For instance if my argument is “Football is a great career” and the other person replies with “What would happen if everyone is a football player? Would it still be a good career then?” but I could apply that to any situation like “If everyone were blue collar workers then that wouldn’t be a great career.” I feel like this is some type of fallacy but I’m not sure.

I’m in psychology rn and I’m reading a thing about the biochemistry of love and how both romantic and parental love are influenced by things such as oxytocin, vasopressin, and other biological factors. This is admittedly making me wonder not just about why we value love as much as we do, as well as other emotions, especially since it’s mainly mammals and other social animals like birds who exhibit the emotion of love, where most reptiles don’t and other animals who don’t show care towards offspring or other members of their species.

I'm really confused after about a week of reading everything I could find from illusionists (mainly Dennett and Frankish). At some points it seems that they're denying I have the experiences I do. But when someone accuses them of this, they retreat and say "no no no, we're not denying all that commonsensical stuff. We're only denying a theory of consciousness, a way of conceiving of your experiences."

This particular quote from Frankish's 2016 paper introducing the subject really befuddles me:

"When I talk of phenomenal properties not being real or not existing, I mean that they are not instantiated in our world. This is compatible with the claim that they exist qua properties —a claim which illusionists need not deny."

So, is he saying that I do have the experiences I seem to be having when I attend to my conscious experiences? Is he restraining his denial of qualia to a denial of the theoretical notion of qualia put forward by philosophers? Or is he saying something altogether more absurd?

Honestly, I'm having an existential crisis. I attend to my experiences and I can't conceive of not having them as they're presented to me. It's driving me mad. Please, help!

I've been a Hindu all my life, but over the past few years I've been leaning more towards atheism. Before reaching any conclusion, I'd like to understand the philosophical arguments on both sides properly.

What are the strongest arguments for and against God's existence, and what are the strongest objections to each?

I'm particularly interested in consciousness, morality, suffering, contingency/cosmological arguments, religious experience, and miracles, including how philosophies such as Advaita Vedanta and Buddhism approach these questions or broadly every major religion.

Is there a rational basis for preferring theism, atheism, or agnosticism?

When I think about the concept of consciousness, the first thing that comes to mind is a kind of ordered chaos — not a fixed definition, but more like a constantly shifting graph. For example, memory loss or an intense experience seems to change the degree to which a person is "conscious."

Are there philosophical theories that treat consciousness this way — as a fluctuating/variable process rather than a fixed essence? For instance, how does this align with or contradict personal identity theories (like Locke's memory-based view of identity)?

Nobody created the land and it seems uncertain that an individual could reasonably claim that a particular piece of the Earth belonged to them , how can the original claim to ownership be justified in the first place ?

I have been recently trying to work through Scanlons "What we Owe to Each Other" and have been struck by how closely this construction so far replicates how the dialectic process evolves mathematics.

For those unaware, all of modern mathematics is essentially built out of the Zermelo–Fraenkel set axioms, which were defined a bit ago to lay to rest the foundational crisis. Ie. How do we know that mathematics is internally consistent? Godel proved that any formalized logical system will give rise to questions which have no canonical answer, and this imo mirrors Scanlons deceleration that moral truth should not be formalized within any axiomatic system.

One of my favorite unanswerable questions is if the millennium hypothesis is true; which states that there is an infinity which is strictly smaller than the infinity of all real values, and strictly larger than the infinity of all natural values. It literally does not matter if you pick yes or no.

My question is if we see similar structure in moral theory generally, or if this is an apples and oranges type situation.

Thank you in advance.

I thought that by being compassionate, I was a good person because I wasn't critiquing people for their life choices or for the way they felt about things or for the way that they acted even when they acted poorly towards me. Because I had this compassion for them and understood where they were struggling. And I just had the ability to just kind of let them be. What I failed to do was to understand that if I can have so much compassion for the reasons that they are, the way they are and who they are and whatever the fuck that they do, I'm also allowed to have my own complete experience at the same time as them.
And just because having compassion leads me to not really feel anger at anyone and kind of have this more neutral, broader perspective on people.

ok so ive heard someone talk abt forgiveness and how they dont agree with the fact tht forgiveness brings peace because u have to prerequisitely attain peace in order to forgive

like there's no like need for forgiveness, because you have to find peace before you forgive, and then you don't even really need to forgive
I don't know really if you're sorry anyway.
I don't know if you know how sorry you should be, depending on what you did. So forgiveness is tricky and it asks a lot of me, but grace just allows you to be.
idea of grace over forgiveness. It maintains that you still did exactly what you did, and that I don't have to view you as someone who didn't.But that also doesn't negate the fact that I am moved on,that I am healed because I think what just pisses me off is the idea that when you say you haven't forgiven someone, that it, it's assumed that there's still a problem there, that you haven't done the work, that you haven't healed, that you're not over it.

ok if someone does something wrong to me and I actually heal and I forgive them, but they never asked me to forgive them so l don't hold that sin against them, right?
And then, but they didn't ask me to forgive them. So they don't give a flying fuck and they go do the same thing again. Do I have to forgive them again even though I know that they're never ever going to change and that sin will be repeated?Or do I get a free pass?But I'm not even angry at them.

Why is the final point of getting past something shitty that someone does to you to pardon them?Why is that necessary?

any thoughts?
i need some clarity on this topic of forgiveness.

Title pretty much covers my question. There are people who are very well read on both philosophy and science, and happen to be scientific realists. I would like to know what they say when asked why they believe science represents reality (to some approximation or idealization).

I am interested in arguments other than No Miracles.

Hi! I know value for Marx is a complex topic with lots of debate i.e. the transformation problem. I'm trying to understand the basics a bit more but am very perplexed.

I sort of understand that value for Marx is a non-empirical category that is expressed through exchange value. For example, Norbert Trenkle writes, "For it is neither possible to filter out the substance of labor from commodities, nor consistently to derive the values of commodities from the level of empirical appearance (that is, from the level of price)."

And that money is a way of measuring value: "Marx (1990a: 188) holds that value has two measures, money and labor-time" (Kilman).

I have questions:

So does this mean that once value becomes expressed as money and labour time, it is being expressed in its empirical form? If so, why are surplus value and price both expressed in money? I thought surplus value was also a non-empirical category that had different empirical expressions?

And what exactly does it even mean to say that value is "non-empirical?" I understand this to mean that it is not quantifiable. But even the definition of value as socially necessary labour time - isn't it already quantifiable as socially necessary labour time that can be counted e.g. if I am producing hats for exchange on the market, I know in advance how much time I should produce each hat in in order to be competitive on the market?

Could you give me simple example of what value means as a non-empirical category? What is socially necessary labour time as a non-empirical category?

Or is value like a more abstract principle, such as "I need to produce commodities as efficiently as possible" that gets expressed in more concrete, measurable forms such as exchange value once the commodity enters circulation on the market?

I know there's likely my ignorance of Hegelian concepts behind this.

I hope my questions make sense, and thanks in advance.

Y

Who are the towering commentators of Aristotle's complete corpus in the last 50 or so years? I'm looking for something extremely in-depth, similar to the Baker and Hacker's commentaries on the Philosophical Investigations.

I’m looking for books that could help me develop the ability to take ordinary, concrete things and naturally connect them to deeper, more abstract ideas.

For example, instead of simply saying:
“People are afraid of change.”

I’d like to be able to think more like:
“People don’t really fear change. They fear losing authorship over the story they’ve already written for themselves.”

Basically, I want to get better at making unexpected connections between everyday observations, psychology, philosophy, metaphors, etc.

What books would you recommend for developing this kind of thinking?

Wittgenstein is often named the most significant philosopher of the 20th century. Yet there seems to be very little scrutiny of his dismissal of metaphysics compared to say, Ayer's.

A recent answer here summarizes the Tractatus as saying:

The trouble begins when philosophers attempt to speak about things that lie beyond these empirical bounds, such as the ultimate nature of reality, ethics, aesthetics, or God. Because these topics do not consist of empirical facts that can be pictured, attempts to formulate theories about them result not in false statements, but in nonsense (Unsinn).

This seems to me to be basically the exact same idea as logical positivism's verification principle. Yet whereas many people have critiqued the verification principle as self-refuting (since it can't be empirically verified itself), I can't find any examples of ethicists, aestheticians or theologians objecting to Wittgenstein's perspective. Have they? What are their arguments? And why does the Tractatus's treatment of metaphysics seem to be taken so much more seriously than logical positivism's generally?

I’m specifically curious about doxastic involuntarism and how one may be literally unable to make themselves believe in God, regardless of how much they want to believe. In the same way that one cannot make oneself believe that the sky is green or that 2+2=5.

Edit: Maybe a better example would be for someone to need to stake a belief in there being an infinite number of pairs of prime numbers, with such a belief being necessary to go to twin prime heaven. And with there being no concrete proof one way or another, and one not seeing enough evidence for one’s will to change to a state of belief in that proposition, and one not being able to force such a condition of belief.

Currently, we are able to slice a flies' brain into many thin sheets, recreate it in computer programmes and miraculously, allowed it to function. While this may only apply to flies currently, it is only a matter of advancement and practical challenges before such similar experiments are done for humans.

Therefore, I would like to ask if such a mind was placed in a digital space, would the brain or digital "person" be conscious. This is because assuming we have the technology to perfectly emulate the brain's operation and the way it "thinks", would the being be conscious because its a perfect digital copy of a biological person (at least in the brain/thinking process, the question on the body as ones identity for this is not what i wish to ask), or are they considered "unconscious" as they are only a digital programme running on a computer at its core. We would not be able to discern the digital being's consciousness at it will think that it is conscious if it is the brain of a real person.

Sorry if qn is bad OP is new here. Thanks!

Suppose my current self which I am experiencing right now is me-1, if my brain was obliterated and rearranged atom by atom exactly as it was in the previous version and if I wake up would the consciousness generated by the grain have the same self i.e. would it contain me-1 or an identical copy of my self me-2? Is there an objective answer?

My psychiatrist just hit me with that and it got to the depths of my soul. Apparently I was given the role of both. Now I need to know everything about it. Which of the books shall I get to? Direct Jung‘s works or people writing about them? Or anything completely different?

How can we trust any form of knowledge when every system of knowledge seems to begin with assumptions?

Even reason and logic depend on foundational principles or axioms that we accept—not necessarily because we have absolute certainty that they are true, but because they seem unavoidable, indispensable, or because we have no more fundamental framework from which to justify them.

But then a deeper question arises: what justifies the foundations themselves?

If every justification requires another assumption, do we eventually face an infinite regress, circular reasoning, or an unjustified starting point?

And if so, on what grounds can we claim that our knowledge is actually reliable?

I really really want to get into David Bentley Hart but I’m just not knowledgeable enough to even start comprehending what he’s saying.

A lot of people discuss the proofs of God, but they generally only discuss a general theism, or they prove various different kinds of existing universal things such as a God that is the highest being (Ontological), a God that is an intelligent designer or logos, a God that is the necessary being. However it doesn't seem common to discuss philosophical proofs of the Christian God (i.e. triune, died as human and resurrected, omni-attributes, etc.) The jump from a general theism or one or more of the aforementioned kinds of universal things to Christianity is then often taken on faith or empirical basis (see Joe Schmidt's recent conversion to Catholicism, where he gave a bunch of arguments for a general theism and then jumped to Catholicism entirely through empirical evidence for present-day miracles)

The only person I've come across in the history of philosophy who has really tried to give a full philosophical account of a Christian God is Hegel. Who are some others who have tried to give a philosophical argument for Christianity in particular over just a general theism?

EDIT: To be clear, I am asking if there is another systematic philosophy of Christianity other than Hegel. I don't want opinions on whether that's a good thing to do or not

And is there a "self"?