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Category Archives: Philosophy
Is Life Ultimately Futile?
The question that idiots always ask when they learn you’re a philosopher is “so what’s the meaning of life?” This question is probably unanswerable, and that’s probably because it’s not a real question, or at least not a single real … Continue reading
Positive Liberty, Inner Slavery, and the Wrong Sort of Rationalism
There’s an idea, pronounced in the history of (western) philosophy and present, though perhaps less pronounced, in popular culture, that a person can be ‘internally enslaved’, i.e. can fail to be fully free not because of external constraints but because … Continue reading
The Fixity of the Future
Not been posting very often recently, as you may have noticed. This may well continue, who knows? For now I will throw up something I found banging around my hard-drive from ages ago. It’s not very original or sophisticated, but … Continue reading
Communication and those who lack Reason
An exceedingly common opinion runs as follows: Certain beings, though conscious/sentient, ‘lack reason’, and it is thus reasonable to treat them in a different way to ‘rational’ beings. These beings without reason include all non-human animals, humans up until a … Continue reading
Defining Contempt: Help Me Out Here
It’s important, supposedly, to respect people – to treat them in ways that express or ‘are consistent with’ respect for them. But what is respect? Conversely, the opposite sort of treatment seems like something to avoid – treatment that degrades … Continue reading
My name is Luke and I am a Mass of Fluids
As a human, I have/am a ‘body’. This post has no point beyond playing with ways of describing this body that might create a sense of refreshing unfamiliarity. Consider entities like puddles, raindrops, ponds, glasses-of, clouds. These are all ‘fluid … Continue reading
Meat and the Body
This is Vegetarian Awareness Month, from World Vegetarian Day on October 1st to World Vegan Day on November 1st. Consequently my posts may have a slant towards such topics, and that includes this post, about the concept of ‘meat’. What … Continue reading
Average = Total/N
An argument against vegetarianism that I’ve encountered a few times is that any individual’s consumption decisions will have no effect on the actual production of meat, and so are ineffective. In particular, this argument was made recently at Bad Conscience. … Continue reading
The End of Mongooses? Predation and Historicism
In a recent opinion-piece at the New York Times, Jeff McMahan argues that the goal of gradually eliminating meat-eating from the animal world is, in principle, morally desirable, to prevent the needless suffering that it causes. (It’s worth clarifying, off … Continue reading
