Official Website for Amitabha Palmer
The JargonLets get it out the way, shall we?Negative rights place obligations on others to abstain from doing something. The most common example of a negative right is freedom of speech. My (negative) right to freedom of speech places an obligation on others (in most cases, the guvamint) to abstain from restricting my speech.Positive rights place […]
Read More A Problem for Libertarianism“If there are any marks at all of special design in creation, one of the things most evidently designed is that a large proportion of all animals should pass their existence in tormenting and devouring other animals. They have been lavishly fitted out with the instruments necessary for that purpose; their strongest instincts impel them […]
Read More The Problem of Evil and Replies: Van InwagenIntroduction and Context:Up until Aquinas in the 13th Century, the church’s (where academia existed) doctrine was neo-Platonic. That is, it followed the philosophy of Plato. Why does this matter? Recall that beginning with Plato and Aristotle, a major debate can be traced through the history of philosophy: Is knowledge accessed internally through a priori introspection […]
Read More Summa Theologica and The Five Ways: Proofs for the Existence of God, The Cosmological ArgumentIntroduction and ContextWith eliminative materialism, we saw a reaction to dualism. Since folk psychological theories of mind got it so wrong (i.e., dualism), eliminative materialists argued we need to abandon everything related to folk psychology–including the concepts of belief and desire–and develop entirely new concepts that arise organically from modern scientific observations about the brain. […]
Read More The Persistence of Mental Attitudes: Folk Psychological Concepts vs Eliminative MaterialismIntroduction and ContextGettier’s “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” is considered to be one of–if not the most–important articles of 20th Century philosophy. Pre-Gettier, the standard definition of knowledge (since at least Aristotle) was “justified true belief”. Pretty much everyone we’ve studied so far held this account of knowledge to be correct (with the exception of Goldman who wrote post-Gettier […]
Read More Gettier: The Challenge to the Traditional Conception of KnowledgeIntroduction and Context“A topic that ain’t given no ‘spect” —Renowned Philosopher D. GurneyIntroduction and ContextSo far we’ve been looking at Descartes, Locke, and Berkeley’s account of what is possible for us to know. Common to all their accounts is that in order for our beliefs to be justified, we have to be able to offer […]
Read More What is a Justified Belief? Goldman and Reliablism
Wrestling with Philosophy 