In philosophy, if you think the answer is obvious you haven't understood the question
Category: Quotes
no magic
“If science shows we are composed of trillions of cells and no ‘magic ingredients’ then…”
The thought is blind to the fact that if there are such ingredients then they are ipso facto invisible to scientific tools. Your first-person subjective experience, for instance, is invisible to science. It can only be accessed by asking you to tell.
Physicalism, as an attempt to explain all of reality, has a selective vision problem: it rules out anything it can't see.
Preparing for a Tory Government
“It is a truly shameful vignette of superhuman arrogance and toffishness and twittishness, I suppose. But you know, it was great fun at the time.” — Boris Johnson
Science & Logical Positivism
New Scientist once published a ½ page letter in which a working scientist ranted that philosophy was all meaningless and that the Only Worthwhile, And Obviously True, philosophy is Logical Positivism.
But logical positivism is distinguished amongst all philosophies as the one which disproves itself in a 2-line proof.
Logical Positivism Premise #1 : All meaningful statements are either analytic (that is to say, statements of mathematics or logic or some other tautology) or else statements of empirical fact, and any sentence that is not in one of these two categories is strictly and literally meaningless.
2. If premise #1 —which is not a tautology, nor a statement of mathematics or logic, nor a statement of empirical fact—is true, then by premise #1, premise #1 is itself strictly and literally meaningless, so cannot be true.