© Roger M Tagg 2010
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
This is really an "exercise book" in the literal meaning of those words - it takes 25 philosophical questions and works its way through many of the different ways one could think about these questions. The questions are:
1. Where Did the Universe Come From?
2. What's Wrong with Gay Sex?
3. Brain-Snatched
4. Is Time Travel Possible?
5. Into the Lair of the Relativist
6. Could a Machine Think?
7. Does God Exist?
8. The Strange Case of the Rational Dentist
9. But Is It Art?
10. Can We Have Morality without God and Religion?
11. Is Creationism Scientific?
12. Designer Babies
13. The Consciousness Conundrum
14. Why Expect the Sun to Rise Tomorrow?
15. Do We Ever Deserve to Be Punished?
16. The Meaning Mystery
17. Killing Mary to Save Jodie
18. The Strange Realm of Numbers
19. What Is Knowledge?
20. Is Morality Like a Pair of Spectacles?
21. Should You Be Eating That?
22. Brain Transplants, 'Teleportation' and the Puzzle of Personal Identity
23. Miracles and the Supernatural
24. How to Spot Eight Everyday Reasoning Errors
25. Seven Paradoxes
The highlights below do not represent a full review. I have just picked a few quotes that I think are most significant.
| Chapter | Page | Highlight |
|---|---|---|
| Introduction | xi | "I believe that those who have never taken a step back (RT: i.e. to look at the wider picture) - who have lived totally unexamined lives - are not only rather shallow - they're potentially dangerous. One great lesson of the twentieth century is that human beings, no matter how 'civilised', tend to be moral sheep. We are disastrously prone to follow without question the moral lead provided by those around us. From Nazi Germany to Rwanda, you find people blindly going with the flow." |
| 1 - | 1-7 | In discussing where the universe comes from, he raises the problem of always looking for a 'cause' of everything, e.g. "what caused the Big Bang?". Religious people say that the 'buck' of causality stops with God, who does not require a cause - but then we can all say that this is just their model or dogma. |
| 16 - Meaning | 175-182 | Locke had an ideational theory of meaning; we look up words or images presented to us against an internal memory bank. But this is just a model and one that gets us into infinite regress, e.g. how do we create the memory bank? According to Wittgenstein, we just rely on 'conventions' within the groups we are involved in. |
| 20 - Morality | 224-7 | Law suggests that there are 4 options for how we think of Morality. Numbers 1 to 3 are what he calls "seen through spectacles", i.e. they do not assume an external objective morality. 1) it's subjective (i.e. we ourselves decide what's right or wrong); 2 it's inter-subjective (i.e. we decide by consensus in a group); and 3 it's 'emotivism' (i.e. we say 'boo' to murder and 'hooray' for kindness because that's just how we feel about it). How we see things through spectacles may be in error. 'Being wrong' (i.e. in error) may be objective in some cases, but not universally. He concludes that 'moral value' is an illusion. |
Index to more highlights of interesting books
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 20th January 2011
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .