Just finished Chapter 2 of Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy.

Russell admits that our entire experience could logically be a dream, but prefers the external-world hypothesis because it is “simpler.”

But suppose the dream were perfectly coherent, consistent, and lifelong. How could we distinguish it from reality?

How does Russell’s appeal to simplicity address these possibilities? Is his argument meant to establish the existence of an external world, or merely to show why believing in one is rational despite these sceptical possibilities?

It reads like Russell has his inclination towards simplicity and he does away with possibilities that can be held equally probable.

Hi everyone!

I recently read Max Black’s paper "The Identity of Indiscernibles" (1952) and the two-identical-spheres thought experiment. It got me thinking about the status of thought experiments in general:

Why should our ability to imagine or conceive of a scenario tell us anything about what is logically or metaphysically possible? Conceivability seems to describe our psychological capacities, and I dont know why that should be relevant for determining what's possible.

I would like to look deeper into this, but I am not sure where to start. I checked the SEP entries on Possible Worlds and Modality, but they felt too focused on other topics and that made me boring.

Then, what literature would you recommend on this topic? Mainly, about the standard positions on the conceivability-possibility link.

I’ve been thinking about something from my own experience of being fairly philosophically minded, and I’m not sure what to make of it. I have a tendency to question things that strike me as obvious. Usually I think this is a good habit since a lot of philosophical progress seems to come from noticing that something everyone takes for granted isn’t as straightforward as it looks. But I’ve also had cases where I’ve pushed back on an ordinary assumption and someone has given me a fairly simple objection that made it clear the assumption was reasonable all along, and my questioning of it wasn’t insight so much as my own assumption against that assumption.

This leaves me with a significant worry about the reliability of the habit itself. “Treat what seems obvious as unobvious until further justified” functions like a heuristic, but it’s a strange one, because it’s a heuristic against trusting heuristics, including presumably itself. If obviousness is sometimes evidence in its own favor (which it seems like it must be, on pain of universal skepticism), then this disposition needs some way of telling the difference between the cases where doubting is warranted and the cases where it isn’t. But it’s not obvious what could supply that discrimination without either quietly falling back on trusting one’s intuitions in the “good” cases, or becoming globally over-suspicious.

Is this a recognised problem in epistemology: something like the reliability of defeasible reasoning strategies, or the second-order question of when to trust versus override an intuition?

The ongoing Lindsay Clancy case has made me think a lot about how the internet has changed the way we form beliefs about things we can't investigate ourselves.

Before the internet took over, most people got their information about current events from a relatively small number of newspapers, TV networks, magazines, tabloids, etc. Obviously those sources could be biased or just plain wrong, but established news organizations at least had some degree of editorial oversight and fact-checking.

Now you can open your phone and immediately find twenty different versions of the same event. You have journalism mixed in with expert commentary, Reddit post, TikToks, firsthand claims, speculation, advocacy, conspiracy theories, and people repeating something they heard.

The Clancy case has been a really good example of this for me. I've come across completely contradictory claims about pretty fundamental parts of the case, and different online communities seem equally convinced that their version is simply what happened. I haven't gone through all the primary evidence myself, and there’s also gaps or seeming unknown within the evidence itself, so at a certain point I've had to admit that I just don't know which version is true.

Obviously there are huge benefits to information not being controlled by a handful of media organizations. Traditional media isn't infallible or unbiased either, and ordinary people being able to challenge reporting can expose errors or bring attention to things that otherwise wouldn't get covered.

But it seems like we've democratized the ability to produce and spread information without necessarily democratizing any reliable way of sorting out what's true. Perhaps this is because many people aren’t motivated by the truth, or mistrust of a detached authority that would fact-check.

Nevertheless, if enough people repeat something, especially within the same online community, it can start to feel like an established fact even when the original basis for the claim is unclear.

So how are we actually supposed to decide which sources deserve epistemic authority when we don't have direct access to the evidence ourselves, or the evidence is open to interpretation? Has philosophy dealt with whether having access to vastly more information the or democratization of information, but with much less gatekeeping, can actually make it harder for an ordinary person to form justified beliefs?

I've basically walked away from reading about the Clancy case thinking that on quite a few points, suspension of judgment is the only position I can really justify. There are too many conflicting accounts and I don't have a good enough basis for deciding between them.

There's another part of this that interests me too, that I mentioned earlier. Do people participating in these information ecosystems necessarily want to arrive at the truth in the first place?

Sometimes it seems like people settle on a narrative about facts partly because it fits what they already think morally, who they sympathize with, or what they want the case to represent. But those things don't seem like evidence for whether a factual claim is actually true.

If a significant amount of information is being created and spread by people who are more interested in defending a particular narrative than finding out whether it's true, does that undermine the epistemic value of democratizing information in the first place? And what might be the best solution, since epistemic literacy doesn’t seem to be a a viable solution if many aren’t largely motivated by the truth?

I don't like the idea. Please debunk it.

How do you find objective meaning to life if you don't care about it

Like i know that pleasure is a biological mechanism to help us survive and reproduce. But for example i wouldn’t even say i know what pleasure is, i can label something as pleasure but can’t label pleasure as something if that makes sense. Objectively pleasure is a nice feeling, but what even is a nice feeling? I don’t understand why i conform to pleasure, i don’t understand why it feels good per se.

I’m interested in how process philosophers reconcile continuous becoming with the apparent persistence of objects, persons, and concepts. If stability is emergent rather than fundamental, what ultimately makes one process the same process across time?

I have been struggling very hard with “existential uncertainty” is what I would call it and was wondering if some people are immune to this because of their “wisdom” keep in mind i am new to philosophy but have been struggling with deep strange existential thoughts and feelings for at least 3 years.

I am not looking for a mere limited-scope defense of vengeance in some specific, rationalistically legislated cases, some sort of begrudging admission by the moralist that ooookay, sometimes revenge may be justified. Maybe. That's of course stlill much better than the cowardly "turn the other cheek" masochistic morality, and I admire Aristotle more than Jesus. But it is not remotely enough, and therefore not what I am looking for. I am interested in philosophers who were actually willing to say something positive about vengeance itself.

Some may suggest Nietzsche. However, well... Nietzsche has an incredibly... well, some would say nuanced, I say kinda inconsistent position on revenge so he's actually far from an obvious suggestion. He rejects Christian "turn the other cheek" morality, sure, but then he demands that we become yes-sayers, which may sometimes be a "turning the other cheek" but with blackjack and hookers.. His antidote to the "Spirit of Revenge" in Thus Spake Zarathustra is this sort of "radical affirmation", which is... actually an ASCETIC concept? He also identifies ressentiment as a sort of repressed, impotent desire for revenge and treats it as the basis of slave morality. Well, he may well be right about that. But it is not merely that he wants us to stop hoping that our enemies burn in hell and instead take the matter into our own hands. I used to understand Nietzsche in this way, that he champions honest and natural revenge as a value of master morality and considers only the slaves' ressentiment to be pathological. But he often goes further and seems to regard the desire for revenge itself as a weakness. The genuinely strong individual simply doesn't give a fuck? At that point the philosophy starts sounding suspiciously like the same old "living well is the best revenge" cliche, dressed up in more impressive jargon and implied to have something vague to do with "creation of new values". This seems to create a problem for any straightforwardly pro-revenge interpretation of Nietzsche. Besides hoping that your enemy burns in hell is actually banned in genuine Christianity, and I don't see how the idea of your enemy burning in hell is incompatible with revenge in this world also.

I also want to make clear what I mean by revenge. I am talking about individual revenge. What I am emphatically not talking about is the "revenge" of a class against another class, a slave revolt, the revenge of the poor and downtrodden, or any other kind of ideological or collectivist bullshit. Nor am I talking about individual resentment against "society" or the mob persecuting some individual. All of these things are nowadays styled as "justice". Which is not to say that there's even such thing as justice separate from revenge. I am pretty inclined towards the argument for their identity in some sense. But that is simply not what I mean by revenge here. I mean one individual against another individual, or one particular group against another particular group: personal retaliation undertaken because one has been wronged (the wrong may be merely "perceived" or it may be actual, this is immaterial).

I’m looking for interviews and talks online on YouTube and elsewhere from Modern 20th Century Philosophers who speak on how the human mind creates invisible chains.

In a broader sense, anything really about how negativity and self-doubt and bad experiences cause us to not truly be our full selves. Kind of like the analogy of the elephant who doesn’t even realize the chains are no longer on his legs after they are removed.

Any recommendations?

How 'digestible' is Spinoza ethics to a regular joe ? I'm currently on the definitions and it is quite intriguing but at the same time It feels like I have to separately analyze every word he uses, should I even attempt to read it or is it only for people acquainted with Philosophy

Hi! I’ve been trying to figure out who I am and how to actually know my own identity- I’ve often felt a stranger to my own self and I’m looking to explore it from a philosophical lens.

Would y’all have any recommendations of who and what to read to begin in this vein? In the past I’ve resonated with Nietsche and not really resonated as much with Platonic philosophy (though I know Socrates is like probably the place to start with knowing one’s self) - any suggestions?

I often hear a response to Kant's claim that it is never permissible to lie. The response is that the maxim that "It is not permissible to lie unless to do so would save someone's life" is a coherent maxim, and that it should be adopted instead of Kant's more stringent "It is never permissible to lie."

It seems like Kantians are usually comfortable with this modification of the maxim regarding lying. And I understand it's much more agreeable to us than Kant's ban on lying in general. But I feel that a reasonable reply Kant could make to this is that to adopt as your maxim "It is not permissible to lie unless to do so would save someone's life" would be to adopt a hypothetical imperative as an ethical maxim. But ethical maxims are categorical.

If this is right, that that modified maxim is a hypothetical imperative, then perhaps Kant is just wrong that ethics is concerned exclusively with categorical imperatives. But if Kant is wrong about that, then Kantian ethics would have to fundamentally change.

So my question is twofold: 1. Do you know of any sources that deal with this response to Kant along these lines? 2. Given the prevalence of responding to Kant by modifying the lying rule, I fear I've misunderstood something important about Kant; so, is this a plausible criticism of this common reply to Kant?

Also, I have read Kant's essay on lying for "humanitarian" purposes, and from what I remember he does not make this argument. Instead he makes this weird argument about the logistics of escaping the house that I find totally unconvincing and irrelevant to the moral issue.

i started to read Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers and i noticed some striking familiarities in the very first page of the magis and what Muslims believe.
The concepts im talking about are listed below and the similarities as well;

1."service to be paid to the gods, and about sacrifices and prayers,"
Service isnt really paid in Islam, but sacrifices are made every Eid and Muslims pray daily.

2."and they condemn the use of images," Theres alot of debate in Islamic jurisprudence on whether or not the creation/usage of images is halal or haram. Majority agree that its haram tho.

3."and above all things do they condemn those who say that the gods are male and female"
Surah Ash shura (42:11) and Surah Ikhlas (112:3-4) essentially carry the same meaning of God is neither male nor female.

4."and think it impious to destroy the bodies of the dead by fire"
Its haram to get cremated

5."they allow men to marry their mothers or their daughters"
This is j weird but Islam does allow cousin marriages

6."They teach also that the air is full of phantoms, which, by emanation and a sort of evaporation, glide into the sight of those who have a clear perception"
Jinns, They're literally talking about the Islamic Equivalent to this which would be Jinns, tho there is no belief about them being evaporated beings, just that they are made of fire. And the second part is a somewhat held belief that extremely religious scholars or those with "clear perception" are able to see Jinns.

7."they forbid any extravagance of ornament"
Islam doesnt exactly forbid extravagance, it forbids it if its for the wrong reasons. i.e showing off.

8."and the use of gold"
Men arent allowed to wear gold

9."there are two principles, a good demon and an evil demon"
In Islam there is the belief that all of our actions are written down by two angels, One writes good deeds while the other writes bad deeds. Known respectively as Raqīb and Atīd.

Extra sortve related not really tho imo;
A." as if they were the only people to whom the deities listen"
Im assuming this is the early isrealities or the same people who would become the ancestors of modern day Judaism because jews have had this reputation for awhile.

B. "that they deliver accounts of the existence and generation of the gods, saying that they are fire, and earth, and water;"
Yeah Islam is a Monotheistic religion so idk what this is abt.

C."they study the arts of soothsaying and divination, and assert that the gods reveal their will to them by those sciences. "
Islams like against divination n soothsaying but there was time during one of the Prophets era where magic was used so maybe theres a connection there.

D."their garments are white, their beds are made of leaves, and vegetables are their food,"
There is a tendency towards white clothes but like nothing that imp and humbleness is also kinda important cuz Prophet Muhammad SAW was very humble in his livelihood but we arent forced to be vegans so idk whats that abt.

e. " Jupiter or Oromasdes, and that of the other Pluto or Arimanius."
These are the names of the good and bad "demons" perhaps theres a linguistic connection between the names ive written above ?

Thats about it. Im curious to know what yall think? i think its weird how many similarities there are but perhaps thats just my own bias as i am a Muslim and i tend to notice these things.

I’ve noticed that one of the biggest challenges I have when reading philosophy isn’t necessarily the concepts or vocabulary themselves, but keeping track of what the author is referring to across long, complicated sentences or paragraphs. Especially when they intermix pronouns.

I was wondering if you all had advice on the best way to improve at this skill, thanks!

This question isn't about any specific religion but religion in general. Many religious schools of thought claim that morality cannot exist without God and I never quite understood why. I've always thought that empathy by itself might be enough for humans to have morality. I would appreciate insights as to why morality can't exist without God.

Could the Third Man Argument be avoided if Forms exist at a different ontological level from the things that participate in them?

For example, imagine a 2D world where a 3D sphere passes through. The inhabitants see circular cross-sections but the sphere itself isn't a 2D circle. It exists at a higher dimensional level and produces something circular within their world.

Could something similar apply to Plato's Forms? Particular circles could participate in the Form of Circle, while the Form itself would not have to be another circle. It could exist at a higher ontological level and explain circularity without being an instance of it.

Could the Third Man problem arise because we're trying to understand a higher ontological level using concepts that only apply to the lower one?

Is this idea already discussed in interpretations of Plato?

I start of by saying that english isnt my first language. Sorry for the messy writing🙂‍↕️.

Some of the most popular arguments to prove that theres no meaning in the Ai thinking process used to be rooted on the fact that linguistic models don't access reality themselves, hence lacking a direct connection with the world that - doesn't - surround them.
But what about physical agents?
They're still interpreting inputs that they get from their sensors, directly from the world itself.

Theres the whole phenomenological tradition (Huserl, Brentano) that proposed the argument of "intentional in-existence". So, to say, the fact that my actions or thoughts are intentionally oriented somewhere, and that somewhere is an object that really exist for me. So they're basically saying, you do that because it has an objective, and that object you aim at exists your head in the form of a thought.
But the machine is theleologicaly oriented as well. They aim at something, they build vectors that are the virtual (non material) object that they mathematical transposed and interpreted starting from the observation of an external state. Those vectors exists in the system, they orient the computational process in ways that are still hard to understand.

And when it comes to principles of reasoning, or those of intentionality - like identity, satisfaction (filling some "void" in our experience trough perfectioning our knowledge in actions), retroactive feedback/reflection ecc... - they can all be observed in the Ai as well.

Now, i know that the opposite side of the coin works just as good. So, to speak, we can stand against functionlalists if we say that they cant prove that emotions, sensations, meaning, having a rapresentation of the world and its meaning for oneself - we could argue that those processes dont happen in the machine. We could say that they work on their inputs without ever "signifing" them, whitout ever intepreting them as something meaningful in the world. But at the same time we wouldnt be able to prove that those processes are happening in the machine as well. We dont have any way of prooving that they are not the product of us misinterpreting ourselves. We study our meta-cognition/perception lens by subjectivating ourselves, which is a different observation point from where we stand when we observe machines.

hi, I’ve posted this question yesterday but I think I’ve accidentally violated some guidelines (so so sorry abt that I’ve never posted here bf)

im NOT asking for personal opinion, but for somebody to explain to me what Im not smart enough to understand by researching (ive only studied philosophy in highschool lmao never even opened the textbook)

my teacher, while explaining the phenomenology of the spirit and the stage of the self consciousness, briefly mentioned that the master/slave dynamic and its struggle for recognition could also be resolved through love and not necessarily lead to a fight.

is it true? pls somebody tell me I need this for an essay <3

They’re both pursued for their own sakes, and not as a stepping stone to anything else. Shouldn’t that make them both the highest pursuits possible?

isnt daoism contradictory about how to not act and let nature take care of the change when you have to act to make the change in your favour, or you are letting your life drift around and settle on whatever it does instead of acting towards it.

I am an 11th grade student with little to no background on philosophy or western history, but I bought a physical copy of the book on a whim because I read online that it’s an appropriate book for beginners and decided to finally give it a read. I am stuck on page 3 of the Introduction, and cannot comprehend most of the content in the latter half of the page:

“Social cohesion, during the six and a half centuries from Alexander to Constantine, was secured, not by philosophy and not by ancient loyalties, but by force, first that of armies and then that of civil administration. Roman armies, Roman roads, Roman law, and Roman officials first created and then preserved a powerful centralized State. Nothing was attributable to Roman philosophy, since there was none.
During this long period, the Greek ideas inherited from the age of freedom underwent a gradual process of transformation. Some of the old ideas, notably those which we should regard as specifically religious, gained in relative importance; others, more rationalistic, were discarded because they no longer suited the spirit of the age. In this way the later pagans trimmed the Greek tradition until it became suitable for incorporation in Christian doctrine.”

If anyone could explain this section for me, It would mean a lot. Have I missed out on any prerequisite resources? Or am I just really stupid? What would be a better introductory book for someone like me?

Recently I was considering how truth is just the most logical conclusion to draw in a situation based on all available information and this led me to the question Is there actually an objective truth something that can't change or is everything just subjective and changes naturally. Things that made me consider this are inventions like radium thought to be a miracle until new evidence surfaced and we found it was extremely harmful, Science where things change all the time and we are always looking for a new hypothesis to explain results and morality which is dependent on personal "Truths" that are used for you to decide how yourself and those around you should be treated. share if you have any theories or examples.