We've all had moments where we're arguing with people online or in person and make our points, only for the person you're arguing with to misconstrue your arguments and respond to points you're not even making. In other words, strawmanning your argument. Points you try to make which you assume are obvious and implied are lost on them. And even if you spend paragraph after paragraph trying to explain exactly what you're arguing for and what you're not, chances are they'll just strawman your argument anyway and ignore most of what you said.

I've come to feel like this is an inherent aspect of linguistic communication as opposed to anything that can be easily solved with intellectual honesty and unbiasedness. There's only so much of a person's overall thought process that can be unambiguously explained through spoken or written language. Anyone else who reads/listens to their arguments is only ever going to get a partial picture of what they're actually arguing for and that other person is going to fill in the blanks based on their own knowledge, viewpoints, thoughts, and emotions. Basically, they strawman the argument without even consciously trying. It seems like literally everyone does this to some degree, generally without even realizing it.

Honestly, the only way I can see to avoid this is if you completely put aside any emotional connection you have to things you feel are true and try to analyze an argument from your opponents perspective in every possible moral, ethical, emotional, and metaphysical way. Anything you're still not sure of about their argument at that point, you'd need to ask them about. In any case, simply believing you're right and they're wrong is inherently going to lead to unconscious strawmanning.

What do you guys think of this? Is this a concept that gets brought up a lot in philosophy? Where can I read more about it?

All responses are appreciated, thanks.

Given the following logical statements:

1.p: lt is sunny.

2.q: I will go for a walk.

3.r: I will take an umbrella.

Express the following statements using logical

operators, will it be the same? p --> q?

"If it is sunny, I will go for a walk."

"l will go for a walk unless it is raining."  or is this -(-p) -->q?

If we consider love for art passion . People say pursuit of passion must be chosen over material pursuits. People say passion is the essence of life .Let's take for example , imagine I have a passion for collecting books. One day I am given a choice , I can either buy a book that Ive been searching for so long , its a book that I have yearned to have my whole life . But if I buy that book I cannot support the starving child across the street, since I can only spend money on one thing. The more moral thing and reasonable thing to do will be to help the starving child . But I am passionate about buying that book , passions do not have to be reasonable .

If suppose you say , you must feed the starving child over your passion . Then must feeding children in africa be given priority over creating art? Then art must have no value, since it is not reasonable to paint a portrait when I can feed a child in africa. Then art must be looked down upon.

Suppose you say I must buy the book, I am starving the child, I could have saved a life with that money .

Should we choose reason or passion ? With reason there will be no passion. With passion there will be no reason.

For convenience, I used male pronouns. It could be a woman, I understand. For what it's worth, I have known several people who meet this description. I wonder about this, but I don't have a preconceived answer. Help me think it through.

So I’m sure you’re all aware of the classical theist argument which goes, there cannot be an infinite regress of dependable causes ad infinitum. Which seems logical, however I’ve seen Alex mal pass debate Mohammed hijab by asking for demonstrable evidence for it being illogical. Which the sniper example was given, I.e if a sniper gets an instruction from his superior who has to consult his superior ad infinitum the sniper would never shoot. What would be the antithesis.

I’m particularly interested in responses that can delve into issues involved with deception. Bonus points for responses delving into issues involving self-deception.

For research purposes

I would like to know if philosophers have had thoughts on this--both for humans, and for hypothetical advanced species.

Is foundational epistemology the weakest school? First of all, I am a noob in philosophy , but I am just going to put my thoughts here.
Is there really no criteria for determining the foundational beliefs , and it is all arbitrary?
In a foundationalist POV , no foundational belief has any evidence, except that we "believe" in it, in fact,it mustn't have any evidence. For example a basic belief , such as contradictions being impossible ,from a foundationalist POV that's true , but for what reason do I believe in it? I know a foundationalist says: Well, it is a first principle , so we don't need a reason to believe in it. That is foundationalism
But my point is: Well, we agree there are foundations which we base our beliefs on, but we are only doing that in order to avoid infinite regression and circularity , but the thing itself is literally unverifiable.
I know this is exactly what a foundationalist says , but isn't that literally the worst position to have?
I had this dialogue between Me and myself (I am a foundationalist):
Me: Do you believe in X
Foundationlist: Yes , I do, due to foundational beliefs. And X is right, you should believe in X too.
M: But I don't believe in those specific foundational beliefs. In fact, I can be a foundationalist without believing those specific foundational beliefs , I could just have other foundational beliefs. Determining which beliefs should be foundational is arbitrary. I might as well believe that flying dogs is a foundational belief and you can do nothing about it.
The foundationalist may reply in the following ways

1. You are right ,I accept my defeat
2. Well, my foundational beliefs are the right ones because (oh no, you just contradicted yourself , trying to justify the foundational beliefs) they always have the desirable and are internally consistent (Is this even foundationalis anymore? Seems like coherentism. Plus I would ask for a reason as to why being internally consistent etc act as a justification. Isn't that your new foundational belief then? So I would ask the question to it now)
3. This is an answer mentioned in some medieval books. They argued that: Well,every single one of us believes and is certain that contradictions don't happen. Yes , Your argument is valid , but what we find in ourselves is that no matter how many arguments you bring to refute those foundational beliefs , we still find ourselves unshaken in our belief in them , and still believe they are true , so we will just dismiss your argument. The third answer is probably the best case they have while still being within the "foundationalist" school , but the other person could just say: Well, I honestly don't care about what you believe , I care about what's right? Why do you trust your mind when it tells you that those foundational beliefs are true? Couldn't our minds have been programmed that way due to natural selection or a god , because that way would make us have the highest chance of survival etc? Couldn't the law of non contradiction be false ,but we are programmed to believe in it because it is just the best way to live? I am done , and I know most of what I said is probably the most basic objections to foundationalism, as I said, I am just a noob in philosophy. I want to know what a foundationalist would say as a response , and I would also like to know if the other epistemological schools have answers to these problems.

Let me clarify something : I am saying that even from a foundationlist POV , there is no objectivity. Two foundationlists could disagree on the foundational beliefs because its arbitrary and nobody can convince the other person at all. But hey, they have probably been dealing with this problem for thousands of years and I brought nothing new.

• Suppose moral realism is true, that is, there exists at least some moral claims/assertions/principles that are themselves 'true', in some adequate sense
• Suppose a person knows/is aware that a specific moral assertion P is true
• Suppose this person knowingly/deliberately acts in a way to violate P

Now... what's supposed to happen to this person? I mean, of course they may be punished by their community if someone else finds out, or they may feel a sense of shame/guilty for their action, but is there anything else besides this? More playfully, is there anything 'the universe' itself would do to somehow punish this person?

I ask it because I guess that if something were to happen, then maybe the truth of moral assertions could become a testable, empirical matter, and conversely, if nothing whatsoever happens, then the possible existence of moral truths can be brushed aside as a non-issue

Note that the possibility of acting in disaccord with P is essential, for if it were simply impossible to violate it, it would likely be best described as a law of physics or something ('thou shalt not decrease entropy in an isolated system' comes to mind)

Also, if at all possible, please refrain from answers involving deities, hells and stuff

• [this was originally posted on Philosophy StackExchange]

++ [here's a little conversation with chatgpt using the text of the present question]

Fyodor Dostoevsky said "There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my suffering."

I read this in Dr. Victor Franyl's book "Mans Search for Meaning"

What do you think he meant by this? "worthy" of suffering?

Please note that my knowledge of philosophy and its history is somewhat limited, so my question may be flawed in ways I'm not aware of. But what I mean by this is that Plato's Republic for instance is an important work of philosophy, but if published today it would hardly be taken seriously because of its structure. Works like Nietzsche's Zarathustra were also mostly ignored by academic philosophy? So when did philosophy start drawing a strict line between academic philosophy and, for instance, philosophical literature?

Hi all so if somebody is doing a good action (eg donating to charity, helping someone who’s injured on side of road good Samaritan style) and are doing it because god / religious texts tell you to do so (eg love your neighbour, whatever else equivalent it says in other religious books) do you reckon it is less “good” than if they were doing it because they believed there was an objective “goodness” about doing it? (Ie helping someone out of the belief that it is the objectively good thing to do)? Does this mean a religious charity eg Salvation Army could be considered “less good” than a non religious one even if they’re doing the same act? Or could belief in god somewhat be equal to a belief in an objective moral goodness? Like god is supposingly all good, all loving ect… if you’re doing something out of a believe there is an objective goodness in doing it could this be equal to believing an action is godly or godlike? Would love to hear thoughts about this.

I’ve been thinking about this, people are taught to be good, but is there really an underlying reason why a person should be good?

You often hear of cases of morally ambiguous behaviour leading to much more success than people who follow the rules and take the righteous and moral approach. Is there a reason to be good at all? If the world doesn’t reward good behaviours as much as behaviours that push boundaries, should there be a reason to be good anyway?

These are the questions that I want to think about, any books would be much appreciated. I’ve read the book “why it’s okay to mind your own business” recently and that got me thinking

Suppose that there is a magical machine which can determine if something has consciousness (qualia, subjective experience, etc., whatever you want to call it) or not. Further, suppose that there exist advanced human-looking robots (HLR - or whatever you want to call them) running something like AI/machine learning internally. We find with out magic machine that humans have consciousness and these HLR don't. Despite the fact that in this hypothetical, we can somehow (suspend your disbelief) prove all humans have consciousness and all the HLR don't, why might we treat the HLR well anyway?

Two possible reasons I thought of were:

1. We don't have 100% credence in our magical machine (please ignore this reason for the sake of the hypothetical).
2. Some virtue-ethics style reason about how mistreating the HLR will cultivate vice and make us desensitized to the mistreatment of human-like entities, which makes us less empathetic, and perhaps more likely to hurt humans.

Can you think of any other reasons? Is there any literature on this question?

Edit: I've framed 2 in terms of virtue ethics, but I would not consider re-framing the reason from eg. a utilitarian perspective a different reason, just the same reason through a different lens.

Howdy! I was having a conversation with an acquaintance last night and he briefly mentioned the concept of a theory of rationality (we were talking about probability). I asked him what that meant but he only gave me examples, natural deduction, game theory and 'the like.' It wasn't helpful because I don't know much about these theories. Is there a SEP article or something I can read more about it the concept of a theory of rationality?

We only know what loneliness is due to the contrast of not being lonely which is being with others. In a hypothetical situation where a person was born as the only being in existence, would the person be able to comprehend the lack of togetherness whereas he has never experienced what being with other life feels like?

Any idea?

What novel, short story, play, poem, or creative non-fiction piece would work best to write an interpretive essay about using Gadamer's Relevance of the Beautiful in order to make an analytical argument about some aspect of that work of literature?

Even with metaphysics and a soul I don't understand how it possible for us to have free will. If any do believe in it, please comment why and how it could work.

Suppose that for whatever reason, you are given two choices, one of which you must pick.

1. You die.

or

2. 1,000 others die.

What would different ethical systems say about this scenario? Ought one to preserve themselves, or should they sacrifice themselves to save others?

A New History of Western Philosophy, by Anthony Kenny
The History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell
The History of Philosophy, by A.C. Grayling.
The Story of Philosophy, by Will Durant

I don’t know if this question makes sense. But we have so many ethical blueprints that differ in many ways, yet most of them share the end goal that “act this and this way so you can be a good person”. In the real world, we see people compromising their morals all the time, harmless or not. So why do we assume that people have a moral capacity in the first place, that they naturally want to and should strive towards goodness. Is it because we are rational creatures? But then why does possessing rationality mean we will desire virtue as well?

I haven’t paid much attention to epistemology so when it comes to theories of truth I’m very ignorant. I know the names of some of the theories, but other than correspondence I couldn’t say anything about them.

I was chatting with a gentleman last night and he presented an argument against CTT that went something like this,

We have two statements: 1) London is North of Madrid, and 2) London is South of Madrid. Under CTT statement one is true because it has a truth making correspondence with reality. However statement two also corresponds to the statement, just in the negative as a fails making correspondence. Hence CTT is circular, it’s just saying what’s true is true.

He then went on to talk about pictures and negatives to make the same point, but he had lost me at that point.

I believe I understood the first argument and what it was point to, but I have a suspicion that there’s something wrong with the argument. It almost feels like it is equivocating with its use of correspondence or something. I just can’t put my finger on the problem.

Is anyone familiar with the argument and maybe correct him/me/both of us?

Husserl is usually regarded as the father of phenomenology, but Hegel obviously used the term before him. Is Hegel's and Husserl's phenomenology the same? Or at least coming from the same places?

“If we have judgement which is thought in conjunction with its own necessity, we have an a priori judgement”

“[When] the predicate B… lies outside the concept A, though [is] connected with it… I call the judgement… synthetic.”

Isn’t another way of saying that latter that the predication of B of A doesn’t necessarily follow from A, and that therefore the judgement that B is predicated of A is by the former definition NOT a priori? So that “synthetic a priori judgement” is a contradiction of terms?

What am I missing here? Surely the problem hasn’t been so easily framed so that the whole book is trying to answer the question whether a contradiction in terms can be true?

I’ve been reading a lot on here about objective morality and atheism recently and wonder what someone would make of this argument (or if anyone can reference a counter or proponent of this argument in writing that would be amazing.)

Basically that Morality is pseudo-subjective because it is the product of evolving in such a way that is most conducive to cooperation and thus survival and happiness. So essentially we do have the same moral tendencies as a species which accounts for the general agreement on principles across cultures. However it’s not objective in the strict sense that there’s a form of morality pre-dating humanity that we discovered through reason.

I myself do not agree with this argument but I’m having trouble poking a hole in it and explaining why moral facts must be objective. I’m not even entirely sure that this isn’t a form of objective morality like moral intuitionism. Maybe I can get behind the idea that morality is objective in the sense that human morality is what leads the human to a good and flourishing human life and that that is what we seek to uncover with our intellect. That’s sort of Aristotle.

One objection I can think of is that if morality is a product of evolution and so ingrained in our nature, why are we so frequently not moral in our actions? Perhaps that lends even more credence to the social construction aspect but then that leaves open the hole of broad agreement.

Can someone help me debunk this or explain why morality must be more objective than this? Or agree with it if you do?

Title tells all! Looking for good book recommendations on philosophy.👀