Official Website for Amitabha Palmer
Introduction For a while, I’ve had the idea of writing short posts presenting right wing and conservative ideas as charitably as possible. There’s a tendency on both sides of the culture wars to oversimplify and straw man (person?) the opposition. I fall prey to this just as much as the next person but in an […]
Read More Gender, Sex, and Transgender DebatesIntroductionExistentialism can be summarized in one phrase, “existence precedes essence.” But what does this mean? Pre-existentialism, philosophical systems presumed Man had an essence. To understand what that means consider a chair. Chairs don’t just randomly pop into existence…no sir! Before they are created someone or something has to have a concept of what a chair […]
Read More Doing What Feels Right and Sartre’s ExistentialismIntroductionBefore reading this, I suggest reading my post from yesterday since most of what I talk about here relates to it (and I end up retracting most of what I said).‘The arrogance of ignorance’ is one of my favorite phrases. I’m not sure of its origins but I heard it first from Dr. Steven Novella. […]
Read More Day 3: Psychological Jade and The Arrogance of IgnoranceOverview A central idea in democracy is that in voting for what the community should do, each individual gets to express their preference for one thing over another. If individual preferences don’t all align then sometimes there will be a puzzle about what the community should do–assuming policy decisions are ideally supposed to represent the […]
Read More Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem: Summary and ExplanationIntroductionThe major debate in ethics is whether there are objective moral facts. There are a variety of defenses and objections to either position. Those who say there are objective moral facts are called “realists” while those who deny realism are called anti-realists or nihilists (there are actually more positions such as constructivists and non-cognitivists but […]
Read More Review and Summary of "Ethics and Observation" by HarmonIntroductionIf I had a nickel for every time I hear something like “Well, if it’s right for him, who am I to judge?” I’d still be poor. Not because I don’t hear it a lot but because I’d donate all those nickels to charity. Anyway, relativism–the position that values are relative to an individual or […]
Read More Relativism, Nihilism, and Realism: You Think You’re a Relativist but You’re Not.IntroductionAristotle and Plato make the same puzzling claim: You can be mistaken about what you desire. Consider the following example: You’re looking at a delicious piece of chocolate cake. You say to your friend Aristotle, “I really want to eat that cake.” Aristotle be like: “No, you don’t.” You be like, “Dude, yes I do. […]
Read More Aristotle and Plato: Hey, Dummy! You Don’t Know What You Want!This post is a summary and evaluation of some of the arguments in “Choices, Interests, and Potentiality: What Distinguishes Bearers of Rights?” by Anna-Karin Margareta Andersson.PreambleThis paper presents itself as an investigation of the topic of rights and argues that (human) fetuses have rights yet never mentions abortion. And so this paper, under the guise […]
Read More Do Fetuses Have Rights?: A Review of "Choices, Interests, and Potentiality"This post is a summary of “From Experience to Metaphysics” by Jiri Benovsky.Check it. We’z about to go to da deps of filosofy: metaphysics. Metaphysics be about da fundamental nature of reality. It’s not that new-age crap about pyramids with eyes you see in book stores. It’s even deeper!!!!1!!!!11!1!!(I know, what could possibly be more […]
Read More From Experience to Metaphysics: A SummaryThe 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
Wrestling with Philosophy 