Reddit mentions: The best thought philosophy books

>You espouse nothing but poor reasoning

You can't espouse poor reasoning. You can however espouse an idea supported by poor reasoning. Assuming this is what you meant, I still haven't done it. You have no examples for how my arguments rely on poor reasoning, you just keep insisting that they do. This is due to your own reliance on specious reasoning.

>You're an apologist. You've chosen that position and it's an ugly one.

Sigh.... You know what an apologist is right? Lets use the term in a sentence... "The christian apologists tried to defend their beliefs using reason, thinking that belief in god could be found through logic." Hmm... Maybe a definition would still be useful.

Ya... I'm not an apologist. I'm not arguing in defense of a belief. I'm arguing against a belief in moral realism. You, my friend, function as the apologist in this debate. Please stop using words without knowing how to use them.

>My morals are quite measured and I do not follow them blindly, with faith. I quoted this because this is all you do. You make stupid and baseless attacks because you have no defense.

Watch this: "My belief in God is quite measured and I do not follow him blindly, with faith." Just because you use reason to justify things after the fact does not make the original assumption true, or any less "faithful."

You seem to have a complete lack of knowledge when it comes to moral theory and what is possible through moral theory. Sam Harris, while an interesting individual, and right about many things, is fundamentally wrong when it comes to what science can do with regard to morals. Not in the sense that his moral system is untenable, but rather in the sense that you can't get his moral system strictly through scientific study—which he claims we can. Assumptions must be made before you can even begin the study of well-being and suffering, and even more must be made in order to say that you should promote one and avoid the other.

A person's insistence on the existence of universal objective morals is best termed as a FAITH. There is no evidence of universal objective morals, and they are fundamentally unscientific entities in the same sense God is—even if we wanted to, we could never find evidence of them. At best they are commonly assumed entities—like God is for most people.

And I repeat, because you seem to think I am some sort of moral heathen, THIS DOES NOT MEAN THAT MORALS ARE USELESS OR THAT WE SHOULD LET PEOPLE DO WHATEVER THEY WANT BECAUSE THERE ARE NO OBJECTIVE MORALS. Your feelings about me being somehow deficient are the same feelings a religious fundamentalist would have toward both of us due to our lack of belief.

That you think a bit of pop-science is somehow "important" for me to read is laughable. If what you know of morals comes from that book, I feel sorry for you. I understand that many atheists will praise anything that comes from the "canon" writers on atheism like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, however, being a fan of someone does not make all of their work good, or even relevant. At best, Sam Harris is simply endorsing the naturalistic fallacy. At worst, he's willfully ignorant of what the naturalistic fallacy is, and simply wishes to push his view as a "counterpoint" to religious morality.

Since you so kindly left me a link to a book, allow me to do the same, by linking you to the most important books in moral theory for you to read, some of which argue directly against me, but at this point the idea is to get you educated, not to get you to agree with me:

Alisdair MacIntyre — After Virtue

Nietzsche — Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche — The Genealogy of Morals

Kant — Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals

Aristotle — Nicomachean Ethics

G.E. Moore — Principia Ethica

I've done my best to find the best editions of these books available (I myself usually default to the Cambridge editions of works in the history of philosophy). You may also want to check out some Peter Singer, along with Bentham and Mill, if only to know what it means to be a utilitarian. After that, read John Rawls, because he'll tell you one reason why utilitarianism is so controversial in ethical theory.

I hope to hear back from you about the results of your studies. I figure you can easily find pdfs of these books (though perhaps not the same editions I linked) somewhere online. Given about a month or two to read them all (I'm not sure how much free time you have... maybe more like three months) you should be up to speed. Hopefully I'll hear back from you after the new year. At that point, I don't expect you to agree with my view on ethics, but I at least expect you will understand it, and be able to argue your own position somewhat more effectively than you are at the moment. If nothing else, think of this as a way to learn how to "stick it" to people like me.

Maybe by then you'll have gotten beyond the whole "I'm taking my ball and going home" disposition you seem to have when confronted with someone who's better than you at debating ethics. I can only hope.

If you take ethics seriously at all, do this for yourself: study the shit out of ethical theory.

Another fair point. So, a clip here, so you don't even need to leave Reddit.

>...

>#Our Argument in Brief

>To orient readers, let me summarize the claims we defend in our book.

>Marriage is a human good with its own structure, like knowledge or friendship. The present debate is not a debate about whom to let marry, but about what marriage (the human good that the law has reasons to track) really is. Two answers compete for legal enshrinement.

>The first, driving the push for same-sex marriage, is that a certain emotional intimacy makes a marriage. But as our book shows, this answer can’t coherently distinguish marriage from companionship, an obviously broader category. So it gets marriage (the human good) wrong.

>The second view of marriage begins from basics. Any voluntary form of community involves common action; it unites people toward common ends in the context of commitment. And in these respects, what sets marital community apart is its comprehensiveness: in (1) how it unites people, (2) what it unites them with respect to, and (3) how extensive a commitment it demands.

>First, marriage unites people in their bodies as well as their minds. Just as your organs are one body by coordinating for the biological good of the whole (your survival), so a man and woman’s bodies unite by coordination (in sexual intercourse) for a biological good (reproduction) of the couple as a whole. No other activity makes of two people “one flesh.”

>Second, as the act that makes marital love also makes new life, so marriage itself is uniquely enriched and extended by the bearing and rearing of children, and the wide sharing of family life.

>Third, because of its comprehensiveness in both these senses, marriage alone requires comprehensive (permanent and exclusive) commitment, whatever the partners’ tastes.

>The stability of marriage, so understood, best ensures that children will know the committed love of those whose union brought them forth. This gives them the best shot at becoming healthy and happy people, which affects every other social good. That is why every society with the merest ambition to thrive has socially regulated male-female sexual bonds: to shore up the stabilizing norms of marriage, on which social order rests.

>If marriage is redefined (in law, and hence in public opinion and practice) as simple companionship for adult fulfillment, then, for reasons to be explained, it will be harder to live by its norms and urge them on others. And this will harm the social goods that hook society into regulating marriage in the first place.

>Besides defending these claims, my coauthors and I answer the most common objections to the historic view of marriage. And we show how society can uphold that view without ignoring the needs, undermining the social dignity, or curbing the fulfillment of same-sex attracted people.

>#Misreadings

>...

I end the clip at that point from this article as this is a succinct presentation of their book, What Is Marriage?

I actually deconverted from Catholicism in college. I'm a revert.

I never got into into the party culture. I'm really against drinking and doing drugs, and I've always been skeptical of sex outside of a committed relationship and those morals stuck with me even after I deconverted from Christianity. What I did encounter was a lot of intellectual arguments against religion that I couldn't answer. However, what I also eventually discovered was that most of those objections had been heard before and responded to, at least in some manner.

So, here's my semi-comprehensive list of apologetics apologetics resources that I've accumulated over the years.

IMHO, the following books cover all the essentials very well and are probably must reads. You can buy used or online copies of them relatively cheaply, under 20 dollars if you're in the US. Check out Trent Horn's Answering Atheism, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civ, Mere Christianity by CS Lewis (you can probably get Mere Christianity at your at public library), and What is Marriage? Man and Woman a Defense for defending the concept of natural marriage. You should also read How to Argue which is a free pdf. I haven't researched abortion apologetics as extensively as other areas but I know Trent Horn has some books on those.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I'm not going to say you should read all of my remaining recommendations but I'm putting the rest out there for you so you know they exist.

Now, no list of apologtics is going to cover every argument about Christianity so I would also recommend some online resources. www.reddit.com/r/Catholicism is an amazing forum. It has tons of Catholics who are way more knowledgable and experienced that me who can answer questions and stuff. You may or may not have heard of it ;). I also recommend William Lane Craig's site: http://www.reasonablefaith.org/question-answer. Again, Craig is a protestant so don't look to him for a defense of Catholicism. However, he's good when it comes to defending the basics of Christianity from atheism. Catholic Answers is good. Fr Barron is good. Strange Notions can be good, I link to it in my last paragraph.

The exact relationship between faith and reason was my biggest stumbling block on the road back to Catholicism, so I have some good recommendations on that topic. I recommend the papal encycle Fides et Ratio and How the Catholic Church Built Western Civ. Plantinga's book Where the Conflict Really Lies is also popular and uses evolution to make an interesting argument against materialism. Plantinga's not a Catholic so I don't know how well they would square with Catholic philosophies like Thomism, but, yeah, he exists. He also wrote this giant essay on faith and science, which was helpful. The book God and the Philosophers is pretty good too, it's an anthology of different Christian philosophers and talks about how they converted to Christianity.

Some comprehensive (but expensive) books by non-Catholics include The Blackwell Companion to natural theology by William Lane Craig (not a Catholic). I've heard good things about Richard Swinburne's apologetics trilogy The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason. Swinburne is Eastern Orthodox, just for the record.

I want to give a special shoutout to Edward Fesser. He's a secular atheist philosopher who converted to Catholicism. You can read his conversion story here. He also has a blog that you can google. Fesser also wrote a bunch of books that are highly recommended by people on this sub, although I haven't read them.

I've yet to come across a definition of existentialism that seems to do justice to the variety of figures put under the term, although I did come across a nice little tidbit a couple weeks ago:

>"Existentialism" is not a precisely defined term. It refers to to a movement or a set of issues. It is, moreover, as much a literary sensibility as it is a set of philosophical ideas...they share a reaction to the philosophical tradition that precedes them. They regard is as overly focused on the achievements of cognition and as offering little insight that can touch the lives of individuals. It is also characteristic of existentialism to regard everyday human life as something of a sham, as a distortion of a more distressing underlying truth. This truth, once exposed, can serve as a springboard for personal liberation, however, and that makes confronting it worthwhile. Page 4.

Kierkegaard does assert that human beings have a sort of eternal essence, something later existentialists, most notably Sartre, strongly push against. However, he emphasizes the weight of being human in a way Sartre and many of his peers also would, exploring themes like anxiety, depression, choice and authenticity, all of which would be picked up by Heidegger, Sartre, Beauvoir, Camus, Jaspers and many others in a variety of ways. While some would try and say that people can live without eternal truths (or that we have to whether we can or not), Kierkegaard seems to think that we're incomplete without something firm to ground ourselves upon, as he says in The Sickness Unto Death of the person who doesn't ground themself in the eternal,

> The self is its own master, absolutely its own master; and exactly this is the despair, but also waht it regards as its pleasure and joy. But it is easy on closer examination to see that this ruler is a king without a country, that really he rules over nothing; his position, his kingdom, his sovereignty, are subject to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment. Ultimately it is arbitrarily based upon the self itself. Page 100.

The problem your question points to is really more about Kierkegaard's reception that it is with Kierkegaard himself. While I think that it's great many atheists and more secular thinkers took Kierkegaard seriously, I do think that there's been a problematic emphasis on his existentialism and psychology, often to the detriment of his spiritual and and religious thought. While you can read Kierkegaard well as an atheist or existentialist, Kierkegaard's central problem was not existentialism; it was how to become a Christian in Christendom.

If you're interested, Anthony Rudd has a book on the topic, and while it is expensive, it does a good job of explaining Kierkegaard's view of the self as being one that requires some sort of eternal truth. He does point out that this doesn't necessarily mean you pick up Kierkegaard's religion, as Kierkegaard himself often talks about our need for 'the Good' as opposed to 'God' (although for Kierkegaard, the terms are obviously going to be largely synonymous) in works such as Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing. Rudd develops Kierkegaard as being situated largely in the Platonic tradition where people, in order to flourish fully, need to be oriented towards some objective Good, and I don't see a reason a more secular person couldn't pick this theory up, even if it does mean picking up the idea that humans have something of an essence. He also does a good job of contrasting Kierkegaard's view of the self compared to fatalists who overemphasize our immanence over our transcendence (Schopenhauer) and existentialists who overemphasize our freedom to the detriment of our given selves (Sartre).

Sorry if this comment is a bit unclear; I'm reading Sickness now, so I'm admittedly working my way through some of these questions and haven't quite organized all my thoughts, but hopefully somewhere in the mess above something works well enough to help you out.

I'm new to Neoplatonism myself. (I also wish this sub was more active so it's a nice coincidence that you posted...)

Anyway, after Thomas Taylor's Platonic Philospher's Creed which outlines the core beliefs of Neoplatonism, I'm moving on to Taylor's translation of Sallustius' On the Gods, then either his Introduction to the Philosophy and Writings of Plato followed by his translation of (and introduction to) Proclus' On the Theology of Plato, or vice versa. Or something like that :) Those are all available online for free and it's nice to see Neoplatonism continuing into more modern times through Taylor.

Since I like to read about something at the same time I'm reading it, I'm going to read Thomas Whitaker's The Neoplatonists: A Study in the History of Hellenism.

After that I'm going on to Plotinus... and probably Guthrie's Plotinus.

One thing I should mention is that I became interested in Neoplatonism because of my Hellenic Polytheism combined with monistic idealism. A good introduction to monistic idealism (the philosophical position that everything is in one consciousness or mind (nous)) is Bernardo Kastrup's recent book, Why Materialism is Baloney. A good author on Hellenic religion is Karl Kerenyi, his Gods of the Greeks is excellent.

In general the http://www.platonic-philosophy.org/ site looks like a good resource as well. There's also an International Society for Neoplatonic Studies, and the Prometheus Trust has files to download as well.

Anyway, enjoy your studies!

edits: filling in the links

I think we are essentially agreed. I don't really mean 'assigning' as a label attachment - that returns us to conceptualisation - so much as doing-with-purpose. It's simultaneous. The language is introducing a duality here where there is none. Another way I see this is a 'releasing into a direction'. When we walk forwards, we release ourselves in that direction, as an analogy.

I believe intention is the fundamental thing. It's a muddied word. Are we better to just jump in and say it's free will and we have free will because we are the fabric of experience, and so can shape ourselves however we choose?

Excuse this extended quote, but it's from a decent recent book which tries to capture some of what we've been discussing, without me having to type too much (Bernardo: see this as promotional!):

>So, in the context of all these metaphors, what is it that makes mind move?

>Notice that the answer to this question cannot be a phenomenon of experience, since experience is already mind in motion! Whatever the primary cause of the movement of mind is, it cannot itself be a movement of mind. Thus, we cannot find the primary cause in physics, biology, psychology, or any area of knowledge. The difficulty here is the same one behind the impossibility to describe the medium of mind itself: since all knowledge is a movement of the medium of mind, that which sets mind in motion cannot be known directly. But we can gain intuition about it indirectly, by observing its most immediate effects in experience and then trying to infer their invisible source.

>Our ordinary lives entail unfathomably complex chains of cause and effect: one thing leading to another, which in turn leads to another …and another, along the outlines of a blooming, unfolding pattern that we call the laws of nature. But at the very root of the chain of causality there seems to be something ineffable, tantalizingly close to experience, yet just beyond it: freewill.

>Whenever you make a decision, like choosing to close your hand into a fist, you have a strong sense that you were free to make the choice. But usually that sense comes only after the choice is made –immediately after – in the form of the heartfelt certainty that you could have made a different choice. The direct experience of freewill, however, remains ambiguous: before you make the choice it is not there; and then the very next experience seems to be already that of having made the choice. The experience of making the choice seems lost in a kind of vanishing in-between limbo, too elusive and slippery to catch at work. It is as though freewill were outside time, only its effects insinuating themselves into time.

>Yet, freewill can be so tantalizingly close to experience – perhaps arbitrarily close – that many people are convinced that they feel the actual choice being made. Personally, despite having paid careful attention, I have never managed to satisfactorily ‘catch’ this elusive experience in an unambiguous manner. I can’t prove it is not there, but I hope to have evoked enough doubt about it that you are open to the possibility that choice itself is outside experience. We only really experience the prelude and the immediate aftermath of choice, never the making of a choice.

>Though I am aware that this is the trickiest element of my entire argument – resting, as it does, more on introspection than logic –I contend that freewill proper is the primary cause of all movements of mind; the freewill of the one subject of all existence. Freewill can never be experienced directly: it is the driving force behind all experience and, thus, never an experience itself. But we can infer its existence from the retroactive sense of free choice that we have immediately after making a decision. This sense of free choice is, so to speak, the ‘echo’ of the primary cause reverberating within our psychic structures.

• From Why Materialism is Baloney - Bernardo Kastrup

This is a good introductory essay by Nick Bostrom from The Cambridge Handbook of Artificial Intelligence. And this is a relevant survey essay by Drew McDermott from The Cambridge Handbook of Consciousness.

If folks aren't taking well to the background reading, they might at least do alright jumping to Section 5 from the Descartes' Discourse (they can use this accessible translation). One little snippet:

>I worked especially hard to show that if any such machines had the organs and outward shape of a monkey or of some other animal that doesn’t have reason, we couldn’t tell that they didn’t possess entirely the same nature as these animals; whereas if any such machines bore a resemblance to our bodies and imitated as many of our actions as was practically possible, we would still have two very sure signs that they were nevertheless not real men. (1) The first is that they could never use words or other constructed signs, as we do to declare our thoughts to others. We can easily conceive of a machine so constructed that it utters words, and even utters words that correspond to bodily actions that will cause a change in its organs (touch it in one spot and it asks ‘What do you mean?’, touch it in another and it cries out ‘That hurts!’, and so on); but not that such a machine should produce different sequences of words so as to give an appropriately meaningful answer to whatever is said in its presence—which is something that the dullest of men can do. (2) Secondly, even though such machines might do some things as well as we do them, or perhaps even better, they would be bound to fail in others; and that would show us that they weren’t acting through understanding but only from the disposition of their organs. For whereas reason is a universal instrument that can be used in all kinds of situations, these organs need some particular disposition for each particular action; hence it is practically impossible for a machine to have enough different •organs to make •it act in all the contingencies of life in the way our •reason makes •us act. These two factors also tell us how men differ from beasts [= ‘non-human animals’].

That sets the stage for historically important essay from Turing of Turing-Test-fame. And that essay sets up nicely Searle's Chinese Room thought experiment. Scientific America has two accessible articles: Searle presents his argument here, and the Churchland's respond.

As always, the SEP and IEP are good resources for students, and they have entries with bibliographies on consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness, AI, computational theories of mind, and so on.

There are countless general introductions to philosophy of mind. Heil's Philosophy of Mind is good. Seager's introduction to theories of consciousness is also quite good, but maybe more challenging than some. Susan Blackmore's book Conversations on Consciousness was a very engaging read, and beginner friendly. She also has a more textbook-style Introduction that I have not read, but feel comfortable betting that it is also quite good.

Searle's, Dennett's and Chalmer's books on consciousness are all good and influential and somewhat partisan to their own approaches. And Kim's work is a personal favorite.

(sorry for the broad answer--it's a very broad question!)

>information integration theory

i do believe you mean integrated information theory? (btw. woah, i just had to delete an entire section from that page, because it was terribly written!)

moving on, i see you're indeed a fan of the eastern stuff. i'd like to just note here that this whole idea of "liberating" consciousness from "disturbance" is entirely value-laden (there's this whole historical developmental thing that comes into play), and as such, i myself don't consider it worthwhile. we could talk about it if you wish, but i'm afraid i would probably just disappoint you by merely attacking the ideas, not exploring them as such (i have a certain measure of experience with such ideas due to my time spent studying philosophy - philosophy of consciousness in particular, actually).

as for husserl - you should definitely read e.g. some merleau-ponty. he's a much less obscure student of husserl, and he's got some great perspectives to add. where husserl was a bit more formal or idealistic in scope, merleau-ponty opens up to some more "alive" angles - or at least, so it would appear on the surface of it, probably because husserl is older, and his tone is rigid, where MP moves in another time. let's say that the perspectives need more work to tease out in husserl than in MP.

but actually, if you're gonna read at all, you should start by reading some overviews. that's always a good idea, when touching a new field. this book is co-written by a former professor of mine, and it's pretty sweet.

you might even be delighted to find that some phenomenologists in recent years have begun to dig around in eastern stuff, to find similarities and establish connections. it's not something i personally found rewarding, but some probably like the culture, or just meditation in particular. verdict's not out yet on whether this actually makes sense in an academic context.

in your last part there, i don't entirely get how you're using the word "phenomenology", so i'm having trouble commenting on it. but it appears that you're making a dualism of some sort out of the study of consciousness on one hand, and the materiality of the world on the other. important to note: it's a major part of phenomenology to dismiss dualisms of this sort, in so far as they're setup by people who wish to describe the world in "layers" (as we see it with so many models of consciousness done by "fans" of the frameworks of modern natural science).

Some responses and questions for your thoughts here (thanks for being thorough, by the way):

You say:

> 1) The polarization of society shows that… moral standards are being strengthened rather than lowered.

> a) To say that [moral standards] are lower because they are not Catholic is to [claim that the] Church [is] right because it says it is right, not because it is [demonstrable.]

I say:

First, “polarization of society” does not equal a “strengthening” of Catholic moral standards. Just because two groups hold competing and increasingly hostile views does not mean that either of those groups hold to the fullness of any particular moral standard, let alone Catholic ones.

As an aside, I’d also be interested in what you mean by “polarization of society.” Which society? What kind of moral structure do these two polarities adhere to? Are there really only two dominant competing moral theories that exist?

Second, how would you suggest we demonstrate the superiority of a particular moral position in a way that is intelligible to those who lack the moral language or conceptual framework to grasp it? Alasdair MacIntyre writes about this problem in the important work After Virtue—one cannot simply “demonstrate” the superiority of a moral position because we do not have a common lexicon in which to understand these positions.

I mention this because saying something is “not Catholic, and therefore not right” seems to me a very valid way of expressing one’s moral perspective. It doesn’t “prove” anything, but it encapsulates a moral position succinctly and objectively, something more than most modes of modern moral theory can muster. (I had to keep my m’s going there.)

You say:

> 2) In the 50’s and 60’s Kinsey found that 50% of married men had cheated on their spouses. In 1990 Lauman discovered the number to be 25%, and another report by Treas in 200 showed the number of people who had cheated to be 11%, which shows a decline in infidelity over that period.

I say:

These statistics do not account for the rise of internet pornography, ease of access to said pornography, and certainly doesn’t reflect the actual state of affairs (excuse the pun) between men and women today versus 60 years ago.

As for the first point regarding pornography: “Infidelity” is an amorphous moral term, because it always references how we conceptualize “fidelity”. Does a man remain faithful to his wife if he doesn’t sleep with another woman, but masturbates to pornography in the confines of marriage? As the taboo against porn has waned, so has the increase of its consumption (an easily searchable statistic.) It has become easier and “safer” to satisfy extramarital sexual desire through the use of the internet, so it follows that the more “risky investment” of an affair would fall.

Finally, the statistics you mentioned, especially Kinsey, cannot account for the actual occurrence of infidelity. Most are already aware of Kinsey’s methodological problems, and of course the very nature of infidelity is one that is shrouded in deceit.

Therefore, it isn’t helpful to use statistics surrounding infidelity and illegitimacy when discussing morals unless: 1) there is an agreed upon understanding of what constitutes infidelity and 2) there are a number of more reports regarding infidelity with varying methodologies that might be compared.

You say:

> 3) …even though they are not married, [couples with children are] still performing the same roles as if they were married

I say

This isn’t relevant to the thesis that “love, marriage, sex and procreation are all things that belong together” for the simple reason that, even if marital “roles” are established, the sacrament of marriage, which is an essential component of a “right” moral structure (as it relates to the identity of the human person, which relates to the identity of God, which relates to the ultimate happiness of the human person) is deemed unnecessary. This deeming rejects a sacramental word-view, which in turns rejects the foundation of Catholic moral theory (again, as it pertains to human flourishing in relation to the Sacred/Divine).

You say

> 4) “…with the expansion of women’s rights we are… objectifying women less than when Humanae Vitae was written.”

I say

As you mentioned, this is your opinion, and one I can appreciate—but disagree with. I agree with you that this is a “touchy” subject primarily because we haven’t done a good job defining what it means to “objectify” the human person. I think it’s clear this kind of objectification has always been present in human history, but I also think it’s clear that it has grown worse in the 20th century moving forward. Simply look at the “adult entertainment” industry for proof of this: There is literally a multi-billion dollar industry that revolves around turning the bodies of men and women into consumable objects. Not to mention the sex-trafficking industry is operating at an all-time high and demand is ever-growing. These kinds of industries have always existed, to be sure, but never before on such a massive scale and with so much tacit support from the general population.

You say

> 5) “Government coercion in reproductive matters [seem] hardly tied to expansion [of] birth control…children are expensive and as society becomes more consumeristic… people would rather spend their money on more things rather than more children.”

I say

Two things: First, I agree that people would rather spend their money on things than children. This fact supports the thesis that birth control has a corrupting and constricting effect on the morality of a nation, not a liberating one. Orienting people’s desires towards products rather than people is a commonly mentioned moral transgression, in and outside of a Christian ethical schema.

Second, it’s hard to prove “government coercion” when it comes to the expansion of birth control. In fact, countries like Japan are now having to encourage that their citizens not use birth control because of the devastating effect of population decline on the economy. But when the aforementioned consumeristic ideology has taken root even in the minds of those who control government, it’s clear to see why dispensing contraceptives becomes a priority, even to the point of elevating them to the status of a “woman’s health product.”

Finally:

I think that your conclusion that “the prophecies of Humanae Vitae did not come true” is unsubstantiated and, perhaps more unfortunately, a misunderstanding of a component of the document’s argument. The idea that “increased birth control is an effect and not a cause of the shift in moral standards” glosses over the reality that moral standards are tied to material changes. The advent and widespread dissemination of artificial birth control was a catalyst, not an effect for the growth for the already-present disordered sexual ethos found natively in virtually every culture.

Sorry, I forgot about this post. A question isn't offensive and your post was not offensive in the slightest.

Perhaps that was confusing. I began to read about Philosophy of Mind during my undergraduate years, and have always had a singe of neoplatanism in my blood since I read about Plato's theory of forms. Today, I'm a hylemorphic dualist. I could go in depth, but I actually have to go to sleep as I've got an appt tomorrow morning (EST). On top of that, I'm actually getting off Reddit today and am staying off indefinitely except for /r/medicalschool (med school life, ha). Regardless, I'm glad I caught this when I did (coincidence or divine providence?^^^joking )

As to why I'm Catholic, put simply: I find nothing wrong in Catholicism, and "everything checks out," so to speak (I find the common criticisms vapid). Becoming Catholic was a tedious process that involved many steps, but there are quite a few that have ended up where I am through a similar path.

Anyway, I could go more in-depth here, but I'd recommend just reading what I read. The basis of my adopting a deist perspective is very similar to the reasons why Antony Flew, one of the 20th century's most famous atheist philosophers, adopted a deist persepective--if you want to check that out.

Regarding phil of mind/dualism, I suggest:
The SEP article on dualism:
Note in the intro paragraph:
>Discussion about dualism, therefore, tends to start from the assumption of the reality of the physical world, and then to consider arguments for why the mind cannot be treated as simply part of that world.

Mind/Brain Identity SEP article


If interested, read likewise for "consciousness" and for the other point of view, "physicalism." I currently reject a completely physicalist perspective.

I recommend reading contemporary philosopher Ed Feser's blog (vibrant combox if that's your thing). Here is a post on the above subject.

Lastly, these two books are excellent, I'd start with the first:

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mind-A-Beginners-Guide/dp/1851684786

http://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mind-Jaegwon-Kim/dp/0813344581

And lastly, the commonly misunderstood Cosmological Argument.

Let me know if you find anything interesting to challenge my beliefs (perhaps I'll respond some months from now, ha), always a truth seeker. Best of luck in your search for Truth.

Academic philosopher here. This is a good guide for those interested in the history of philosophy, but a great deal of contemporary philosophy (including my own subfield, philosophy of mind) is not, for the most part, directly concerned with the great philosophers of history. I think someone who was interested in understanding certain problems - consciousness, linguistic meaning, the basis of ethical truth - could bypass much of the history of philosophy to begin with. That might be especially useful for those more familiar with reading scientific papers and disinclined to engage in interpreting older texts. They would certainly miss out on some historical context, but as I said, a lot of contemporary work only loosely touches on that in any case. Someone who wanted to try this approach could start by picking up a text like James Rachels' Problems From Philosophy for a topic-based overview of major debates, or start with an introductory text directly focusing on a particular issue, such as Alter and Howell's A Dialogue on Consciousness.

Susan Wolf has a good book called Meaning In Life and Why It Matters. Ultimately, the 'why it matters' section is making a point about the limits of moralizing, but that may actually be beneficial given your interests, anyway.

She also does have a paper on love worth mentioning titled "Loving Attention: Lessons in love from The Philadelphia Story". It's in a book about philosophy, film, and fiction titled Understanding Love. I haven't read the other papers, but I know the philosophers' work and I bet many of them are good.

Massimo Pigliucci is fine from what I've seen. He's also an academic philosopher, but writes a lot of public stuff.

Nigel Warburton and David Emonds are now full-time public philosophers and I enjoy the things they do: from their short books to the Philosophy Bites podcasts and so on.

There are also a number of academic philosophers who have written public pieces, even if that's not the majority of what they do. Al Mele has a recent book on free will, Michael Lynch has one on epistemology in the internet age and the role of reason in democracy. There are certainly others I'm forgetting.

You can also check out Aeon's essays for dozens of good, ~3000 word pieces by professional philosophers aimed at a wide audience and on a variety of subjects.

EDIT: looking at your specific topics I would suggest checking out Lynch's In Praise of Reason and Pigliccui's A Short History of Truth. The former is very good; I haven't read the latter, but there's not a ton of good books on truth that are easy. You might also look at Simon Blackburn's Truth: A Guide.

I think it's not the best for this particular goal. The section "general introductions" contains a lot of books that are mostly appetizers. If you have already decided to study systematically to build a solid foundation you can downright skip these.

All the books of the other sections are either classics in their own right (therefore, you will study the meat of them in your study of the history of philosophy, and you will do so in the context of what they were replying to, what kind of assumptions they made etc.) or famous but not essential books that have been chosen according to the tastes of the author of the list (therefore you don't need them for foundations; you can always choose to include them in your list if you decide they are valuable in their own right).

So I say skip all the list for now. A much better and much faster way would be to read Anthony Kenny's history of philosophy. If you work through it making sure you understand all the arguments, your focus, thinking, and comprehension skills will already be at another level.

After that, you can start grappling with the Critique of pure reason. Be warned that most of the "introductions", "guides", "explanations" and "companions" to the CPR are actually investigations of obscure points that manage to be harder to read than the actual CPR. The best two books that I found that are actually introductory guides to CPR are this and this.

Despite the titles, they are not "Kant for dummies". They are actually dense expositions which require concentration, familiarity with terms used in philosophy, and knowledge of what came before Kant (both offer a quick overview, but if you don't already know what it's talking about it will just leave you dizzy). Of course, if you have already done step 1, this will be a breeze for you.

I suggest you read both before opening the real CPR, but if you only have patience/time for one: Rosenberg is more one-sided, more focused on certain aspects, and somewhat less clear on some points, but he will really get you excited on what the CPR can mean - it will become a great adventure that could possibly transform your whole understanding of yourself and the universe. Gardner is less exciting, but he is so clear, so exhaustive in predicting what kind of doubt can arise for the reader and in presenting the different interpretations, that it is scary.

u/tathougies has it. There is legitimate reason for the gov't to support 1m1w marriage because it can (and usually) does produce children. Gov't has a vested interest in making sure those children are raised well. Yes, not all marriages produce children, please don't bring that up as if I'm unaware of it. Given they're the exception to the rule, it's not relevant.

There's no other valid reason for gov't to be involved in marriage, why does gov't care who you love? Does gov't care who your best friend is? No. So all this talk about love is irrelevant, you can love whomever you want but there's no reason for gov't to get in the middle of it unless there's children or the possibility of children.

I highly recommend "What is Marriage?" and "Correct, Not Politically Correct" for a lot more in-depth look at the subject. Neither quotes the Bible or relies on it to make their case. "Correct, Not Politically Correct" is a lot shorter and more "layman" in its approach. Plus it has a handy Q&A in the back.

Take care!

I had a comment in here giving a reason for he post, though that's not an explanation.

> Note: may not be the best place to post, but I needed to post somewhere in order to link it in Dr. Feser's open thread today, which he only does a couple of times each year. I've been working through his books since early this year, and developing this concept map as I progress.

By way of explanation, this is a work in progress to visualize the relationships between the concepts brought to bear in the philosophical advances of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Beginning for the fundamental argument for the necessary reality of the distinction between actuality and potentiality, the concept map walks through the conceptual divisions of act and potency. Notably, the divisions of act arrive at a core conception of God as Pure Actuality, Being Itself, utterly devoid of any potentiality or passivity. This is not a proof of God, but rather simply serves to define God's role as the First and Unmoved Mover and Sustainer of all things.

The divisions of act and potency expand to the right of the map, where you see how actuality and potentiality come together as Form and Matter to produce concrete, material things.

Branching off of from the soul (here defined as the substantial form of a living substance), there is a section which details the powers or capacities of the different levels of living substances, which are hierarchically related, with respect to the corporeal order.

For now, the section on the Four Causes is placed on its own, as I still haven't decided where best to tie it in, since many topics make use of this principle. Particularly, Final Causation (defined as the end, goal, purpose, directedness or teleology of a thing) is essential to understanding the concept of objective goodness, which carries into the section on ethics (which, in this view, amounts to an understanding of the directedness of the will).

Also included, but not yet connected as well as it could be, is a section on the divine attributes, along with a brief explanation of how we can know them.

There is much more that can be included. As mentioned elsewhere, this was posted here so that I could link to the WIP. I had hoped that I could catch Edward Feser's attention in the comments of his open thread, which he posted on his blog site yesterday, and which he does only a couple times per year. This concept map is the result of my learning from his books:

• Aristotle’s Revenge: The Metaphysical Foundations of Physical and Biological Science
  
  
• Aquinas (A Beginner's Guide)
  
  
• Philosophy of Mind (A Beginner's Guide)
  
  
• Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Scholastic Editions – Editiones Scholasticae)
  
  I am still working my way through this last one, and when done I intend also to read:
  
  
• Five Proofs of the Existence of God

> I'm fine with you or someone else saying, "based on this and this definition for an objectively good movie, I find X movie to be objectively good" what I am not fine with, is if someone just says "Y is an objectively good/bad movie" without context. This would be a miscomunication as the person who said that uses a different defeinition than most others.

Yes, one needs to be clear on the conception of beauty being used.

>I couldn't disagree further

On what grounds? I encourage you to read up on epistemology - the field that specializes on knowledge, reason, evidence, and the like. Robert Audi's introduction to the field is good!

1. Things that exist can't disappear into thin air, and things that don't exist can't appear out of thin air.
   
   
2. All of the atoms that comprise your body existed in some form before you were alive. When you die, they will all still exist in some form. Atoms don't magically appear/disappear.
   
   
3. Likewise, your mind must have existed in some form before you were alive, and it won't magically disappear when you die. In other words, you had past lives.
   
   People have trouble accepting this because our culture teaches us that materialism and scientism are the default truth. We're taught that the consciousness is entirely dependent on the body, or more specifically, the brain, because science can't observe anything beyond that. There's no objective truth to this view; it's only the assumption of our culture. If history had gone differently, our culture could just as easily assume the opposite.
   
   There are tons of flaws in the ucchedavada view. Look up the hard problem of consciousness. Read about the shortcomings of materialism and physicalism. Subscribe to r/ScientismToday. There is a book called Why Materialism is Baloney. I haven't read it myself, and I think it supports a tirthika view, but it could still be interesting for you to read. The guy who wrote it also has a YouTube channel.
   
   >Basically what I am making this post for is, is there good verifiable evidence of past lives and consciousness going from one body to the next after death. Help me understand rebirth past a metaphorical sense if I am able.
   
   There's much evidence for rebirth in the form of personal testimony, but nothing that can compel folks who only believe in science. Past life experiences aren't consistent and repeatable enough for that to happen. In order for anyone to believe in rebirth, they have to be okay with the idea of believing in something that isn't scientifically verified.
   
   In general, to believe in anything spiritual you needs three points.
   
   
4. You need to be interested in the idea of spiritual things. If ordinary life satisfies you, you'll never devote enough time to studying spirituality.
   
   
5. You need to be okay with the idea of believing in something that hasn't been, or perhaps cannot be, scientifically verified. Spiritual things just don't work that way. They're not physical, they're not repeatable, and they're very much influenced by our state of mind.
   
   
6. You need to listen to testimonies with an open mind. Spiritual things are very much connected to our minds, so if you listen to every testimony assuming it's just imagination and placebo effect, you won't get anything out of it.
   
   >Please do not say that Buddha was an extraordinary being that could see past this realm of existence into others. This feels the same to me as him having psychic powers (Angulimala story.) This feels the same to me as people developing Pyrokinesis and things like telepathy. It feels like it is not at all real or likely in this existence. As always good points will be considered.
   
   I used to be a materialist and skeptic, and now I believe psychic powers and other things. There is no scientific proof that it's real; it's something that gradually becomes plausible as you're exposed to testimonies. I'll just share this one video.
   
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0yB_yUPiOc

Woooooo!

So, Merleau-Ponty is basically merging Husserl, Heidegger, and psychology. Reading a bit of Husserl or Heidegger helps get a picture of his project on a whole. The PoP is also MP's critique of both rationalism (idealism/dualism a la Kant) and empiricism/naturalism (materialism/dualism a la Russell).

Don't worry about struggling, one MP scholar noted that his works "fall somewhere in the range between formidable and impossible." That is, without a good background.

For the 'minimal work' to get at the primary text, I'd suggest

• Lawrence Hass's Merleau-Ponty's Philosophy
  
• Shaun Gallagher's Phenomenology
  
• His SEP page or IEP page
  
  The Hass book is a great secondary source that covers more than the PoP and traces the growth of MP's thought. The Gallagher book is a pretty good introduction to the vocabulary and dialogue that the PoP was written in. While his moves won't come easy unless you are familiar with Husserl, Heidegger, and Sartre (maybe some Scheler or Stein) [oh, and psychoanalysis!] - the Gallagher book should get your feet wet enough to feel more comfortable diving in, though.
  
  Edit/PS; MP just tosses out (as in citing and using) famous psych and neurology studies from his time, it isn't terribly important to look them up, though it is fun to see what the running french theories were.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I do think appealing to the natural / biological realities of our bodies as fundamental to our ethical and theological beliefs can appeal to people. It's pretty undeniable that, biologically speaking, the purpose of our sex organs is to procreate.

Anyway, I think I see the point you're making, as well. I think I will leave it at that, but if you haven't already read this book I will recommend it to you because I think it's interesting and helpful on the topic of marriage.

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (CPR) gets taught very rarely in this department. The department recognizes the need to have a course on Kant's CPR (or, alternatively, on Kant's shorter version of the CPR, his "Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics"), but the Maryland philosophy department (a) doesn't have many faculty who work on the history of philosophy, and (b) those faculty who do work in the history of philosophy either do work on ancient philosophy (Rachel Singpurwalla, Quinn Harr, Kelsey Gipe) or on Spinoza and other historical Jewish philosophers (Charles Manekin).

Sam Kerstein of course does work on historical Kant, but Sam's focus and interests in Kant is fairly exclusively directed towards Kant's moral philosophy. This is why Sam teaches a 400-level class on Kant's Groundwork every other year or so.

The upshot is that I am the first person to teach a course on Kant's CPR at this department in many years (6+). I'll probably teach the course again either next school year or, if not next year, then the following year. Unfortunately, that sounds like it might be too late for you (from what you've said, it sounds like you graduate this year).

Fortunately, I would argue that it is better for you to have taken a class on Kant's Groundwork before you graduate than Kant's CPR. Kant's ethics is more important to contemporary philosophy than his epistemology and metaphysics. That being said, I do hope you decide to give the CPR a read on your own time someday or at least read a secondary source on Kant that covers the important content from the CPR in detail.

If you decide to read Kant's CPR on your own, let me recommend some resources. First, I'd suggest you watch the following two videos about Hume and the following three videos on Kant as background (although, unfortunately there isn't a video connecting Kant to Hume through how Kant's CPR is in large part a response to Hume's skepticism):

• Hume's Skepticism 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QpUrSn3cWU
  
• Hume's Skepticism 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPlNsyXl-0c
  
• Kant's CPR 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZtQXteAE-w
  
• Kant's CPR 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQnG0fyEr_w
  
• Kant's CPR 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQnG0fyEr_w
  
  You might want to also read one general secondary source on Kant's whole philosophical system before the CPR. Here are a few suggestions to pick one from - all accessible to a upper-level undergraduate student or graduate student. I am not sure which one would be best to recommend:
  
  
• Paul Guyer's Kant https://www.amazon.com/Kant-Routledge-Philosophers-Paul-Guyer/dp/0415843456/ref=sr_1_22?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504276067&sr=1-22&keywords=kant
  
• Roger Scruton's Kant: A Very Short Introduction https://www.amazon.com/Kant-Short-Introduction-Roger-Scruton/dp/0192801996/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504276050&sr=1-4&keywords=kant
  
• Allen Wood's Kant https://www.amazon.com/Kant-Allen-W-Wood/dp/0631232826/ref=sr_1_27?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504276277&sr=1-27&keywords=kant
  
  There are also several specific secondary sources aimed at upper-level undergraduates and graduate students that specifically cover Kant's CPR. One of these might be useful to have besides you as you read the CPR for those times you get lost:
  
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Philosophy-GuideBook-Critique-GuideBooks/dp/041511909X/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1504276632&sr=1-12&keywords=kant+critique+of+pure+reason
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Kants-Critique-Pure-Reason-Introductions/dp/0521618258/ref=pd_sim_14_34?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=DTHDDSHZVAW06VE9RC48
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Accessing-Kant-Relaxed-Introduction-Critique/dp/0199275823/ref=pd_sim_14_11?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=AZ7XQ4TK2FHQPD91321D

>I have not yet encountered this problem.

You mentioned computers before so I'll use them here as an example:

My computer, in front of me now, is meaningful in that it is meaningful to me. It's meaningful to you, too, in an abstract way because I'm using it to transmit this message. It allows me to access stores of information I could never have dreamed of.

Now, imagine a nuclear apocalypse. 95% of the world's human population dies. Most knowledge of the post-industrial and indeed industrial world is lost to history.

I live near DC so odds are my area will be pretty radioactive; it'll be hundreds of years, if not more, before the area is habitable and longer still before it is excavated.

Imagine, then, that the descendants of the survivors of this apocalypse, generations later, find my poor laptop. It will have no meaning for them, because they have no use for it. Similarly, were I to go back in time to, say, 1500, my computer would have no meaning for the people of that time, because they have no use for it.

My computer has meaning in that it has meaning to its user. Purely extrinsic value, there. Humans, however, we possess something innate. No one knows really what to call it - some say it's a soul, some would say it's consciousness, some would call it free will - whatever it is, we don't understand it at all. But we pretty much all agree that a human has innate value, period.

So, to say that I am to God like my computer is to me is demeaning to that innate whatever-it-is, don't you think?

NOTE: the above is a restructuring of a thought experiment presented in the introduction to Alaisdair MacIntyre's After Virtue which, if you haven't already, is a dense but phenomenal work and totally worth the effort.

>I see no problem with that.

Me either :)

>Can you come up with something that would?

I didn't today - ain't life fun like that? I don't think you need one meaning, all the time, forever. Meaning can change as we do. I'm not the same as I was before I met you, or before I turned 25, or before I turned 16, etc. You're not the same, either. Why should your "meaning" be so permanent when "you" are not?

>Why must it? Without God it seems that we are just chemical bonds.

I agree with you, it seems like we're chemical bonds. But I'm not a monist - there's something else there. We don't understand consciousness, not even a little bit. We don't know where it comes from, what it is, whether my dog is conscious in the same way I am and if not, then whether she is conscious at all. We just don't know.

On a personal level I still haven't decided whether the field of Noetics is doing really, really interesting scientific work or really, really interesting voodoo, but suffice to say it's really, really interesting (to me, at least). Check it out if you get a sec!

But what I said was, given that human life does have meaning and given that there is no God, then the meaning of human life cannot come from God, and must come from human life.

First off I think a good place to start is to try to isolate atleast some questions that strike you as particularly interesting. Simply starting at random in the midst of the endless mounds of philosophy done in the analytic style is a horrible and frustrating endeavour(speaking from experience).

That being said, two really good introductury anthologies that helped me alot are: Chalmer's The Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings. It contains key essays by key thinkers in the field as well as some really helpful considerations by Chalmers who attempts to tie the different schools together and show similarities and differences.
And Martinich's The Philosophy of Language which contains a big chunk of classical and semi-contemporary essays in the subject. Both are a great place to start if you want to go directly to the source and read the actual essays as opposed to secondary litterature.

Seeing as you are already familiar with Husserl and the earlier phenomenology I think going through philosophy of language can be a good idea. As Frege was a central character in Husserls earlier writings, it sets an interesting background to some of the differences in interpretation we find in the early analytic philosophers who were, like Husserl, inspired by Frege but came to radically different conclusions and interpretations.
Morris has written a really neat introductory book called An Introduction to the Philosophy of Language that goes well with Martinich's anthology.

Hope this helps!

edit: spelling, links

If you're talking about Libet's experiments, these don't eliminate free will. They show that actions are preceded by brain activity before the person is conscious of making the decisions to act. The problem with interpreting this as meaning the unconscious brain activity determines the act is that there are also experiments in which a person is able to override that previous brain activity at the last minute.

Another problem with interpreting Libet's experiment as eliminating free will is that the results were only recorded in case where a person moved their wrist. If a person's brain ramped up prior to moving their wrist, and then they did not move their wrist, it was not recorded.

You should check out Alfred R. Mele's book, Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will.

If you're a compatibilist, then Libet's experiments wouldn't be a problem even if they did show that our actions are determined by antecedent conditions. Under compatibilism, we are responsible for our actions as long as we do them on purpose, and to do something on purpose is to act on your own antecedent desires, motives, plans, intentions, etc. That means your antecedent mental states do determine your actions, and that's precisely why you're responsible for them.

Christianity doesn't depend on libertarian free will, and a lot of Christianity doesn't support that idea anyway. According to Jesus, a person's decisions are determined by the condition of their heart. He said, "The good man out of the good treasure of his heart brings forth what is good; and the evil man out of the evil treasure brings forth what is evil; for his mouth speaks from that which fills his heart" (Luke 6:45). That sounds a lot more like compatibilism than libertarianism.

> I mean I've been an atheist for a long time but it didn't occur to me until recently what the absence of a higher power entail. ... Everything we hold dear only has any meaning because we tell ourselves it has.

I don't see how having "a higher power" would solve this. Suppose God existed, and said that "the purpose of life is to figure out how many asteroids there are in the asteroid belt." Even if we knew this, most people would think "well that sounds like a waste of time." It's not clear how having a higher power telling you what to do would solve this. And even if God were to tell us "the meaning of life", a natural follow up question would be, "Okay. And how is that meaningful?"

You asked for some literature on the subject, so here are some things that come to mind if you're interested in reading more on it:

Thomas Nagel's The Absurd

Susan Wolf's Meaning in Life and Why It Matters

Thaddeus Metz's Meaning in Life

Additionally, Thaddeus Metz has also written the SEP article on the meaning of life, so that may be a good place to start.

EDIT: Fixed formatting.

It sounds like you are getting some good advice in here. I'd also suggest the Prolegomena - It's essentially the Cliff's Notes.

I'll suggest The Routledge Companion: Kant and The Critique of Pure Reason

This book is great. It walks you through the CPR in a nice step-by-step way. It also has a great primer on the history of philosophy that motivated Kant's project in the CPR.

Unsolicited Advice: Just take your time. Be patient. You can do it.

A few months ago I got interested in this topic as well, largely due to reading Ben Morgan's On Becoming God, which talked about identity as something that we do in communities. To do this, Morgan first 'clears the ground' of contemporary thoughts about identity, which are generally isolated objects, and goes back to medieval Europe, and in Meister Eckhart finds a way of doing identity that is more communal. It's a wonderful entry into the subject, as well as a great introduction to religious mysticism as well.

Another book that's arriving in the mail tomorrow is Self, Value and Narrative, which I obviously haven't read yet, but it apparently is going to pick of the lens of Kierkegaard as a means of understanding identity. I'm super excited to read it.

In response to your first question, McDowell is saying that the Myth of the Given is the idea that the space of justifications or warrants extends more widely to the conceptual sphere. It's just his particular way of putting Sellars' point.

As far as book recommendations, I think what you're looking for is books in the tradition of the so-called "Pittsburgh School" of philosophy, a group of philosophers focused at Pittsburgh, heavily influenced by Sellars. Here's a comment from a while back where I talk about them.

For Sellars himself, the most obvious reccomendation is Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. This is widely considered Sellars' best work, and it is definitely his most influential.

The two most important living philosophers of the Pittsburgh School, both very influenced by Sellars, are John McDowell and Robert Brandom (Brandom is a student of Rorty).

I'd definitely recommend John McDowell's Mind and World.

Brandom's a bit trickier to recommend, since his magnum opus, Making It Explicit is a 700-page, very dense tome. He wrote an introduction, called Articulating Reasons, but a lot is lost in the simplification. A better option, if you want to get into Brandom, is Jeremy Wanderer's book Robert Brandom.

I'd also recommend Yo! and Lo! by Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance, two leading next generation Pittsburgh-style philosophers. Influenced by Sellars, Brandom, and McDowell, Kukla and Lance give an account of the core social practices that constitute what Sellars calls "the space of reasons."

Well, obviously you should give Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics a thorough read.

A modern philosopher well known for his attempts at reviving virtue ethics is Alasdair MacIntyre - his seminal book on the subject is After Virtue.

Also, another philosopher, with virtue ethics in the baggage, who's more politically oriented would be Martha Nussbaum. She's noted for going on about her 'capabilities approach' for many years, and some people regard this as an equally viable political option to utilitarian/liberal minimal states or Rawlsian social democracies. The literature on the approach is rather massive, so I'd go give the SEF page on the subject a go for starters, as she also makes very compelling arguments strengthened by interdisciplinary research with experts from other fields.

Also, I highly recommend [this book](http://www.amazon.com/Contemporary-Political-Philosophy-Will-Kymlicka/dp/0198782748/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1414771070&sr=1- 1&keywords=contemporary+political+philosophy), as it has great chapters on communitarianism and citizenship theory, which draws heavily on the Aristotelian legacy - the citizenship theory chapter being especially great, since Kymlicka there points out how difficult it turns out to be trying to cultivate civil virtues in modern societies.

EDIT: grammar.

This is a very general question, but let me try to point you to what you might be looking for.

If you're looking for people's attitudes on Harper, you can check out this thread from a little while back.

If you're looking for people's ideas on any particular policy, you can either do a search of this subreddit, or ask that question yourself!

If you're looking for people's philosophies, as dmcg12 said, those will be evident if you keep an eye on frequent posters; the more you see them write, the more coherent your picture of their ideas will be. If you're looking at philosophies rather than policies, though, there are philosophers who have produced better arguments than any of us here are likely to be able to articulate in support of their own stances (or at least, they've articulated them in greater detail than I think any of us have done). Some of the best books I've ever read are this (by a Canadian liberal egalitarian/social democrat), this (by a libertarian), and this (by an ex-Marxist Catholic conservative-in-a-way-that's-different-from-most-people-who-call-themselves-conservative). Of those three, I'd start with the Kymlicka, and read at least the chapters on Utilitarianism, Liberal Egalitarianism, and Libertarianism before deciding whether to put down the book. If, however, you take a look at Kymlicka or either of those other books and are intimidated, this does a fabulous job of explaining in accessible language what sort of things people might disagree on, without very strongly coming down on one side or another of such disagreements; it also has outstanding suggestions for further reading. All these books should be in any university library.

So with mind uploading, there are actually several procedures we could be talking about. If you're interested in taking an in depth look at some various procedures, Keith Wiley's book A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind-Uploading is a great place to start.

The Ship of Theseus has already been mentioned. This type of procedure for uploading a mind is called gradual replacement. The procedure where you copy the brain and instantiating a new version of it is called scan-and-copy.

If you accept that there has to be some level of continuity (temporal, psychological, etc.) for personal identity to persist, then the scan-and-copy procedure would not transfer personal identity to the new instantiation. It could be possible to transfer personal identity through a gradual replacement procedure, but there would be no way to test. Although others might hold different views than me (e.g. The Fallacy of Favoring Gradual Replacement Over Scan-And-Copy).

Keep in mind that the Ship of Theseus thought experiments generally have to do with object identity, which doesn't really help us understand what it takes to to transfer personal identity. There are a lot of unknowns at this point in the domain of mind uploading.

---

As a side note, I'm working on a series of documents that outlines these topics (among other things). I also introduce some of my own ideas for mind uploading, personal identity, and mind uploading procedures. If anyone is super interested, here's the link to the documents:

Lifetimes Infinity Roadmap Series - Master Document List

Just know that many of the documents are still under development and might be very very messy. If in doubt, just stick to the "draft ready documents". The one on mind uploading is the one I'm working on right now, so be warned :)

With Robert Kane, I suggest starting with A Contemporary Introduction to Free Will and then following it with Four Views on Free Will, a collaborative debate which includes other philosophers; with one each defending libertarianism, compatibilism, incompatibilism, and revisionism. You'll get a much better feel for the debate rather than a lopsided bias.

Before any of that, I suggest that you listen to Alfred Mele's interview debunking a lot of the pseudoscientific [mis]interpretations which have accrued around the subject of free will, and which are essentially to our era what phrenology was back in its heyday. He's written a few books on the subject, of which Free: Why Science Hadn't Disproved Free Will Yet is the most accessible.

Neuroscientist Peter Ulric Tse's The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation is also invaluable as far as providing a scientific account.

We cannot. It is impossible. That ship has sailed. We have to live with the reality that, as long as the current system lasts, morality and justice will continue to decay and decline into corruption.

The reason is simple: this world is now totally in the hands of a political system, democracy, that is optimized not for morality and justice, but for giving the people what they want. And while people may say they want morality and justice, the reality is that, with the universal reality of Original Sin, what they really mean by that is: they want everyone else to do what they themselves say, and give them what they themselves want.

The entire concept of "morality" is predicated on the paradigm that who I am and who I ought to be are different. There is a gap, and morality is what defines and bridges that gap. It means what we ought to do is not what we want to do. That it requires us to sacrifice want for ought. In our current system, such a self-sacrifice has to be voluntarily chosen. And while that may happen on a limited basis in a limited way, it will never be widespread when it doesn't have to be.

Genesis 6:5 says: "Then the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great on the earth, and that every intent of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually." That is reality. Democracy is based on the Enlightenment fiction that man is perfect and perfectable.

To make it worse, we not only live in a system where morality is impossible, we have lived in it for so long, we can no longer even use the language of morality in a coherent and rational way. And justice, being a moral virtue, is included in that.

>It explores consciousness, especially conscious experience

Just what are you taking the difference to be between consciousness and conscious experience?

>Tons of philosophy touches on phenomenology, but if you're relatively new to it, I always recommend two essays: Nagel's What is it Like to be a Bat? and Dennet's Where Am I?. You may also be interested in the Mary's Room experiment.

For someone enquiring about phenomenology I find these recommendations very peculiar. I haven't read Dennett's Where Am I?, but I know of his heterophenomenology which has been heavily criticised as basically not phenomenology, by those such as Zahavi (e.g.). As for Nagel's infamous paper, although he introduces an interesting characterisation of conscious experience ("something that it is like"), that paper is less about phenomenology and more about the current inability of reductive physicalism to capture subjective experience:

>I shall try to explain why the usual examples [of reduction] do not help us to understand the relation between mind and body- why, indeed, we have at present no conception of what an explanation of the physical nature of a mental phenomenon would be.

The SEP article on phenomenology, Zahavi and Gallahger's The Phenomenological Mind, or Gallagher's Phenomenology, would be good starting places for someone interested in phenomenology.

I really enjoyed Dennett's Consciousness Explained. Chalmers' The Conscious Mind presents another popular view which, if I recall correctly, opposes Dennett's views. I'm slowly getting into work's by Steven Pinker.

Probably a general Philosophy of Mind reader would also benefit you just to get a good idea of the different views and topics out there within the discipline. I cannot remember which one I read years ago, although if I read one today I'd pick Chalmers' Philosophy of Mind or Kim's Philosophy of Mind.

That's the liberal position, yes.

If you are interested in this topic and are willing to entertain a serious and secular defense of traditional marriage, the likes of which you will never be exposed to without seeking it out, here's a read:

https://www.amazon.com/What-Marriage-Man-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225

Your views on marriage have been informed by pop culture. You can do better than that.

Might as well weigh in on what you should focus on specifically, as one of those philosophically-inclined theists. As for why you should-- given that atheism and theism are both within the field of philosophy, it'd be good to at least have a clear view of the evidence for both sides. I'll be giving books that support theism, since I don't know many that do so for atheism-- something by JL Mackie might help?

Before even engaging in the philosophy backing theism, it'd be good to get some background knowledge.

Intro to Logic

Metaphysics

Given that, you can familiarize yourself with some books on classical theism, attacks on naturalism/physicalism/materialism, and specifically attacks on materialism of the mind.

The Last Superstition

Aquinas

Philosophy of the Mind

All three of those are by the Catholic philosopher, Edward Feser. I usually argue for theism, or against materialism, based on his books.

Popper's ideas are of the practical kind, regarding scientific inquiry. It is not epistemology in the traditional sense. For example, would you say that your empirically based idea X is knowledge? If you say yes, how do you know that tomorrow you won't discard it for an idea that fits the criteria even better, even if today you don't think anything could possibly fit the criteria better than your current idea? Many ideas that fit the criteria are eventually discarded not because a detail or a few in them can be improved, but because they turn out to be completely false (look at the history of physics, for example). Such epistemology is practically useful, however, it says nothing about epistemic justification.

There are a lot of theories in epistemology. Read the 'epistemology' entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Find a book about epistemology, such as this

It would be helpful if you were slightly more specific about what you mean by individuality, since the word can be used in a more technical way in which, say, my chair is an individual and then the way in which humans are individuals. It sounds like you're interested in various themes concerning the human self. That's a very broad area in philosophy. Two themes that might interest you are free will and personal identity. The first I don't know much about, but for the second, this volume is really good: http://www.amazon.com/Personal-Identity-Topics-Philosophy-Perry/dp/0520256425

Reddit doesn't like Amazon links with a bunch of options because it assumes they are associate links (links where the referrer get a cut of the sale). So when linking Amazon books on Reddit it best to use bare links such as:

• http://www.amazon.com/After-Virtue-Study-Moral-Theory/dp/0268035040
  
• http://www.amazon.com/dp/0268035040
  
  Both of which do the same thing because the book title in the url is ignored by Amazon. In fact you can do the following as well and it would still work:
  
  
• http://www.amazon.com/digifork-is-da-bomb-diggity/dp/0268035040
  
• http://www.amazon.com/the-sex-toy-bible/dp/0268035040
  
  Which means you can prank people with Amazon links pretty easily.

It sounds to me like somebody's been attemptin' some philosophy on the side. 😜

But seriously, I'd recommend reading some good philosophy to help wrap your mind around these questions - what it is to be has been around since Descartes, if not earlier. I'm reading Feser's Philosophy of Mind and it deals directly with that question.

As to other advice, pray even louder when all you can pray is, "WHY?" And perhaps think about how no matter what, you must exist, or you couldn't be doubting that you exist, because who'd be doing the doubting?

These two books cover essentially the same material (The Last Superstition is a little broader in scope, but this ground is also covered by Feser in Philosophy of Mind); large passages are word-for-word the same. The main difference is that The Last Superstition links together these long, dry passages with gratuitous insults for marketing purposes. There is really not that much polemic relative to the substantial passages, but what there is will be insufferable to some readers. While I share Anthony Kenny's judgement that The Last Superstition "would have been a better book if it had never mentioned Dawkins and co at all", they are both very good books.

While some of OP's responses make me question that this is being asked in good faith, I will nonetheless try to answer.

First, one needs to consider the fact that there is literally a book on non-religious reasons why Gay marriage is bad policy. This is a pdf of the article that the book was later spun into with more arguments and sources. It is only 43 pages long and easy to understand.

Ultimately, it comes down to a couple of things: if you think there is value in humans procreating, then marriage policy should encourage biological sex (reproduction) in any shape or form to the exclusion of other relationships, otherwise, there is no added incentive to have children.

Similarly, you need to think of people as having natural ends, limited as they may be. Biologically, humans tend towards survival, reproduction, and expansion. If you do not think humans are supposed to, by our nature (because you deny that humans have a particular nature, which many people do and have done) do anything of the aforementioned, then this argument will ring hollow to you. You might say, is a computer natural? I would say yes, any tool is a natural expansion of our desire to survive and expand. Computers included.

Therefore, you might see then that while a liberal approach (classically speaking) might want to leave gay people alone to enjoy their rights to self determine, the same people might not want to extend incentives designed to reward a stable family unit to a relationship that will neither result in children, nor can.

From the article above:

> A thought experiment might crystallize the central argument. Almost every culture in every time and place has had some institution that resembles what we know as marriage. But imagine that human beings reproduced asexually and that human offspring were self‐sufficient. In that case, would any culture have developed an institution anything like what we know as marriage? It seems clear that the answer is no....The essential features of marriage would be missing; there would be no human need that only marriage could fill....Because marriage uniquely meets essential needs in such a structured way, it should be regulated for the common good, which can be understood apart from specifically religious arguments. And the needs of those who cannot prudently or do not marry (even due to naturally occurring factors), and whose relationships are thus justifiably regarded as different in kind, can be met in other ways.

You can take it or leave it, but it is rather meaningless now that gay marriage is the law of the US.

Have you read Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue? It is a great book. In the opening chapter he points out that the classic moral/ethical debates (e.g. abortion, homosexuality, pacifism, animal rights, etc.) are all marked by the inability to step out of one pre-determined system of argumentation. People simply argue past one another. Your comment here about 'human goods' vs. 'penis in vagina' is getting at Alasdair's point. When we have these (optimistically named) conversations, we simply entrench ourselves within the system we affectively choose to be in. "If only these would see that (insert assumed premise), then they would understand." This whole thread is a great example of this dilemma. The premises we assume are usually not even assumed consciously and they end up destroying our ability to have a conversation. Natural law or virtue ethics? 'Penis in vagina' or fidelity?

Well it's actually a contemporary versus traditional work, but I really like Robert Audi's introduction to epistemology. He goes into why the typical "default agnostic" thing is a bit silly.

Traditionally, I usually refer back to Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange's work on Thomism (Reality: a Synthesis) and some more recent Thomists like Anscombe and Feser.

John Perry’s book Personal Identity is an anthology that covers some of the most important work in the field. I think that would be a pretty good start!

Reasons I Believe In Setianism

1. It started with the rejection of materialism [1]
   
   
2. Then I came to Platonism [2]
   
   
3. I realized Platonism logically led to polytheism [3]
   
   
4. I learned about Life-Fields [4], the Teleology [5] they imply [6]
   
   
5. I learned the myths [7] of the ancient Egyptians [8]
   
   
6. I accepted the position that best fit this knowledge, Setian Metaphysics [9]
   
   Resources:
   
   [1] More against materialism
   
   • Rejection of Materialism
   
   • Wiki
   
   • Why Materialism is Baloney
   
   • Dualism
   
   • Substance Dualism
   
   • Against Materialism
   
   [2-3] More on Platonism
   
   • Mathematics and Physicalism
   
   • Theory of Forms
   
   • Arguments for Forms
   
   • Plato
   
   • Short
   
   • Platonic Polytheism
   
   [4-6] More on Life-Fields
   
   • Scientific Evidence
   
   • Evidence 2
   
   • Summary
   
   • By Dr. Burr
   
   • Dr. Aquino
   
   [7-8] More on Egypt
   
   • [Setian Pyramid Texts] (http://orderoftheserpent.org/forum/index.php?topic=35.msg150#msg150)
   
   • Seth God of Confusion
   
   • Images of Set
   
   • Mysteries of Horus and Set
   
   [9] More on Metaphysics
   
   • Self Actualization
   
   • O.S. AMA
   
   • O.S. statement
   
   • Metaphysics

I don't think that is an especially good definition, since epistemology and metaphysics are separate areas. Though 'first principles of knowing' could refer to questions like "what is truth?" or how the world gives beliefs content, which would be metaphysics. To motivate my point, check out the table of contents of these standard textbooks:

Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction

Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction

You'll note that your first three topics all appear in the former book and not in the latter.

It seems to me that your comments encompass wide range of topics but i think the problem of truth and meaning is at the center. Of course there is a huge literature about these topics but for a start Nietzsche's On Truth and Lie in An Extra Moral Sense can work as a thought provoking piece.

If you are into more scientific type of literature Maturana and Varela's Tree of Knowledge offers a theory of cognition which basically argues that all experience and knowledge are self-referential and constructed relative to the organisation and history of living systems.

In English speaking philosophy William James and Whitehead's different versions of empiricism are good places to look. In continental philosophy Foucault's writings on truth/knowledge can be helpful to put the concept in context of a more sociological perspective.

Edit note: The philosophical field which focus on these issues is called epistemology, some secondary and introductory type of books can work. For example Robert Audi's [Epistemology] (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Epistemology-Contemporary-Introduction-Introductions-Philosophy/dp/041587923X/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1373061172&sr=1-2&keywords=epistemology).

This book is a good collection of essays regarding personal identity and a good number of them work through that thought experiment as well as other thought experiments one might think about in regards to personal identity.

Yes, actually there is a pretty cool book on this

Rawls is obviously important. It's also probably good to read something from the communitarian school of thought. Influential books include After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice by Michael Sandel, Sources of the Self by Charles Taylor, and Spheres of Justice by Michael Walzer.

Philosophically Catholics (should) hold that AI is not possible; that intelligence is an aspect of a rational soul, and so the only way to have a true "thinking machine" is either to somehow have a human or angel soul therein (think cyborg or demon-possessed object).

Feser's Philosophy of Mind goes much deeper into it.

Now, of course, none of this prevents sci-fi stories about AI (some of RA Lafferty's are great), but it does mean that true AI is not possible without an immortal soul (because of the universals, basically).

I think Searl's book was titled "Minds, Brains, and Science" and one of his papers was called "Minds, Brains, and Computers", otherwise I agree with this list completely, adding in David Chalmers' "Consciousness and its Place in Nature" as well.

The Chalmers compilation Burnage mentions below contains most of these essays, and a few others that are also very good.

OP, this is the collection mentioned.

A tour guide may not be a bad idea depending on familiarity with the subject of the House of Kant.

I found Gardner and [Pinkard](German Philosophy 1760-1860: The Legacy of Idealism https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521663814/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_jKZMyb84C98MF) particularly useful.

Sorry, I honestly don't know the timezone that the 7:30 timeslot implies. If I find out, I'll put it here. They seem to archive their podcasts so you'll be able to listen to it later. This interview is about my recent book, A Taxonomy and Metaphysics of Mind-Uploading (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00NJZHGM8).

[EDIT: showtime is 7:30 Pacific, 10:30 Eastern]

Cheers!

See David Staume's book, The Atheist Afterlife. He wrote all about how the afterlife is related to dreams and how we make our afterlife what we want it to be. It sounds like a whole lot of bunk to me, but it sounds like what you are talking about.

You definitely would enjoy some of their works. Particularly:

https://www.amazon.com/What-Marriage-Man-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=X39PYP8GT616NY99W3SC

As others have said, it might be of help to you to start with secondary sources.

One of my professors recommended
Phenomenology by Shaun Gallagher and I found it really well written and accessible.

While GEB is good, I also recommend /i/ Dialog on Personal Identity and Immortality /i/ by John Perry for a much more targeted discussion of this question of identity.

http://www.amazon.com/Dialogue-Personal-Identity-Immortality/dp/0915144530

I've had luck in saving a couple hundred per term buying on Amazon. Look up the book you need (I usually go to the bookstore and photograph them on my phone to make sure I get the right one) and have a look at the new/used copies.

For example, I saved about $20 buying a new copy of Chalmers: Philosophy of Mind on Amazon with shipping as opposed to the Book Store. Sometimes there are larger savings or more minisculesavings, but they can add up.

As for timing, when ordering online, I've learned to do it at least couple weeks in advance in case it is late. Last year a couple of my books were a week (or more) late and it really put me behind in my readings which were adding up. Needless to say I've learned my lesson and have already acquired all of my books as they were available in the book store and online.

Have you read A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality? Because that is a huge discussion between the characters in the book.

Also, I have to say that I agree that a copy of me offers no comfort in looking forward to its experiences.

> By the way, I am not trying to show that you are wrong, I am trying to understand how you think about this subject.

All I am doing is giving you a general description of the dualist position. If you're interesting in digging into the subject in greater depth, you might want to pick up an introductory text to the philosophy of mind, such as Jaegwon Kim's.

> Are you saying that the mind doesn't have spatial location or weight? Under identity theory (or functionalism) it certainly does.

This is the classic Cartesian formulation of substance dualism. It doesn't have anything to do with identity theory or functionalism.

> Would you say that identity theory of chairs, as I have defined it, is accurate or not?

I would say that your made-up theory is nonsense, for reasons I've already given.

I don't really see this one get mentioned a lot, but John Perry's A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. It was assigned to me in my first intro-level philosophy class (Life and Death). It's written very colloquially without dumbing things down too much, and touches on a lot of the main ideas in epistemology and metaphysics. If you're looking for a quick, informative, accessible read, I highly recommend this one.

Hm, I enjoyed The Education of Little Tree as a book that is somewhat like Sophie's World, but it's not meant to be a deeply philosophical work.

Check out A Dialog on Consciousness. Disclaimer, I have no idea if it's good, but it's been on my to-read list for a while.

The Atheist Afterlife: The odds of an afterlife - Reasonable. The odds of meeting God there - Nil

Haven't read it. Looks interesting, though.

John Perry's very short Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality is really fun to read.

>I don't plan to continue this thread much further - this isn't a terribly good time or place to summarise a first year moral philosophy textbook for you, nor would doing so benefit you in the same way that reading that textbook and thinking about it would.

Weird you should drop into Condescending Philosophy Major Mode, because we're actually agreeing vehemently on everything of substance.

>There is no "moral reality" in the way that there are atoms or energy levels or other physical things.

Not quite. We haven't found one when we've investigated. It's worth remembering that even at the time of the Enlightenment, the field of moral philosophy started with a mixture of divine command and natural-law as its "informed priors" (the frame for its questions). Darwinian evolution dealt a major blow to natural-law/natural-teleology theories, as well.

The finding that we cannot locate an "atom of morality" or a universal optimization target (at least, one that fits our moral intuitions better than the Second Law of Thermodynamics) is a posteriori. Unfortunately, some people drop into Condescending Philosophy Major Mode and insist that their moral intuitions have so much epistemic value that naturalism must be completely wrong.

And these people have tenure!

>Yet almost everyone lives by some kind of moral code,

Well yes, of course.

>and almost everyone thinks something rather nice has happened over the last few hundred years as we drove back ignorance, racism, sexism, slavery, oppression and so forth.

With emphasis on the almost. There are still serious moral philosophers who may like modernity, but take positions that are technically opposed to it.

>Arguably civilisation couldn't work at all unless most people most of the time followed moral rules, or if it could work there would be massive overheads in policing everyone.

It also requires massive policing overheads when you try to run it very, shall we say, wickedly. It shouldn't be too unsupported to assert that nice rulers require more police than mean rulers.

>So how do we justify moral beliefs in a universe that hasn't been so kind as to give us an atom of evil or a wavelength of sin or anything similar? Well, if you want the long version then study moral philosophy. The very short version is we just make something up, or we do something reasonably sophisticated with game theory to get to a very similar place assuming self-interested agents capable of big picture thinking.

Yes, this is exactly what I said. We can take an anti-realist stance ("make something up"), or we can take a very sophisticated, reforming sort of realist stance that involves precise naturalistic grounding (game theory and psychology are aspects of nature too, you know).

But in either case, the Is/Ought Gap, or Moore's Open Question Argument in its other form, are simply not Hard Problems in the sense of demonstrating that the gap is impossible to bridge. In the a-posteriori absence of mystical moral particles, morality is left amenable to natural, empirical investigation via very precise theories of which empirical facts count as moral facts (or via outright anti-realism, which denies that there exists any gap between normative ethics and moral psychology, and thus denies the normativity of ethics in general). The problem is that some trained, professional academic philosophers remain actually committed to the position that the strength of their realist intuitions constitutes evidence against naturalism, or attempt to rationalize ways in which naturalism self-undermines.

Kastrup has written some really interesting books on his ideas along these lines. One I especially like is Why Materialism Is Baloney, in which he argues that a form of idealism is a more rational and skeptical worldview than materialism.

Chalmers has also published a pretty accessible anthology of classic readings in the Philosophy of Mind.

https://www.amazon.com/Philosophy-Mind-Classical-Contemporary-Readings/dp/019514581X

Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" and Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" might be decent places to start familiarizing yourself with analytic philosophy after the demise (in effect) of logical positivism.

The simple answer is because religion is not necessarily 'reasonable'. Yes, it may be reasonable in the eyes of the person of a certain religion, but that is personal reason, rationalizations for ones own ease of mind.

At the end of it though, at some point of that religion you will be faced with 'reason', or what is masked as it. If you believe in a religion then it is fairly reasonable to assume you would concede that there are some things of the religion that you cannot physically show me, I mean that's why it's called faith isn't it? You simply choose to believe in it.

I agree that it isn't very... adequate, to outright label religion as illogical or without reason, that fact depends on the type of faith the individual himself holds (that is to say any faith, including atheism)(after all, to label an entire act as reasonable or not is a generalisation, for both theism and atheism, which is in itself not reasonable). But it is also sensible to say that atheism is largely comprised of a 'logical' (relative to physical practice) method and setting to it which has led to such an entitlement.

If we were talking philosophically, then yeah you're absolutely right, mostly because now all knowledge is 'liquid' and nothing is 'certain' (relative to the person) because everything is now infinitely subjective.

But in the strictness of looking through what we can physically define, there is no doubting that religion has a blank spot in it which you can never know, yet you choose to believe.

Sidenote: The Atheist Afterlife. As far as I know atheism doesn't have (nor has it ever had) a problem with the afterlife reasonably, because, as you said, there is no proof for either argument, therefore so far both sides are possible. Atheisms issue is the existence of 'heaven' and 'hell' and the entire judgement argument in such an afterlife.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology/

There are lots of introductions to epistemology, as a quick search on Amazon indicates:

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=epistemology&sprefix=epist%2Cstripbooks

I haven't read most of them, but based on the authors and publishers, I expect these to be solid surveys:

http://www.amazon.com/Epistemology-Contemporary-Introduction-Introductions-Philosophy/dp/041587923X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1416622594&sr=1-1&keywords=epistemology

http://www.amazon.com/Epistemology-Richard-Feldman/dp/0133416453/ref=pd_sim_b_4?ie=UTF8&refRID=1NPT7RZ11R84R4WD6B1T

I haven't read Subahibi, so I'm just going to take your question as "how do I get into philosophy."

Philosophy is one of the most diverse fields that we currently have. Philosophy is more than just pondering the meaning of life, it also is about uncovering the mindsets on discoveries and how people came about the knowledge we have today. You should start more simple over diving into people's work like Nietzsche so you can get the full picture on why they say what they say.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge, metaphysics is the study of existence (not to be confused with existentialism, which is even more meta and theoretical), Aesthetics is the study of art, Ethics is the study of morality, and there are philosophies of politics, mind, body, religion, and all sorts.

I would shy away from direct writings from philosophers, as contemporary books are the literal collection of all of their knowledge presented in an easier to digest way.

If ethics is more interesting to you than doctrine, you should read Alasdair MacIntyre's 1983 After Virtue. It's a serious work of moral philosophy, written before MacIntyre converted to Catholicism, arguing that contemporary moral disagreement is unresolvable and therefore useless, and thus we ought to return to an Aristotelian framework. Eventually it requires a deist God at the least to be logical, but he argues for that along the way, and you don't need to begin with such a belief. It is excellent, but you do need a little philosophical background to not feel swamped.

Try this one: https://www.amazon.com/Personal-Identity-Topics-Philosophy-Perry/dp/0520256425

I'm not, though I will have to look at this. The inspiration for this post primarily came from The Invention of Art and After Virtue.

https://www.amazon.es/Atheist-Afterlife-afterlife-Reasonable-meeting/dp/1897435290

This what you're after. I can link a PDF if you need.

http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-Marriage-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225

One of these might suit what you're looking for:

• https://www.amazon.co.uk/Personal-Identity-Blackwell-Readings-Philosophy/dp/063123442X
  
• https://www.amazon.com/Personal-Identity-Topics-Philosophy-Perry/dp/0520256425

Susan Wolf's book on the meaning of life is non-technical and on the human condition. There's plenty of literature on this if you look around.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Routledge-Philosophy-GuideBook-Critique-Guidebooks/dp/041511909X

Also try reading prolegomena to any future metaphysics first, as it is shorter

> The scholarship all use the Hong translation

Generally, although I remember this used Hannay where possible.

A few suggested additions:

• Philosophy of technology: Scharff's anthology and/or Kaplan's anthology
  
  
• Philosophy of mind: Maybe Searle's Mind: A Brief Introduction, and the Chalmers anthology

The "secular" argument against the redefinition of marriage is based on the discussion about what marriage is. The moment you frame the discussion around "equality of marriage" you're already taking a step beyond the basis that form marriage in the first place, so it's question begging.

One must first define what marriage is and then we can begin to discuss whether people have a "right" to it. The secular argument is based on natural law (regardless if people think or don't understand it).

I have yet to have a single pro-gay-marriage person give a definition of marriage that ultimately doesn't make marriage meaningless, which would mean they're advocating something they don't believe exists in the first place, which is absurd.

BTW, this is a secular defense of traditional marriage: http://amzn.com/1594036225

Plenty of academics, when engaging in scholarship, accurately and without misrepresentation present the ideas of peers with whom they disagree precisely for the purpose of entering into dialogue with those ideas or the edification of readers. I was recently reading an introduction to philosophy of mind by Jaegwon Kim, in which Kim forcefully disagrees with what we call "dualism"; despite the fact that he holds a contrary opinion, Kim accurately reports dualist arguments and treats them with great seriousness.

A world in which being fair is precluded by having an opinion is sad.

This is more of an AcademicPhilosophy-style response, I suspect, but I would suggest checking out:

Metaphysics: An Anthology (Sosa and Kim)

Epistemology: An Anthology (Sosa and Kim)

Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings (Chalmers)

Philosophy of Language (Martinich)

Actually, a good primer might be Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy

I don't know what else to say to you, other than Rand should have stuck to political philosophy.

Here's some reading. I keep this one in my office.

Philosophy of Mind: Classical and Contemporary Readings
https://www.amazon.com/dp/019514581X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_i_XAWmDbZSHZDYB

If you think that scientists are in a consensus about free-will not existing, then you haven't been reading enough! Also, Roger Penrose is considered one of the finest mathematicians currently living, so the fact that he doesn't have an answer to this is far more interesting to me than random internet user #1001.

Also, Philosophy has a huge amount to bring to the discussion, the arguments made by neuro-scientists have many fundamental flaws and weaknesses. Science still has a lot to learn from Philosophy, especially in the way we discuss elements of the mind which cannot easily be described and defined.

Try reading this book: https://www.amazon.com/Free-Science-Hasnt-Disproved-Will/dp/0199371628/?tag=stno-20

There's a good article about this book and why recent experiments don't really prove or disprove free-will at all here: http://www.strangenotions.com/why-science-hasnt-disproved-free-will-a-review-of-alfred-meles-free/

There are also other neuroscientists saying we DO have free-will. See here: https://news.dartmouth.edu/news/2013/03/neuroscientist-says-humans-are-wired-free-will

Like I said, if you pick and choose your sources, some people argue in favor of free-will, but there are just as many people poking holes in experiments that were done, and arguing on the other side of the argument that we do have free-will.

Philosophy. Seriously.

Considering how far away we are from a concrete answer this is as good a place to start as any. not discounting the considerable advances that have been made, just pointing out that there is a lot of disagreement at a very basic level of even the definition of the conciousness problem.

This is the primer I used for a class in college by Chalmers

And here's one that critiques some of those arguments by Searle

(these might be a little dated. anyone else have more current suggestions?)

> Please try to from a non theological perspective defend denying gay marriage?

http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-Marriage-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225

>Please from a non theological perspective try to tell me why a fetus without a heart beat spawned from a rapist has more rights than the mother whose body contains it?

http://www.cambridge.org/cr/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/american-government-politics-and-policy/defending-life-moral-and-legal-case-against-abortion-choice

>Their conversion just proves that despite the gift of intelligence, one is nevertheless susceptible to irrational beliefs.

How is it irrational when these people gave rational reasons for their belief in the truth of the Christian religion? Check out any of their books/writings. Are Edward Feser's The Last Supersition and 5 Proofs irrational? What about Chesterton's The Everlasting Man and Orthodoxy? What about Alaisdair Macintyre's After Virtue?

>You said he wasn't a Christian yet. Did he accept Jesus as his savior? That is the requirement for salvation from what I know.

Looks like your only idea of Christianity is Protestant Christianity (in fairness to Protestant denominations though, many of them are nuanced in their views on this issue and would disagree with the assertion that only Christians are saved). The Catholic Church which was founded by Christ himself disagrees, and so do the other apostolic orthodox churches (Eastern Orthodox and Coptic Orthodox).

>What other ways would this be?

I quoted official teaching, didn't you read it?

>You know this how?

Because they themselves shared their reasons for converting/believing in the truth of Christianity (for non-converts) in their talks, books and writings? How else dude?

>What's this evidence that others converted over?

A lot -- philosophical, scientific and historical evidence.

Philosophical: The traditional cosmological arguments (given by the great thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition -- Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Aquinas, Leibiniz, etc) for the God of classical theism, the argument from consciousness, the moral argument and others.

Science: The Kalam Cosmological argument, the fine-tuning argument, the argument from biological teleology, and the argument from the laws of nature.

History: the argument from Jesus' miracles, the historical case for the Resurrection, Catholic miracles, and the religious experiences and mystical gifts of countless Christian saints. I lay this out these arguments briefly in this post.

>Because of this outright lie and string of labels thrown at me:

Nah, my assessment is self evident from what you wrote. A silly absolute statement like "no Christian ever believed in his faith on the basis of reason and evidence" is extremely telling...especially given that you doubled down on your erroneous views after being given abundantly clear evidence.

> no purpose other than an emotional one.... led to the widespread image that Republicans are gay hating bigots.

To quote Donald Trump: "Wrong."

The problem with this argument is that it fails to consider the legal arguments against gay marriage. Actually, the only reason why people want gay marriage is because of a misunderstanding of the nature of marriage and their emotional response to what they feel is an inequality(which doesn't exist).

People who give up over the battle of gay marriage due to political correctness are the reason why people see Republicans as gay hating bigots. Basically they are admitting that there is no(and was no) justifiable argument that could be used against Gay Marriage. This patently false, we simply were so involved in Gay Marriage fervor, that no bothered to do a substantial argument against it.

I have said publicly I am not sure who is right, the Libertarians or the Conservatives, but to say there is no good arguments against Gay Marriage is intellectually dishonest.

The best argument in print is here: http://www.amazon.com/What-Is-Marriage-Woman-Defense/dp/1594036225

> The fact is, the only time anyone EVER trots out the "the government should be out of the marriage business entirely" line, is when they are being forced into a corner of admitting they want to limit the rights of gay Americans arbitrarily,.....During the Supreme Court and higher court hearings of the gay marriage cases, I paid close attention and read court transcripts and listened to recordings of the proceedings

Genetic Fallacy, just because you don't like where it is coming from doesn't mean its the wrong position. It seems that you are bias against this argument for no justifiable reason either as many libertarians have been arguing this for years but as I explained above,

I agree they did a bad job on defending in the Supreme Court, still has no bearing on the validity of the issue. People should actively seek out non-religious arguments and taking political arguments from Herman Cain is going to give you a skewed view of the subject.