Month: September 2013

  • Regent nomadic educated oligarchy

    My brother studies politics and economic history, so sometimes we get into discussions about how governments should be structured. Yesterday we had an interesting discussion, so I thought I’d write something about it. Anarchism and the problem of greed We started by discussing anarchism. Now if you didn’t already know, anarchists aren’t proponents of chaos, they’re →

  • Fitch, Humberstone, and an omniscient being

    I just read the paper “Omnificence” by John Bigelow[1]. In the preamble he recounts the following argument for an omniscient being Any fact (true proposition) is knowable by someone. (Premise) Therefore, every fact is known. Therefore, someone knows every fact. Fitch[2] was responsible for showing that (2) follows from (1). One way to see this is →

  • Argument from love for objective moral value

    Consider the following argument: Love involves appreciation. Appreciation of something is irrational if it has no value. It is rational to love other persons. Now, I suppose value comes in different forms, and what we really need is objective intrinsic value. Well, people usually don’t love other people because of what they can do for →

  • Atheism is self-defeating

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    I was thinking about the short argument I gave here and was wondering if it could be turned into a positive argument for theism. I came up with this: If God doesn’t exist, then our cognitive faculties arose from non-purposive processes. No purposive system can arise from non-purposive processes. Therefore, if God doesn’t exist, then our →