Discussion Roundup #1
I’ve long been interested in linking to discussions I’ve taken place in which I thought were particularly insightful, whether they take place here or otherwise. I used to do this within my weekly link roundups. Though now, as the amount of these discussions went up, I’ve decided it better to take them out and into a roundup of their own. Thus, the “Discussion Roundup” series.
This particular roundup covers all my discussions since July 6, when I last documented some. Since then, this site has had 204 additional comments.
On This Site
In “Why Argue About Religion”, I explain why I still write about religion.
In “But Religion is Useful!”, we discuss more about why I don’t think there is an absolute ground from which moral statements can be made.
In “The Good of Religion”, we have a long conversation about moral realism vs. moral anti-realism, utilitarianism, motivations behind utilitarianism, and the costs and benefits of religion.
In “A-Unicornism and the True Definition of Atheism”, we discuss the definition of atheism versus the definition of agnosticism, and I debate the existence of gods.
In “A Bit More Redesign”, I solicit more feedback on how my website looks.
Elsewhere
I’ve been included in this link roundup of link roundups. Now he’s been included in my roundup of things that mention link roundups of link roundups. Kind of crazy?
On The Reddits
I’ve been featured on r/badphilosophy. Yay?
My “Free Will That Makes Sense” essay has been torn to shreds on reddit. Time to recant it…
On Reddit, there was some okay counter-criticism of my criticism of the ontological argument, but I still think my criticism stands and the ontological argument fails.
A a bit more talk ensues about the costs of benefits of religion, in response to my essay “The Good of Religion”.
In response to my essay “Is Naturalism Bleak and Hopeless?”, another good conversation ensues.
-
I now blog at EverydayUtilitarian.com. I hope you'll join me at my new blog! This page has been left as an archive.
On 29 Jul 2012 in All, Discussion Roundup. 5 Comments.
30 Jul 2012, 2:18 am
Torn to shreds seems a little strong, nobody criticised your reasoning on libertarianism. To be fair all books I’ve read (for the lay person) give a copenhagen account of heisenberg uncertainties, physicists in general don’t seem to be doing much to educate the general public. Further in your defense, you do have a grasp of bell inequalities.
1 Aug 2012, 7:44 pm
Only because they didn’t they libertarianism was worth defending.
I guess you could say they thought it was a good example of bad philosophy. But, in truth, the bar is probably set pretty low for qualifying under the first adjective. Do you get why they denigrated it? Almost nobody that I know of considers the sound in the forest a philosophical problem. It is obviously a trivial problem of definition. But you imply many problems philosophers take seriously are similar problems of definition. A very unlikely proposition. If there’s anything philosophers are *too* good at it’s drawing trivial definitional distinctions to avoid confusion in argument. The view that philosophical discussions really are just about definitions seems and usually is just a failure to understand the difference between an argument about concepts and one about words, a very basic distinction, the grasping of which marks one’s initiation to philosophical discourse. The disagreeableness is similar to my reaction to Luke Muehlhauser’s notorious semantic attack on the problems of ethics.
1 Aug 2012, 8:19 pm
Really, are only theists libertarians now? I feel terribly uninformed.
1 Aug 2012, 10:03 pm
Close to it. Popper believed in libertarian free will, so maybe his disciples do today. The only libertarian today I can think of who has some intellectual credibility is the mathematical physicist Roger Penrose. Nobody understands what he’s getting at.
15 Sep 2012, 2:50 am
I do still think that several key philosophical problems are a matter of a war between two different definitions, though less than I suspected at first… I think that such takes place in “moral realism” (what makes for a moral realist?), the correct definition of ethics, and much of free will (a question about whether free will requires one to be the ultimate author of one’s actions or not).
Do you think these debates all take place at a much deeper conceptual level to the point where picking one definition over the other is actually a matter of importance?