Djokovic
So the Australians have shown themselves even stupider than the Americans. I blame the British.
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One’s Own Mind
One’s Own Mind Several times in The Basis of Morality Schopenhauer remarks on the mysterious nature of compassion (or altruism). He says: “When once compassion is stirred within me, by another’s pain, then his weal and woe go straight to my heart, exactly in the same way, if not always to the […]
Right and Ought: Schopenhauer on Kant
Right and Ought: Schopenhauer on Kant In The Basis of Morality Schopenhauer undertakes a wholesale critique of Kant’s moral philosophy. He begins by attacking the very idea of a categorical imperative: morality should not be conceived as consisting of imperatives at all; the concept of the “moral law” is defective; moral rightness […]
Language and the Cave
Language and the Cave In Plato’s cave the inhabitants see nothing but shadows. Shadows are etiolated compared to the objects that cast them. You can glean very little from a shadow about the object that casts it. The shadow is two-dimensional, colorless, massless, and without texture: it is merely an absence of light, […]
Death, Disgust, and a Possum
Death, Disgust, and a Possum The other day my attention was caught by a bad smell emanating from near the front gate of my yard. Upon closer inspection I discovered a dead animal, evidently a possum. It had clearly been there a few days in hot weather. Flies were buzzing all around it. […]
A Modal Argument from Evil
A Modal Argument from Evil Some worlds are more evil than ours: we don’t live in the worst of all possible worlds. Some are a lot worse than ours: only the wicked prosper, disease is rampant and deadly, virtue leads to imprisonment, people are executed for singing in public, deep depression is the […]
The Frog Crawl
The Frog Crawl The kick in swimming the crawl adds little to forward momentum, maybe ten or fifteen percent of the power. All the power comes from the arms. In the breaststroke the frog-like movement of the legs adds much more to propulsion, about forty percent I would estimate. The arms have less […]
Is God an Atheist?
Is God an Atheist? God (if he exists) is a rational being. He believes in his own existence only if it is rational so to believe. So does God believe in his own existence? It might be thought that he has quick route to his existence—the divine version of the Cogito. God […]
Seeming
Seeming Seeming is a pervasive feature of conscious life. We (and other animals) are constant subjects of seeming: things are forever seeming this way or that to us. It now seems to me that there is a red cup in front of me, that Sebastian is in a good mood today, and […]
Philosophical Knowledge
Philosophical Knowledge I wish to examine the distinctive nature of philosophical knowledge. I don’t want to place much emphasis on the concept of knowledge; if that is too vaunted a term, we can as well speak of opinion or hypothesis or reasoning—whatever it is we do mentally when we do the thing […]