in saying,  ” It is true that Trump colluded with the Russians."   and,  "Trump colluded with the Russians."  They argue that the concept "truth"  seems to be redundant, because it isn't saying  more than what the statement says without it.    The deflationists want us to believe that there is nothing much to "truth",  that it doesn't add anything to our assertions unless we are generalizing about multiple statements, as in "What Mueller said was true."  If truth is nothing more than a logical connective, why do people everywhere feel so passionate about it?  Why is it so important that we get to hear what’s really in the Mueller report? Why do we want to know what really happened during the 2016 U.S. Presidential campaign?   Doesn’t knowing what really happened, or who a person really is, matter c...

I am not a Christian, I am a philosopher.  That being said, it strikes me that to understand what morality is, it helps to begin with the story of the Garden of Eden.  First of all, the story of Eden is a myth of origin;  and to understand something complex like morality we could start by using our imagination instead of analysing it to death, as we philosophers have done for two and a half thousand years.  Interestingly, no one knows where morality came from or how it came about.  Many, many philosophers since Plato, and he lived and wrote 2400 years ago, have been fascinated by the topic of morality.  They have many theories about what it is, but they have never come to an agreement. In contrast, science is younger than philosophy;  it is only 500 years old;  but the thing about science is that even if scientists have disagreements, they eventually come around to agreeing on the main subjects.  This has not happened with the concept o...

If I were to posit one question that sums up my philosophical inquiry it would be this:  “What makes humans different from animals?” For me, it is the single most important question to ask.   Philosophy in its Western form comprises three main parts, which are conveyed to us by the three Greek words:  Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Ethics. In my opinion, (and it’s probably a minority opinion), Ethics is the most important of these three, precisely because it is at the heart of what makes humans distinct from animals.  But the subject of ethics is most troublesome to grapple with.  Where does ethics or morality come from?  This was never an easy question, but nowadays it seems so much more complicated to answer, because our society has so many overlapping jurisdictions.  This is why it is hard to know whether a particular rule is a moral rule, an obligation, or merely a convention. For instance, the Mosaic rule against making images of a deity - c...