Online research in philosophy

Of course you know the movie, just by cultural assimilation if not by having seen it. There’s this young elephant, Dumbo, who has laughably big ears and has been pitiably separated from his mom. He’s aided by a friendly talking mouse2 into translating those otherwise hapless ears into the power of flight, which he eventually uses to rescue his mom and live happily ever after. The way the wily mouse gets Dumbo to believe that he could fly is to give (...) him a “magic feather” which, held in his trunk, demonstrably imparts the gift of flight. Naturally the mouse believes throughout all this that Dumbo can fly anyway, but he also knows that Dumbo needs the feather as a confidence-builder to do so. At the critical juncture of the tale Dumbo loses the feather after being pushed off a precipice, and he thus plummets perilously towards earth—only to find at the last moment that he can indeed fly on his own. (shrink)

Of course you know the movie, just by cultural assimilation if not by having seen it. There’s this young elephant, Dumbo, who has laughably big ears and has been pitiably separated from his mom. He’s aided by a friendly talking mouse[ii] into translating those otherwise hapless ears into the power of flight, which he eventually uses to rescue his mom and live happily ever after. The way the wily mouse gets Dumbo to believe that he could fly is to give (...) him a “magic feather” which, held in his trunk, demonstrably imparts the gift of flight. Naturally the mouse believes throughout all this that Dumbo can fly anyway, but he also knows that Dumbo needs the feather as a confidence-builder to do so. At the critical juncture of the tale Dumbo loses the feather after being pushed off a precipice, and he thus plummets perilously towards earth—only to find at the last moment that he can indeed fly on his own. (shrink)

All right, first off I need to disappoint some people who despise reading the fine print on things or just plain love to speed-read only large fonts: this is not only not my last lecture, I m not even retiring anytime soon. So sorry to those of you poised to shout Good riddance to bad rubbish! at the end of this soliloquy. You re going to have to be patient a while longer.

After learning about the concept of determinism, a natural tendency is to conclude that if anyone actually believed in the determinism of human nature, then all future human actions are "set out for us" or "cut and dried" and, in some sense, utterly unavoidable. Another way of referring to such inevitability is that human action appears to be..

“Men can never be free, because they’re weak, corrupt, worthless and restless. The people believe in authority; they’ve grown tired of waiting for miracle or mystery. Science is their religion; no greater explanation exists for them.” (Cigarette Smoking Man, "Talitha Cumi" The X-Files 3X24).

In ‘Moving faster than light’ Hud Hudson [2002] argues that by employing simple reasoning with a few explicit metaphysical assumptions, one can demonstrate that, contrary to accepted physics, there must be objects that move at superluminal velocities. Though there is without doubt some very quick thinking on Hudson’s part that is more than a little reminiscent of Zeno’s, I will show that Hudson’s argument no more requires anything in the world go at dazzling speed than Zeno’s arguments (...) stood the world still. (shrink)

The aim of Jonathan Tallant’s recent article ‘What is B-time?’ (2007) is to demonstrate that B-time - which holds that time consists solely of tenseless temporal relations - is something of which we have no understanding, and that, therefore, if mind-independent time is B-time, then time is unreal. Of course, implicit in his own position is that since time is plausibly real and we do understand what time is, the correct ontology of time is A-time or tensed time. How then (...) does Tallant purport to substantiate the crucial claim that ‘we have no understanding of what “B-time” is’ (2007: 147)? The overall structure of his argument may be stated as follows:1 Argument A.. (shrink)

Analysis shows that statements of ability are disguised conditionals. More exactly, the correct analysis of 'X could have done A' is 'If X h decided (chosen, willed ...) to do A, X would have done A'. Therefore having acted freely--having been able to act otherwise than one fact did--is compatible with determinism (with the causal determination of one's acts).