Dan Ariely - The Truth about Dishonesty

If I were to ask you if you are an honest person, chances are that you'd say yes. Yet, if we look at the details of your everyday behavior with a magnifying glass, we'd most likely discover all sorts of ways in which you lie, cheat and steal, on a regular basis! Notice the irony? In answering a question about your own honesty, you behave dishonestly! Well, it's not quite that straightforward. It's not so much that you'd be lying to me; it's...

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Propositional Logic - Using Truth Tables to Evaluate the Validity of Complex Arguments

In our previous lesson on propositional logic, we learned that we can take arguments in natural language (English, Spanish, German, whatever) and translate them into symbolic form through the use of variables to represent statements, and connectives to represent relationships between statements. This helps us set aside irrelevant considerations such as the content of an argument (what the argument is about), or the language used to express that content,...

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Propositional Logic - Connectives and Truth Tables

The Stoic philosophers bequeathed us with an important theory of ethics and a very respectable account of the nature of the good life. What's less well known, outside of philosophical circles, is that they are also responsible for developing a theory of logic that can impressively deal with most forms of everyday reasoning. Logicians and mathematicians, especially over the pasts two hundred years, have come up with more sophisticated theories of...

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Steven Pinker - You're Already Committed to Reason

One thing that we philosophers love is questions and spirited friendly debate. This dialectical process helps us get a better grasp on various subjects, and though we may not always reach consensus, we do gain intellectual growth.But this kind of attitude is not ubiquitous, especially for those just getting acquainted with philosophy. On many occasions, when dealing with some elusive topic, whether in epistemology, the philosophy of religion, or...

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Megyn Kelly Makes Karl Rove Her Bitch

I have an ongoing debate with a friend. We're both liberals, and I think one can theoretically separate a person's political ideology from their physical attractiveness, and not like the former while very much liking the latter, or vice versa. My friend thinks I'm full of crap: once you know what's inside a person's heart and soul, especially when they're conservative ideologues, the outside is just as hideous as the inside.And the object of contention...

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Election Results in a Beautiful Animation

I don't know if you heard, but here in the ol' U.S. of A. we just had an election this Tuesday. You know, just trying to choose who the most powerful man in the world would be...Well, as it turned out, President Barack Obama was re-elected, beating his conservative-liberal-tea-party-ultra-conservative-liberal-conservative opponent Mitt Romney.If you haven't been paying attention, or don't quite understand how things break down, the following animation...

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Substance Dualism

Although most philosophers of mind are probably physicalists, there is still a live debate about the ontological status of mind: is it physical or immaterial?On one side of the debate are those who argue that thoughts are not physical, and therefore cannot be generated by something physical. Apart from obvious religious and soteriological reasons, one of the more popular lines of argument goes roughly as follows: when we have a complete physical...

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