Reading Time: 3 minutes Abstract ideas are, in my humblest of opinions, the source of the most important arguments in philosophy. The ontology (the nature of the existence) of abstract objects underwrites all other philosophy from morality to mathematics, aesthetics to personhood. You can’t make serious claims about these latter ideas without first understanding the impact of the former. […]
abstracts
Posted inPhilosophy
What does ‘exist’ even mean?
Reading Time: 7 minutes “Exist” can be a tricky word. Unless I define the term upfront, people often think I mean something other than I do. When I am talking about the color red, or, the concept of loyalty or morality, I might say that these things don’t exist. What I usually mean is that they exist in our […]
Posted inGeneral
Your Foundations Are Wrong; Your Conclusion Is Wrong. Just Stop It.
Reading Time: 5 minutes I wish people would read what I write and then interact with it, rather than just posting the same erroneous conclusions on my threads. It’s really frustrating, because I have debunked their position until they can show me I haven’t. Here is Person223’s latest rehash of the same tired old baloney: People do have the […]
Posted inGeneral
Ontology, Essentialism, Faulty Foundations and, Well, Racism.
Reading Time: 16 minutes Make a cup of tea: it’s a big one. But a necessary one. I have let a thread flow on Emma Raducanu and subtle racism exhibited, unsurprisingly, by the British media. Enter stage right a bunch of race realists racists. But here’s the thing. You may get bored of me banging on about “conceptual nominalism” […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Breaching the Epistemic Barrier
Reading Time: 5 minutes I recently wrote an important piece explaining the foundations to my entire worldview. Go read it. I’ll remind you of the impressive infographics I got my design department to put together: The last one illustrates how, when being moral or thinking something about the character or attributes of God, it is impossible to know whether […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Philosophy
The Foundation to My Whole Worldview
Reading Time: 8 minutes In a sense, this is about the most important piece I can write because out of it comes my whole philosophy. What you are about to read pertains to any abstract object: morality, meaning (of life or words), maths, purpose, and so on. I am just about to release a new book called Why I […]
Posted inUncategorized
Criticising Craig’s Personal Mind As Causing the Universe
Reading Time: 4 minutes Here is an argument that a commenter on one of my recent YouTube videos on the Kalam Cosmological Argument gave me. It’s actually something I have argued elsewhere (possibly even mentioning in that Kalam series itself). Before I hand over to him, let me remind you of the KCA: Whatever begins to exist has a […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Responding to Wilcox #2: “An Embryo Is an Innocent Human Being”
Reading Time: 8 minutes To continue the rejoinder to Clinton Wilcox over at the Life Training Institute, who took issue with one of my posts looking at the pro-life/pro-choice debate concerning abortion. I responded to the initial part of his first piece here. Today, I will look at his comments with regard to points 1-5 from my original post […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) #11 – Laws of nature: Humean or non-Humean?
Reading Time: 8 minutes Having posted the Philpapers survey results, the biggest ever survey of philosophers conducted in 2009, several readers were not aware of it (the reason for re-communicating it) and were unsure as to what some of the questions meant. I offered to do a series on them, so here it is – Philosophy 101 (Philpapers induced). I will […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Philosophy
Making Moral Claims Without Doing the Groundwork
Reading Time: 16 minutes This post was recently posted on Facebook by someone I know and I was added to the link. I want to deal with this here because it is not only something this other person does all the time, but it is a really common occurrence when arguing about morality and moral claims. I have talked about […]