If you go back in time to change the past, you've made sure that it'll happen just the way it has. Over and over and over and over again--because once you go back in time, you've created an infinite loop. If you go back in time, you've ensured that the situation that drove you to make the trip still happens, because you've always and forever gone ( Read more... )

Pantheism vs. Pantheism vs. Pantheism

Have decided that, once demolition is done, the new RE building is up, and we're back to regular discussion group stuff again, I'm going to start doing a once-a-month philosophy topic. And I might even put it into something resembling chronological order. Start with something about what metaphysics is, then go into the pre-Socratics, then the Big ( Read more... )

This is what my mind does when left to fend for itself.

In truth, a man who renders everyone their due because he fears the gallows, acts under the sway and compulsion of others, and cannot be called just. But a man who does the same from a knowledge of the true reason for laws and their necessity, acts from a firm purpose and of his own accord, and is therefore properly called just.
--Spinoza, A ( Read more... )

From Seneca's To Lucilius on Providence, in which he explains why the "bad" things that happen to good people aren't really bad:

God, I say, is showing favour to those whom he wills shall achieve the highest possible virtue whenever he gives them the means of doing a courageous and brave deed, and to this end they must encounter some difficulty in ( Read more... )

Because man, in so far as he is a part of nature, constitutes a part of the power of nature. Whatever, therefore, follows necessarily from the necessity of human nature (that is, from nature herself, in so far as we conceive of her as acting through man) follows, even though it be necessarily, from human power.
--from A Theologico-Political ( Read more... )

[The pre-Socratics'] doctrine is hylozoistic, dynamistic, evolutionistic, deterministic, and sometimes (as in Heraclitus) pantheistic. Of all the philosophers of this school Anaxagoras is by far the most notable, for he alone achieved the idea of an independent Divine Mind as the original mover and ruler of the world.Why does Anaxagoras' theory of ( Read more... )

So one of these essays is saying that philosophy as science and philosophy as ethics are two different animals. I have to disagree ( Read more... )

JKLTHQW845NAVZYRI3!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How how how have I never found this site before?!?!?

Yeah. I'll be over here in my little corner imitating a puddle of goo.