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1500 questions
17
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Are all philosophers subject to a variation of the Socrates problem?
Obviously, the specific problem of knowing who Socrates was and what he taught is wholly unique to the man. However, reading books and articles about philosophers and philosophy, I'm struck by the occasions when later commentators disagree about…
Jon Ericson
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Are we all ‘atheist’ or 'agnostic in a pandemic'?
Saudi Arabia is a deeply religious country. Most of the people in the Persian Gulf nation pray five times a day, 35 times a week, 140 times a month and 1,680 times a year. But they banned pilgrimages (one of the pillars of Islam), because of the…
Barungi Stephen
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Is logical positivism "dead" today?
John Passmore in 1967 said that logical positivism
"...is dead, or as dead as a philosophical movement ever becomes."
Are there any modern philosophers that advocate logical positivism the same way Vienna Circle did? If not, to what principles and…
Mirzhan Irkegulov
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Does Alvin Plantinga's account of epistemic warrant require belief in God?
On Plantinga's account, true belief becomes knowledge under epistemic warrant; and epistemic warrant requires the 'proper functioning' of our cognitive faculties in the right kind of cognitive environment. Plantinga further holds that the resulting…
Tom Morris
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17
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Is there any worth—other than historical—to reading Aristotle's works on logic?
What I mean is that presumably a topic such as logic would have, at this point, been so advanced that the ancestral works are unnecessary.
I would read it for pleasure, but have they been ultimately rendered obsolete?
Sermo
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Why were Kant's categories used in the mathematical category theory?
I am curious exactly how mathematical categories were inspired by Kant's categories. The SEP article on category theory says:
In order to give a general definition of the [natural transformation], they defined functor, borrowing the term from…
William Oliver
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When it is correct to use Tarski's undefinability theorem versus Gödel's incompleteness theorem?
Smullyan (1991, 2001) has argued forcefully that Tarski's undefinability theorem deserves much of the attention garnered by Gödel's incompleteness theorems. That the latter theorems have much to say about all of mathematics and more…
Xodarap
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17
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What are the differences between sentience, consciousness and awareness?
Dictionary definitions such as this one often seem to use the terms sentience, awareness, and consciousness as if they are synonymous with each other. Is this really the case? If not, how do they differ? Some books suggest that sentience and…
coleopterist
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Can we tell whether human groups or societies are behaving as superorganisms?
An anthill can be described as a superorganism, with behaviours and interactions much more complex than those of an individual ant. We could find analogies between the superorganism and other living organisms, as memory for instance. Chemicals that…
rraallvv
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What are the connections between philosophy and semantic web?
I worked with semantic web technology, and got interested in philosophy out of it. In semantic web, concepts such as semantics, ontologies, and logical inferences are fundamental to understand the technical discipline and make the best out of it.…
Stefano Borini
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6 answers
What fallacy dismisses criticism of a bad law with "just don't break it"?
Let's say someone is criticizing the government for instituting some draconian policy, and/or for persecuting people for doing something minor. And the response is:"Just don't do it and you'll be fine". This is a one-size-fits-all "argument" that…
Legend of Overfiend
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Does Google's latest translation tool support Jerry Fodor's Language of Thought Hypothesis?
Google recently updated their translation tool so that it can now translate between language pairs that it hadn't seen before, something they're calling "zero-shot translation." See here for the full paper and here for a summary.
For example, they…
Alexander S King
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Is Logic Empirical?
We use the logical system that we know from observations (empirical data) holds true in the world we live in (please correct me if I am wrong). Hence the axioms of logic we choose are themselves dependent on our observations. Does this mean that…
Suraj Jain
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8 answers
Are there any counter arguments to the claim God does not exist because there is evil in the world?
It's been argued that God doesn't exist because there is so much evil in the world. For example, suppose a person is violently murdered - an innocent child say. They argue, God could have prevented that but He didn't, therefore He does not exist. …
Michael Lee
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How to assess philosophically whether String Theory is Science or rather Metaphysics?
String theory substitutes basic particles with infinitesimal strings in order to reconcile the seemingly incompatible theories of gravity and of quantum world. But those new elements - the so called 'strings' - are too little to observe or to even…
L.M. Student
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