A bit of a long question

I've been considering getting into it for a while now and I just want to understand it more. I'll be honest, in some ways I want to improve my vocabulary so I can speak eloquently during a debate, but considering the time at I'm at right now it would really help.

I'm first and foremost an ex-muslim who only left the religion around a year and half ago so I'm still adjusting to the world around me and leaving everything behind. But I feel like I left when I haven't fully read the Quran or Hadith or looked into any Islamic philosophers and that's why I'm still adjusting. I want to understand more, sorry I don't know how to get my way across but I don't want to a doubtful, lazy, existential crisis inflicted person forever. And being exposed to so many different philosophers on reddit also make me feel overwhelmed.

I want to read into different philosophers and the general and popular ones as well finding ones that are less known and just broadening my horizon. That way when I create content in the future, I actually know what I'm talking about.

Thank you for listening to my desperate attempt at a TED Talk in the form of a rant

With skeptic I mean people that hold the beliefs of some sort of philosophical skepticism. I'm asking this because I'm having problems reconciling making epistemic claims with the belief that skepticism is the most plausible epistemic view.

Background/motivation behind the question:

As I understand it, Cornell realism is the view that moral properties are sui generis (=of their own kind) natural properties, which are constituted/realised by natural properties, but not identical to any (other) natural properties. This view allows Cornell realists to sidestep the Open Question Argument, because holding that a moral property is constituted/realised by a set of natural properties is coherent with rejecting that moral concepts are analytically identical to natural concepts (which is what the OQA – at most – shows).

To explain how moral properties could be constituted/realised by natural properties, Cornell realists typically (or always?) rely on the causal theory of reference (hereafter CTR): the view that a term's referent is the property/entity that causally regulates our use of the term. On this view, a moral term refers to the complex natural property that causally regulates how we use it. Just as the various natural properties that constitute health (itself a natural property) causally regulate our use of the term, so too with the various natural properties that constitute moral properties (e.g. rightness).

Any form of naturalism that relies on CTR is, however, vulnerable to the Moral Twin Earth thought experiment, which shows that naturalism combined with CTR leads to implausible conclusions about the way we use moral terms and the possibility of moral disagreement (for more details, see SEP on naturalism, paragraph 13 under the section on Cornell realism).

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The question:

My question is not a general question about how one could reject the effectiveness of the Moral Twin Earth thought scenario as an objection to naturalism, but specifically whether Cornell realism necessarily requires that one holds a causal theory of reference. Or are there other ways in which Cornell realists could explain how moral terms can refer to a sui generis complex natural property that is itself constituted by other natural properties, and also explain how we can come to know about such a property?

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Edit: I wish I could read your replies lol

I am very much a person interested in the wisdom and knowledge that philosophy keeps, but at the same time, I get sort of overwhelmed at the greatness of its subject. Since a layman can almost never grasp everything there is to know about philosophy, I often wonder how I can possibly apply the tenets of philosophy in my daily life without getting too lost in the myriad complexities.

When do the lines blur between self improvement and arrogance? And why does it happen??

Could anyone please recommend a short treatise or work (fictional or nonfictional) on being good or helping others, similar to the Enchiridion? I've tried to read through other threads on this subreddit but have not found an answer as specific for this question.

I know being "good" can be pretty arbitrary and a wide net to cast, and its usage in this thread seems egotistical (my apologies). Perhaps I’ve also been mistakingly using the term “good” and “goodness” when they should be exchanged for “ethics” and “virtue”. I've just been as of late reading and watching sentimental works (Grave of the Fireflies and Made in Abyss) and I'm really drawn towards helping others. I've associated this search with the catch-all keyword of "goodness," since that seems to be the broader subject of this search, but I'm more closely seeking a work that promotes helping others. If such a work includes broader expounding on “goodness,” “ethics,” and “virtues,” I’d be fine with that!

On why I ask for a short work, similar to the Enchiridion, I'm of the opinion that a position on a subject can be beneficial if it's short and sort of becomes a pocketbook reminder to the reader, and could thus be used similar to a prayer or meditation. Longer works for me tend to devolve further and not be as succinct, and I tend to forget a lot of it. I'm also sure that a detraction to using a short work is that it misses all the finer points and criticisms compared to a longer work that justifies its content more thoroughly.

Works that I found mentioned on other threads in general were Stoicism classics like the Discourses of Epictetus, the Zhuangzi, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Emerson's essays (particularly Nature), The Life You Can Save by Peter Singer, and Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. I think those are all solid books, but my only detraction from them is that they're lengthy and not as concise as a treatise or shorter work. If you'd like to recommend one of them again, I'd be fine with that! Perhaps I've set one of them aside too early simply because of its length.

If only a longer work comes to your mind, I wouldn't mind hearing that out either! I would greatly appreciate any help in this. :)

Could someone please explain how Heidegger demonstrated that Dasein is ontico-ontologically prior in the first section of the introduction: The Necessity, Structure, and Priority of the Question of Being. Thank you.

So Mill says that we should choose actions which 'tend' to produce happiness. So essentially you cannot always ensure happiness but you try to to promote happiness even though you will fail. Now, he also says that human beings can sacrifice their greatest good (self sacrifice) for the general welfare of society at large. The problem is that self sacrifice that doesn't lead to a tangible increase in happiness is not a 'good' action, what makes it a good action is that it increases overall happiness. The Kantian will reply that even if the agents action produced no tangible increase in the happiness of others but he had intended for there to be an increase, then this action would be good. Mill's reply is that this confuses the rule of action with the motive. The motive doesn't tell you whether the action was good-it tells you about the character of the agent. The goodness of the action is measured by its consequences. This is extremely confusing and blurry for me because Mill sort of does account for 'intention' when he is talking about choosing actions which 'tend' to produce happiness. (I am sorry for any errors as english is not my first language)

I’m trying to make the concept of global skepticism something enlightening rather than something quite frightening, any tips? Thanks!

They write:

No important moral philosopher, naturalist or non‐naturalist, has ever thought that merely gathering together all relevant descriptive truths would yield a full normative ethical theory.

But I thought that's exactly what Frank Jackson has advocated in his high-profile work on "analytical descriptivism".

Here's the full paragraph:

Let us return, then, to the objection in its current form: namely, that nothing normative follows from any of the empirical information we might gather from the natural, social, and human sciences. Perhaps the fear is that if the background theory is scientific, this makes ethics a science, or that if the background theory is a science, we can suddenly violate the laws of logic and derive “ought” from “is.” However, no one has suggested these things! No important moral philosopher, naturalist or non‐naturalist, has ever thought that merely gathering together all relevant descriptive truths would yield a full normative ethical theory. Morals are radically underdetermined by the merely descriptive, but so too, of course, are science and normative epistemology. All three are domains of inquiry in which ampliative generalizations and underdetermined norms abound.

This is from The Blackwell Companion to Naturalism (2016).

Am I missing something? Thanks.

Hoping to teach myself phenomenology. So far the best thing I've found is Mark Thorsby's lectures available online, but I have no idea if they're good quality/reliable.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WNs7t7fzXU

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Anything else? Like I said I prefer lectures/audio sources but books are ok too.

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Cheers.

I have an essay on this, and wanted to know if there were any decent papers/ppl who deal with this question/concept

Hi all,

I am writing an essay on "Epicurus on bivalence and law of exlcuded middle cicero on fate" and I'm struggling to find any good resources on the topics. It is whether his approach to the debate on fate is based on ignorance of logical principles in "Ciceros on fate"

If anyone could please signpost me to any good resources (or even want to explain in the comments!) I would really really appreciate it. I've been trying but really struggling, and as it's coursework my lecturers and supervisors aren't allowed to help ne. Thank you all so much in advance.

I'm currently reading the book Ethics as First Philosophy, and I am reading about how Emmanuel Levinas did not agree with the idea that a person is granted freedom by their autonomy (their ability to self govern and only follow rules and laws they set for themselves.) An example of kants thoughts on the matter back then is given:

"Freedom means obedience to the moral law of reason. Consequently, if one man obeys the will of another, he looses his freedom."

After this, the author argues from the perspective of Levinas: " The spontaneity of freedom is not called in question; its limitation alone is held to be tragic and to constitute a scandal. Freedom is called in question, only as much as it somehow finds itself imposed upon itself. "

My understanding of this is that people who have freedom strictly through autonomy can be unpredictable and hurt others ability to be free and practice their own version of autonomy, and only then do we begin to question whether autonomy is in fact freedom.

The paragraph ends with a quote saying "if I could have freely chosen my own existence everything would be justified."

This is where I become lost. I don't follow the logic. If someone could choose whether or not they came into existence, I suppose the point is that they have autonomy over their existence, and the choice to be or nit to be. How does this justify everything a person does though? How does this relate to the idea that autonomy does or does not result in freedom? What point is being made by bringing this quote up? I am struggling to connect the dots.

Thank you for your time 🙏

I feel like my grasp on Focoult is really poor. From what I understand power is subtly used to shape people into individuals the power require them to be. But I can't understand the rest of it. Is Biopolitics similar to this concept. If so can someone help me understand his lectures on Biopolitics too. I can't find a good explanation for it.

I've been trying to find a way to read Hegel properly but always find my self with insufficient knowledge to understand him...I'm not in academics of philosophy but I'm really interested in a deep understanding of German idealism in general...I'm trying to find a correct path that leads me there and I've started reading the history of ancient philosophy....presocratics Plato Aristotle the stoics and more in a general manner....is it a proper start and how should I continue....I was thinking of jumping straight to Hume and Kant after this learning journey...any opinions?

Maybe people with exposure to the six ancient indian philosophies, especially Advaita Vedanta, might be able to answer accurately. The question might seem simple that obviously the information is transmitted from the external world to the self, so it all depends on the world, for example, a light of red colour received by us solely depended on the red source. But as the self is the centre, all information is gathered with respect to it. The frame of reference is the self. So maybe, it has a role in our experience of the world via the senses. Maybe both, the world and the self have a hand in affecting the information, or maybe only one of them. Give it a thought.

Would nietzsche accept the fact that the self is something that has a core of being, or would he be more skewed towards a humean or Buddhist view of self? Because I feel like concepts like eternal recurrence require a strong view of the self, instead of something that is even impermanent in desires and goals

I've tried asking ChatGPT this question in a lot of different ways but still come out with the same sort of answers. Basically from my understanding, Reverse Deontologists assess the most probably outcome of any given action, and whether it maximizes well-being. While the Rule Utilitarian is more focused on the general rule of thumb. I don't see how these two things differ. They both sound consequentialist in nature and concerned with preventing overall harm. I'm familiar with classical deontology, but was trying to understand Reverse Deontology and found that the framework sounds practically identical to Rule Utilitarianism.

(This dilemma is related to a school project which is why I need help)

Consider the following dilemma :
The minister of economy of a fictional country wants to make a new law. The country regularly gives money to other countries to help fight poverty. The new law would completely remove any support to countries whose leaders don't let fictional country give money directly to the people (without giving it to the leaders for them to give it to the population) because they think that these leaders who want to take the money themselves and redistribute it actually use it for corruption.

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I know this seems a bit unclear so tell me if you don't understand. However, would Kant and Rawls agree with this law concept? I ask because the philosophical ideology of these two doesn't seem to apply to this dilemma. please help :(

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around modal realism. I understand that it’s a theory that relates to possibilities and necessity, but I’m a bit confused around the nature of what Lewis called “possible worlds”. Was he saying that any possible world, any world theoretically conceived (such as Germany winning WW2) literally exists? Does he mean it could exist in theory, or definitely exists? And if they do exist, are there infinite worlds taking place right now? If so, what was the overall basis of his claim?

Based on my limited understanding, I find that Lewis’ theory seems like a bit of a cop-out, only because it essentially alleviates the need to ask more in depth questions about this world, and because the validity of these worlds can’t be proven OR disproven, it just seems a bit self-defeating.

Apologies if I’ve completely butchered his ideas. If someone could explain the basics of Lewis’ theory like I’m 12, I would greatly appreciate it!

I am currently working on a syllogism problem and have worked it into the form of AAA-4, I've worked through it and it seems valid and it also does violate any of the rules for categorical syllogisms. However it is not on the list of 24 conditionally and unconditionally valid syllogism forms. Can someone explain to me why that is? I can't find any specific mention of it anywhere.

Hi! I just read Chauvets paper on cultured meat (Should cultured meat be refused in the name of animal dignity?) however I’m struggling to understand the Qzar example he uses and why he uses it. Can anyone help me? Thank you :)

This question will involve concepts in quantum mechanics.

So unless you believe in many worlds theory, certain outcomes out of a series of outcomes occur. But there seems to be a hidden assumption that one of the other outcomes in that series could have occurred at any particular instant.

This assumption seems to be because of the lack of a hidden variable (usually deterministic theory) that explains why a certain outcome occurred in quantum mechanics.

For example, in the double slit experiment, each photon arrives at a particular point on the screen when measured. A radioactive atom decays at a particular time t. These are said to occur for no further sufficient cause. But even if there is no cause for that decay time or the exact point at which the photon arrives at the screen, how do we know that any of the other outcomes could have occurred?

And if we can’t know this, in what sense do we know that they were possible? Could it still be the case that there’s only one possible branch of reality even if we can’t fundamentally predict the next part of that branch?

A possible analogy I can think of is a random sequence of numbers. Suppose there is a paper and the paper contains this entire sequence. A computer then spits out each number one by one from the paper.

So for example, the sequence might be 8 5 0 3 8 6 1 7 5 0 3 1. Suppose for whatever reason we only notice two things about the sequence: a) each digit is between 0-9 and b) over time, each digit occurs about as frequently as any other digit with a 1/10 probability. Let’s now further assume there is no pattern inherent in these numbers and no way to sort of “shorten” this sequence. This implies that there is no rule and thus no “law” that connects one element to the next. This now becomes somewhat analogous to how quantum events might be playing out in the universe. We know that the next event is among a range of possible outcomes, but we can’t actually know the exact next outcome.

Now, even though we can’t predict the next number, because this computer in my example is merely displaying that sequence, what comes next is still inevitable. Thus, in a real sense, there is only one possibility despite the lack of predictive capability of the next digit.

How do we know that the universe does not function in a similar way? Why do we make the assumption that in a real sense other outcomes were possible, and can science actually show this to be the case one way or another?

I was watching some video where zizek briefly mentioned something about the "athiest core of christianity". he mentioned a reading of the crucifixion as god "falling into" man. I might be misinterpreting zizek here but nonetheless this really piqued my interest about unconventional readings of the bible and I was wondering if there are any more out there you guys know about.

I've never studied philosophy formally, I just read about philosophy for fun and think a lot, so sorry if this seems juvenile.

I believe that there's no objective morality, aside from possibly pain=bad and pleasure=good. E.g. the belief that human lives are valuable requires multiple assumptions: living is a net positive experience, it's good to maximize positive experiences, we're not in a simulation, etc. I don't think it's objectively good or bad if an asteroid hits Earth and we all die instantly.

However, it seems intuitive that pain is bad. I don't care if I die painlessly, but I wouldn't want to have any pain. I believe the fear caused by the thought of death is worse than dying.

Is it valid to say that oneself experiencing pain/pleasure is the only objective source of morality? We can't know if everyone else is real, but our own pain/pleasure are sufficiently real. Is there a formal way to express this idea?