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 […]
logic
Posted inSatire
7 fresh fallacies for your favorite fundamentalist
Reading Time: 6 minutes Still relying on old standbys like ad hominem and tu quoque? Well, that’s bad and you should feel bad. The new hotness has arrived.
Posted inPhilosophy
Philosophy 101 (philpapers-induced) #12: Logic: classical or non-classical?
Reading Time: 7 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 inCritical thinking, Politics
You Do It, Too: How Whataboutism Teaches Us Not to Trust You
Reading Time: 8 minutes People use a lot of bad arguments online, but few frustrate me more than the tu quoque fallacy, otherwise known as whataboutism. It is, of course, one of the most commonly used methods of changing the subject, dating back as far as grade school when we used to win arguments by shouting “I know you […]
Posted inEvolution
Creationist Argument Refuted: Biological Cells as Complex Machines
Reading Time: 10 minutes We have had a good insight into the workings of creationists from the last post. Here is the core foundation to Angelo’s argument that I would like to take to task today: It is known that complex machines and factories are intelligently designed Biological cells are factories full of complex machines Biological cells are intelligently […]
Posted inPhilosophy
God, Logic and the Euthyphro Dilemma
Reading Time: 2 minutes I have been discussing God’s attributes of late, and the subject of logic is never far away. One aside to this – perhaps the very fundamental nature of it all – concerns logic itself and from whence it came. I am not talking about ideas of whether God can make a rock too heavy for […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Empiricism Revisited: Intuition and Epistemic Priority
Reading Time: 4 minutes There was a really interesting comment on a thread on my original “Empiricism as Foundational” that would be good to stimulate more discussion. Here it is, from Joseph Graney. So, I would like to offer the following response (in an order unrelated to the above article): 1) Empiricism does not, in fact, reject the innate […]
Posted inPhilosophy
On Deduction and Induction and How They Relate to the Kalam
Reading Time: 9 minutes I will be reposting a previous article today because ideas of induction and deduction have come up in another post with a few asking for clarification. Here, I will look at deduction and induction in the context of how they relate to the Kalam Cosmological Argument. Alan Duval has also written about induction and deduction […]
Posted inEthics and Morality, Philosophy
Empiricism as Foundational
Reading Time: 3 minutes I have talked before about the empiricism vs rationalism debate that has taken place historically and presently in philosophical circles. Today, I am going to explore this a little further. As I said before… Rationalism The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy states that rationalists adopt at least one of three statements: The Intuition/Deduction Thesis: Some propositions in a […]
Posted inPhilosophy
Kalam Cosmological Argument: Causality and a Circular Argument
Reading Time: 8 minutes As some of you will know, my most recent book was on the Kalam Cosmological Argument, the cosmological argument that deals with the beginning of the universe, concluding in favour of it having a cause (i.e. God). the argument is favoured by apologists the world over. It has obsessed me for years to the point […]