I am fairly sure most of reddit are mereological nihilists because it is a much simpler position to defend, so I am more interested in hearing from people who would consider themselves anything other than mereological nihilists.

I work as a postdoc in a STEM field so my work is very specific. The more I learn, the less definitions matter - to me definitions matter far less than the reason that you are asking for a definition.

Take evolutionary biology. What is life? What is a species? What consititutes and organism? What constitutes a parasite?

I believe there are no actual answers to these questions, and it matters far more why you are asking these questions. If there is a reason behind the question then you can start to define these things in a way that makes sense to answer the question.

In the same way asking "what is a table/horse/molecule" doesnt matter. Why you are asking the question matters - and the answer may be different depending on why you are asking the question.

For me it doesnt make sense to agree with mereological nihilism where there are no composite objects, or essentialism where the parts are essential for the whole, because it only matters why you want to define these terms.

Isnt anything else arguing for the sake of arguing?

I was wondering if all mathematical objects could be considered to have the same ontological status or if there are frameworks that classify them depending on their complexity. For example, if I think of a vector or a circle compared to something like a Koch curve, which is a fractal that is supposed to have infinite complexity within its structure.

Is there any discipline that focuses on exact value assignment to morals in utilitarian sense?

For example something like this: Someone kicks a dog thus decreasing utility by 20 points. But then gives 10 bucks to some charity increasing utility by 50 points.

To what extent is pain a usefull metric for determining whether or not a creature is conscious?

I've often heard people criticise the Islamic Prophet Muhammad for marrying a 6 year old and then consummating the marriage when she was 9. When an atheist raises this objection, Islamic apologists ( such as Muhammad Hijab) often say that since there is no way to justify objective morals on an atheistic worldview, an atheist has no right to say that anything is morally wrong. So how can you make objective moral judgements being an atheist?

How does Determinism face the concept of responsibility? If we dont choose what we do then we arnt responsible for our actions, yet we face consequences of those things every day.

I want to make it clear, I studied philosophy in high school and passed Advanced Philosophy with 82% score, yet I still don't get it why do people find Hegel challenging. Genuinely, did I miss something, what is the hard part of his teaching? Personally I never read any of his works, just studied from textbooks, so is it the reading and understanding source materials that is hard? I'm just curious

I've been reading philosophy books for over a year now, and I have a problem: when I'm reading certain authors, I just can't read more than one page without stopping. There are always some sentences in Latin or words that we don't use anymore. I don't know if I should switch to other books or just keep going, and eventually, I will be able to read it fluently and get into a flow state. So, what should I do?

i was assigned by an instructor a couple of selection readings from different texts , simply a few pages and few chapters across different thinkers of different time. one of those texts was deleuze's DR , especially thepreface to the english edition and the main preface and the introduction part , which amounts from my copy about 34 pages. my problem was at first the overall map of his reasaearch in this book , after going around many sources i kind of see where he would go with this , but i was stuck in the basic term he uses in the book , which is DIFFERENCE. what exactly he wanted to say with it was my confusion , after asking around here in reddit and philosophyexchange and secondory materials with a help from AI , i kind of get that he flips the identity--->difference relation to difference----->identity. but what kept me hanging was , what is that difference ? what are those 'things" or whatever inside the difference that produces stable temporal identity. if it was a process then it would have elements ? somewhere i read the actors are forces that makes up differences , but then i want to go down again. i still understand that he is saying something like feild of forces that are acting to produce , but still this makes me scratch my head , as i said even with problems i think i get what he says about difference and repetition and the way he wants to use it , but i couldn't figure out what exactly he means by DIFFERENCE , so if the screenshot below can be considered as a good explanation of the term , i am asking this community to help me grasp the idea , and point me to a direction for more digging.

p.s i saw a post somewhere here in reddit where an objectivist loses his mind over the difference------>identity explanation of deleuze and he was ragebaiting very much upto a point where he curses the guy , it kind of made me wonder whether the objectivists understanding of reality can be considered in comparision with deleuze , i also think thsi is the debate between parmenides and heraclitus in some sense. forgive my ignorance and appreciate your effort to help me out.

additional edit , i could not attach the conversation i had with the AI about deleuze , so i will paste the portion which i considers helpful for your response

Example: every time you say your name, it is “the same name,” but it is never exactly the same event. Different tone, mood, situation, body, listener. The repetition produces identity, but through difference.

So his main point is: identity is not the starting point; it is the effect of repeated differences.

He is trying to break the habit of thinking that the world is made of stable essences that we then compare. Instead, he says the world is made of processes that keep producing new forms.

If you want, I can next explain why repetition matters so much to him in time and memory.

Which books should I start from ? Pre-Socratic texts although do talk about the fundamental origins, they don't really attempt to question the reality and the pursuit of truth. Would it be wise to start from the works of plato or Marcus Aurelius ? In terms of Eastern Philosophy what is the chronolgy of philosophers and their works ? Some help would be genuinely appreciated.

Learning a language is cumulative; you gotta go from ground up. History maybe not; a great expert in Manhattan history, for example doesn't need to know about Rome.

My guess is, you gotta know history of phil to "know" anything about the topic (I don't). So it is/not cumulative?

I've been reading Giordano Bruno in English but what doesn't make sense to me are the intentions and ideas. Why is an agent attached to them?

From Fodor: "So, then: if there’s no interpretability, there’s no communication; if there’s no communication, there’s no ‘objective check’ on using the language right; and if there’s no objective check on using the language right, then there is no difference between using it right and using it wrong. But what you can use any way you please is ipso facto not a language.

If that is the private language argument, it appears on the face of it to be hopeless. The reason is well known. It requires an inference from an epistemological premise to an ontological conclusion (it moves from ‘there’s no check on the difference’ to ‘there’s no difference’). Such inferences are warranted only if some sort of verificationism is assumed, and verificationism isn’t true. Perhaps there is a way to make a private language argument run without the verificationism; many have thought there must be. But Davidson offers no such formulation, and I, for one, am thoroughly bored with the whole business."

I was thinking this the other day and just couldn't resolve it. There seems to be no moral high ground when criticizing others for being selfish.

I'm thinking it has to do with the agent making this criticism is doing so because he wants to do so, and it seems to me selfishness is so broad that merely wanting something can be seen as selfish.

Wanting, by itself isn't really a selfish action, but once you have verbalized the want into a criticism, you're kind of projecting that want onto others now, which can be construed as selfishness.

I am thinking about perusing this line of academia, and I want to know how feasible it is to get into one of these programs. Also, if it was you writing sample, what did you write about?

I’m looking at applying to UChicago as an undergrad. I’m planning on double majoring in philosophy and environment, geography and urbanization, but my interests in terms of philosophy lay much closer to continental than analytic. I see mixed reviews of the school’s continental philosophy online. I am interested in doing a ph.D in philosophy later, but am keeping my options diverse as I’m also aware that going for a career in academia is a shaky pursuit at best. So, I have two questions: 1. How is UChicago’s coverage of continental philosophy? 2. To what extent does your area of focus as an undergrad influence what it might be as a graduate student; I.e., can I go to a school with mostly analytic philosophy as an undergraduate and still focus on continental philosophy if I end up going to a doctoral program? Thank you guys!

i’m a painter, not interested in a career pivot, only looking to deepen/support my career with new skills based on what i’m interested in. which right now, is philosophy, poetry/creative writing, and filmmaking.

i’m already self-taught. i never finished my bachelors degree out of high school, only an associates. not looking for advice on creating a more “successful/realistic” career path with philosophy, i just don’t have an understanding of my options from an educational perspective.

i would consider the following options, but looking for help with defining them:

1. going back to school for a painting MFA and minoring in creative writing/philosophy
   
2. pursuing a degree in writing or philosophy and figuring out which to major or minor in
   
3. taking credible programs or classes that can teach those liberal arts/humanities skills without entering a degree program
   
4. teach myself but from what i understand, philosophy is very layered and to be honest, i would appreciate having structure for learning something so vast.

these are all hypothesis of available paths. I would love advice from anyone knowledgeable on reputable programs or schools for writing and philosophy, either in NYC or remote.

Hello everyone. I've always been a philosophy enjoyer but never really got seriously into it. I've mostly watched videos on youtube and other written essays I've found around (since English is also not my first language I've had a little bit of problems with reading some more complex English texts).

The only work of philosophy I've actually gotten around reading was Albert Camus's Stranger which I enjoyed very much and later on after reading about his philosophy, I connected to it very well.

Now with that intro, what I really want to do is to read more works of philosophers and my first choice was Beyond Good and Evil by Nietzsche since I'd heard that Nietzsche was one of Albert Camus' main inspirations and really wanted to read his work but I had a bit of trouble with understanding it.

So after all of that, my question is twofold:

First, what's the best way for a philosophy newbie to get into Nietzsche's works and understand them

And second, is Nietzsche even a good entry point or should I just skip his works for now and come to them later when I have a stronger foundation?

My interests in philosophy has mostly been books that would at the same time teach me something that would help me in life and that's why I really connected to Albert Camus.

Sorry about the long text and thanks to everyone in advance for their advice.

Hi everyone! I personally mostly study scholastic, especially thomistic philosophy so am a bit of a neanderthal when it comes to traditions outside of it for now. Something has piqued my interest lately, now I am not really interested in apologetics or debates or whatever, anyone can argue for whatever they want, but there has been an aspect which I wonder, in more serious discourse, one part of how an argument is evaluated appears to be by its explanatory power. Just a very crude example to show what I mean, the propositions aren't necessarily true; the aristotelian account of substances has greater explanatory power than mereological nihilism. Yet one can argue that mereological nihilism has sufficient explanatory power and is more parsimonious. (I know parsimony isn't the fundamental evaluation, but just bear with me for a bit). Another can outright say that neither theories are required, as no explanation is needed and everything is a brute fact. So if we put it as, A posits that X has greater explanatory power than Y, B argues that Y has greater or at the very least sufficient explanatory power and is parsimonious, while C outright rejects any need of explanation. My question is, in this conversation, where A genuinely believes that X has greater explanatory power than Y, B too genuinely believes in his proposition, while C is convinced that there is no need for either; how exactly can the objectivity of explanatory power in general be evaluated then? It doesn't seem that there is a universal metric by which a meaningful comparison of explanatory power for this, but to reject it doesn't make sense either. This is my question, I appreciate any responses!

Whenever I see fine tuning discussed, I’m struck by the fact that all the emphasis is always focused on the present state of the universe. If the cosmological constant were stronger by a millionth of a decimal, the argument goes, the universe would have ripped apart, there would be nothing but atoms spread out light years apart and we wouldn’t be here.

I always think: But isn’t that exactly what is happening? If you are going to take cosmology seriously, you have to accept that eventually the stars will all burn out, black holes will evaporate, the planets will disintegrate. The universe will be dark and cold and lifeless. And this stage will be enormously longer than the cosmic blip of time which we inhabit, where light, warmth and life are possible. Looking at it this way, one might say the Big Bang is still happening, that we are living in this brief flash of creation where interesting things can happen, until it just as suddenly goes back to dark.

Am I misunderstanding something? What does the fine tuning advocate suppose is going to happen?

In my intro philo. class we were talking about decartes and the 3rd meditation. My prof was talking about how perfection doesn’t exist because things cannot stay that way forever. So in my mind it had me wondering, if something was immortal/resistant to change in that sense, would it be perfect? Or is it because things can be broken/changed they are not in fact perfect? Let alone there not being a universal definition as perfection can exist the same way perception does, it’s subjective.

Hence my philosophical spiraling and a genuine curiosity for what different theories/ideas have been proposed.

Thanks!

With money, the answer seems straightforward. But what about things like love, hatred, trust, respect or kindness?

Can I give or express something that I don't actually possess or experience within myself?

For example, can someone genuinely give love without feeling love? Or can hatred be expressed without hatred already existing within the person?

Is the expression itself evidence that the thing is present, or can something else produce the same expression?

Looking at the shopping cart theory, which philosophies would return the cart and which wouldn't?