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One Year On, Part Two: Philosophy Applied to Public Debates
I’ve lost a measure of faith in the idea that philosophy can be ‘applied’ to the various debates of our times. In most cases, most people wouldn’t understand the arguments because they lack the requisite ‘preparation’; and so if you have a cause to fight for then that would be better served by appeal to other means of persuasion, such as one celebrity endorsement.
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On Election Day
The proper purpose of democracy is not to find the right answer (for that we should appoint experts) but to allow each individual to participate in their own government. It is a way of preserving freedom or self-rule (autonomy) as a community. The will of the people will often choose badly, just as people will often make bad choices in how they govern their own lives. But since this was a free choice, and our purpose was to preserve freedom, this is not a failure. Democracy does not fail when it chooses badly: it fails when people do not choose.
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Antinomy
Science is offered in support of everything nowadays, true and false, good and bad. Without a capacity to distinguish the difference between good and bad science, ‘the science’ means nothing. How do you develop a capacity to distinguish between good and bad science?
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Why Do I Write?
Why do I write? When I say write I mean writing philosophy. I could try writing other things, I suppose, but what I have been writing up to now is philosophy. And not only writing it but also putting it online for all to see. What is the purpose of this? […]
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Evaluative Claims within the Problem of Evil
When it comes to the problem of evil, I’ve always felt there was something wrong with someone trying to argue for a factual conclusion on the basis of moral premises. Saying ‘God does not exist’ sounds an awful lot like a statement of a fact, like a claim that ‘no human being that exists is over 10ft tall’, but the grounds for this fact are at times little more than a report of your moral feelings. Ordinarily, we wouldn’t give this kind of argument the time of day. […]
An experiment with philosophy as a way of life
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