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1500 questions
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Is omniscience possible in a universe with quantum mechanics?
Today this argument against the existence of an omniscient being occurred to me. Can someone point out the flaws? Can someone point me to writings about arguments like this one?
If an omniscient being exists, there exists knowledge about the…
lassic81
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What did Heidegger get wrong about Hölderlin?
The reason we know very much about Hölderlin isn't from Schelling or Hegel who actually knew him, but from Heidegger, many years after his death, to help fill out the nature of art in his ontology. Over the years, though, I've heard many people…
Carduus
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To what extent was Galileo's trial a conflict between science and religion?
In an answer to another question (https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/50328/8160), I mentioned Galileo as an example of religion contradicting science. Several comments criticised that.
I posted another question elsewhere…
elias_d
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Why did Kant say space and time do not exist independent of us?
As far as I know, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) believed that space and time do not exist objectively, independent of us, and that they are added by our minds to our perceptions. I am eager to know what his argument/justification was for this claim.…
apadana
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Is the value of art always contextual, or can it ever be inherent?
A few years back, I was in a modern art museum and saw this painting by Russian Suprematist artist Kazimir Malevich:
It seems to me that the value of this painting lies completely in the identity of its creator and the context of its creation.…
Alexander S King
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What are the philosophical implications of the uncertainty principle?
What, if any, are the major philosophical consequences of the uncertainty principle?
Wikipedia describes the principle this way:
[T]he principle implies that it is impossible to simultaneously both measure the present position while "determining"…
Joseph Weissman
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5 answers
From a functionalist point of view: when is an algorithm an A.I., and when is it just software?
Recently, The Atlantic published an article claiming that "Google Taught an AI That Sorts Cat Photos to Analyze DNA". When you look at the original paper published by the Google team, what they really did was take a neural network model normally…
Alexander S King
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Who applies the pessimistic induction to moral "truths"?
I happened upon the term pessimistic induction (the history of science is a "graveyard" of once empirically successful theories whose central terms have been found not to refer) on this page and thought I could articulate my question more clearly by…
Ruben
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What was Nietzsche's Position on Darwin and his theory of Evolution by Natural Selection?
I will preface this question by saying I have not read Nietzsche extensively. The one exception is his 'Genealogy of Morals', a recent read of mine, twice actually.
I always assumed Nietzsche's ideas of "the will to power" and the "Ubermensch"…
Waterman
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Is it ethical to wipe someone's mind of a bad memory?
I was just watching Men in Black 3 yesterday and at the end of the movie there is a scene where a general dies and the his son walks to K and asks where his dad is. After being unable to tell the general's son the truth that his dad is dead, K…
AdAstra
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Does fictional discourse pose special difficulties for logic?
Natural language is context-dependent, like the statement “My uncle is a plumber”, which is true or false depending on who asserts it.
There has been lots of discussion about fictional entities and their place in classical logic (predicate logic),…
viuser
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What triggered the philosophical movement in the ancient West?
The history of civilization in the West (i.e. Europe) goes back many thousands of years. Since well before 1000 BC there have been people living in what is now Turkey, Greece, and even Italy, in such cities as Miletus and Troy. For much of their…
commando
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Is my understanding of the Transcendental Deduction correct?
I don't want to misinterpret this important philosophy of Kant, so I need to ask here whether my interpretations are in accordance with what is generally accepted.
Transcendental deduction implies that it is not experiences that let us put the…
Zid
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Did a lot of Greek philosophers believe lying is impossible?
As I understand it, Parmenides and Heraclitus were two pre-Socratic Greek philosophers whose views could not be farther apart. Parmenides believed that all change is illusory, and that there is just one indivisible entity which exists in reality. …
Keshav Srinivasan
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How did materialists historically fit magnetism into their model?
Going by its Wikipedia page, materialism has been largely discredited due to advances in physics as it cannot explain phenomena such as gravity which apparently exist without the connivance of matter. Considering some of the dates involved in the…
coleopterist
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