Everyday Ethics

The first time that I applied to graduate study in philosophy, I applied to four programs and struggled with keeping track of all that was required for each school.  My more recent application experience involved applying to ten schools, and this required a comprehensive organizational system.  Trying to keep track of what ten different schools [...]

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Although our usual topic of conversation is ethics, the nature of human behavior dictates that in discussing our moral point of view we inevitably fall into considering aspects of religion and spirituality.  Thus, it is helpful to have a working knowledge of the basic tenets of major world religions, as well as an ability to [...]

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It is not often that one is intrigued by a three hundred year old philosophical controversy, but The Courtier and the Heretic:  Liebniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World manages to achieve this goal in impressive fashion.  Oxford graduate Mathew Stewart creates a compelling, rich storyline as well as a thorough [...]

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Most people generally take for granted that there is such a thing as a self, and that they have one.  The three major monotheisms would be lost without the concept of self, and most of us would have no idea how to describe who we are without making reference to something like this entity.  However, [...]

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As we continue our discussion of the way in which metaphysical questions apply to everyday problems, we turn to the complicated relationship between causation and value.  Most individuals don’t give much thought to what value is, or what makes certain things valuable but not other things.  Subjectivism and objectivism are two metaethical views that offer [...]

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Freedom is one of the most challenging and important questions in metaphysics.  In our own freedom-loving society, it is often taken for granted that we are free to do what we want, at least for the most part.  But there is an important distinction between political and metaphysical freedom, and how we address the second [...]

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Philosophy is constantly in a state of having to defend its legitimacy to both the rest of the academic community, and to the world at large. This is evidenced by the common reply of people finding out that I study philosophy, “what are you going to do with that?” Our society assumes, with [...]

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There is perhaps no better place to consider issues of ethics and morality than in the world of intimate human relationships.  It is in these arrangements that we find our own sense of what is right continually challenged, and it is especially easy for our own psychological hang-ups and insecurities to negatively affect our ability [...]

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The U.S. economy continues its unstable wavering despite the election of a potentially competent future president in Barack Obama.  The $700 billion bailout has given way to individual requests from companies like AIG, Citigroup, and GM for bailout packages of their own.  As a Toyota owner and a firm believer that the American auto industry [...]

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